Search Results: "pabs"

31 May 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 1 Debian bug reports and 41 Debian mailing list posts
  • Patches: reviewed gt patches
  • Debian packages: sponsored psi-notify
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:
    • approved cppcheck-gui eta flpsed fluxbox p7zip-full pampi pyqso xboard
    • rejected p7zip (help output), openshot (photo of a physical library), clamav-daemon (movie cartoon character), aptitude (screenshot of random launchpad project), laditools (screenshot of tracker.d.o for src:hello), weboob-qt/chromium-browser/supercollider-vim ((NSFW) selfies), node-split (screenshot of screenshots site), libc6 (Chinese characters alongside a photo of man and bottle)

Administration
  • Debian servers: investigate etckeeper cron mail
  • Debian wiki: investigate account existence, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The gensim and libpst work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 May 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 33 Debian mailing list posts
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:

Administration
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The libpst, gensim, SPTAG work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

7 April 2022

Gunnar Wolf: How is the free firmware for the Raspberry progressing?

Raspberry Pi computers require a piece of non-free software to boot the infamous raspi-firmware package. But for almost as long as there has been a Raspberry Pi to talk of (this year it turns 10 years old!), there have been efforts to get it to boot using only free software. How is it progressing? Michael Bishop (IRC user clever) explained today in the #debian-raspberrypi channel in OFTC that it advances far better than what I expected: It is even possible to boot a usable system under the RPi2 family! Just There is somewhat incomplete hardware support: For his testing, he has managed to use a xfce environment but over the composite (NTSC) video output, as HDMI initialization support is not there. However, he shared with me several interesting links and videos, and I told him I d share them there are still many issues; I do not believe it is currently worth it to make Debian images with this firmware. Before anything else: Go visit the librerpi/lk-overlay repository. Its README outlines hardware support for each of the RPi families; there is a binary build available with nixos if you want to try it out, and instructions to build it. But what clever showed me that made me write this post Is the amount of stuff you can do with the RPi s VPU (why Vision Vector Processing Unit and not the more familiar GPU, Graphical Processing Unit? I don t really know But I trust clever s definitions beyond how I trust my own ) before it loads an opearting system: There s not too much I can add to this. I was just Truly amazed. And I hope to see the remaining hurdles for regular Linux booting on this range of machines with purely free software quickly go away! Packaging this for Debian? Well, not yet not so fast I first told clever we could push this firmware to experimental instead of unstable, as it is not yet ready for most production systems. However, pabs made some spot-on further questions. And yes, it requires installing three(!) different cross-compilers, one of which vc4-toolchain, for the VPU is free software, but not yet upstreamed, and hence is not available for Debian. Anyway, the talk continued long after I had to go. I have gone a bit over the backlog, but I have to leave now so that will be it as for this blog post

1 April 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 3 Debian bug reports and 53 Debian mailing list posts
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:

Administration
  • Debian servers: investigate wiki mail delivery issue, restart backup director
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Forward python-plac test failure issue upstream
  • Participate in Debian Project Leader election discussions
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The oci-python-sdk and plac work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 March 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: fix usertags for some users, unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: horae dh-haskell shutter logging-tree openstreetmap-carto gnome-commander
  • Debian servers: restore wiki data from backup, restarted bacula director for TLS cert update
  • Debian wiki: restore wiki account from backup, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord, gensim, DiskANN, SPTAG, wsproto work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 February 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages
  • Debian servers: ping folks about mail forwarding issues
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The oci-cli, oci-python-sdk, circuitbreaker, autoconf-archive, libpst, purple-discord, sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

3 January 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities December 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 166 Debian mailing list posts
  • Patches: reviewed libpst upstream patches
  • Debian packages: sponsored nsis, memtest86+
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:

Administration
  • libpst: setup GitHub presence, migrate from hg to git, requested details from bug reporters
  • plac: cleaned up git repo anomalies
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: stardict, node-carto
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord, python-plac, sptag, smart-open, libpst, memtest86+, oci-python-sdk work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 December 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SPTAG, visdom, gensim, purple-discord, plac, fail2ban, uvloop work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 November 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 2 Debian bug reports and 73 Debian mailing list posts
  • Patches: merged whohas/iotop-py/libusbgx patches
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages
  • Debian IRC: disable anti-spam channel modes for some channels, rescue #debian-printing from retired chanop
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The valgrind bug was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

4 October 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities September 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: reopened bugs closed by a spammer
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord/harmony/pyemd/librecaptcha/esprima-python work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

5 September 2021

Antoine Beaupr : Automating major Debian upgrades

It's major upgrade time again! The Debian project just published the Debian 11 "bullseye" release, and it's pretty awesome! This makes me realized that I have never written here about my peculiar upgrade process, and figured it was worth bringing that up to a wider audience. My upgrade process also has a notable changes section which includes major version changes (e.g. Inkscape 1.0!), new packages (e.g. podman!) and important behavior changes (e.g. driverless scanning and printing!). I'm particularly interested to hear about any significant change I might have missed. If you know of a cool new package that shipped with bullseye and that I forgot, do let me know! But that's for the cool new stuff. We need to talk about the problems with Debian major upgrades.

Background I have been maintaining detailed upgrade guides, on my wiki, starting with the jessie release, but I have actually written such guides for Koumbit.org as far back as Debian squeeze in 2011 (another worker wrote the older Debian lenny upgrade guide in 2009). Koumbit, since then, has kept maintaining those guides all the way to the latest bullseye upgrade, through 7 major releases! Over the years, those guides evolved from a quick "cheat-sheet" format copied from the release notes into a more or less "scripted" form that I currently use. Each guide has a procedure made of a few steps that can be basically copy-pasted to batch-upgrade a host (or multiple hosts in parallel) as quickly as possible. There is also the predict-os script which allows you to keep track of progress of the upgrades in a Puppet cluster.

Limitations of the official procedure In comparison with my procedure, the official upgrade guide is mostly designed to upgrade a single machine, typically a workstation, with a rather slow and exhaustive process. The PDF version of the upgrade guide is 14 pages long! This, obviously, does not work when you have tens or hundreds of machines to upgrade. Debian upgrades are notorious for being extremely reliable, but we have a lot of packages, and there are always corner cases where the upgrade will just fail because of a bug specific to your environment. Those will only be fixed after some back and forth in the community (and that's assuming users report those bugs, which is not always the case). There's no obvious way to deploy "hot fixes" in this context, at least not without fixing the package and publishing it on an unofficial Debian archive while the official ones catch up. This is slow and difficult. Or some packages require manual labor. Examples of this are the PostgreSQL or Ganeti packages which require you to upgrade your clusters by hand, while the old and new packages live side by side. Debian packages bring you far in the upgrade process, but sometimes not all the way. Which means every Debian install needs to be manually upgraded and inspected when a new release comes out. That's slow and error prone and we can do better.

How to automate major upgrades I have a proposal to automate this. It's been mostly dormant in the Debian wiki, for 5 years now. Fundamentally, this is a hard problem: Debian gets installed in so many different environments, from workstations to physical servers to virtual machines, embedded systems and so on, that it's extremely hard to come up with a "one size fits all" system. The (manual) procedure I'm using is mostly targeting servers, but I'm also using it on workstations. And I'll note that it's specific to my home setup: I have a different procedure at work, although it has a lot of common code. To automate this, I would factor out that common code with hooks where you could easily inject special code like "you need to upgrade ferm first", "you need an extra reboot here", or "this is how you finish the PostgreSQL upgrade". With Debian getting closer to a 2 year release cycle, with the previous release being supported basically only one year after the new stable comes out, I feel more and more strongly that this needs better automation. So I'm thinking that I should write a prototype for this. Ubuntu has do-release-upgrade that is too Ubuntu-specific to be reused. An attempt at collaborating on this has been mostly met with silence from Ubuntu's side as well. I'm thinking that using something like Fabric, Mitogen, or Transilience: anything that will allow me to write simple, portable Python code that can run transparently on a local machine (for single systems upgrades, possibly with a GUI frontend) to remote servers (for large clusters of servers, maybe with canaries and grouping using Cumin). I'll note that Koumbit started experimenting with Puppet Bolt in the bullseye upgrade process, but that feels too site-specific to be useful more broadly.

Trade-offs I am not sure where this stands in the XKCD time trade-off evaluation, because the table doesn't actually cover the time frequency of Debian release (which is basically "biennial") and the amount of time the upgrade would take across a cluster (which varies a lot, but that I estimate to be between one to 6 hours per machine). Assuming I have 80 machines to upgrade, that is 80 to 480 hours (between ~3 to 20 days) of work! It's unclear how much work such an automated system would shave off, however. Assuming things are an order of magnitude faster (say I upgrade 10 machines at a time), I would shave off between 3 and 18 days of work, which implies I might allow myself to spend a minimum of 5 days working on such a project.

The other option: never upgrade Before people mention those: I am aware of containers, Kubernetes, and other deployment mechanisms. Indeed, those may be a long-term solution, we currently can't afford to migrate everything over to containers right now: that is a huge migration and a total paradigm shift. At that point, whatever is left might not even be Debian in the first place. And besides, if you run Kubernetes, you still need to run some OS underneath and upgrade that, so that problem never completely disappears. Still, maybe that's the final answer: never upgrade. For some stateless machines like DNS replicas or load balancers, that might make a lot of sense as there's no or little data to carry to the new host. But this implies a seamless and fast provisioning process, and we don't have that either: at my work, installing a machine takes about as long as upgrading it, and that's after a significant amount of work automating that process, partly writing my own Debian installer with Fabric (!).

What is your process? I'm curious to hear what people think of those ideas. It strikes me as really odd that no one has really tackled that problem yet, considering how many clusters of Debian machines are out there. Surely people are upgrading those, and not following that slow step by step guide, right? I suspect everyone is doing the same thing: we all have our little copy-paste script we batch onto multiple machines, sometimes in parallel. That is what the Debian.org sysadmins are doing as well. There must be a better way. What is yours?

My upgrades so far So far, I have upgraded 2 out of my 3 home machines running buster -- others have been installed directly in bullseye -- with only my main, old, messy server left. Upgrades have been pretty painless so far (see another report, for example), much better than the previous buster upgrade. Obviously, for me personal use, automating this is pointless. Work-side, however, is another story: we have over 80 boxes to upgrade there and that will take a while. The last stretch to buster cycle took about two years to complete, so we might be done by the time the next release (12, "bookworm") is released, but that's actually a full year after "buster" becomes EOL, so it's actually too late... At least I fixed the installers so that new the machines we create all ship with bullseye, so we stopped accumulating new buster hosts...
Thanks to lelutin and pabs for reviewing a draft of this post.

1 September 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities August 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian servers: expand LV, fix debbugs config
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts
  • Debian QA services: deploy changes

Communication

Sponsors The pyemd, pytest-rerunfailures, libpst, sptag, librecaptcha work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 August 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • libusbgx/gt: triage issues
  • Debian packages: triaged bugs for reintroduced packages
  • Debian servers: debug lists mail issue, debug lists subscription issue
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The microsoft-authentication-library-for-python and purple-discord work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 July 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities June 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 3 Debian bug reports and 135 Debian mailing list posts
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:
    • approved php-horde endless-sky claws-mail memtester
    • rejected python-gdal/weboob-qt (unrelated software)

Administration
  • Debian: restart bacula director
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication
  • This month I left freenode, an IRC network I had been on for at least 16 years, for reasons that you probably all read about. I think the biggest lesson I take from this situation and ones happening around the same time is that proper governance in peer production projects is absolutely critical.
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord/flower work was sponsored by my employers. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 June 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Joined the great IRC migration
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord, sptag and esprima-python work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

9 May 2021

Norbert Preining: bash: passing around arguments with quotes

Update: I just learned on IRC that checking with shellcheck would have told me everything, including the usage of arrays, and the linked page even mentions ffmpeg how stupid to reinvent the wheel again and again Thanks to pabs for telling me! It has hit me several times, and searching the internet gives lots of suggestions: How to pass and argument containing quotes to another program from a bash program. My case was a script that automatized video processing using ffmpeg, and I needed to call ffmpeg with arguments like 
ffmpeg ... --filter_complex "some arg with spaces" ...
My first (failed) shot at doing this in the shell script was: 
filterarg='--filter_complex "some arg with spaces"'
...
ffmpeg $someargs $filterarg ...
which, as most bash gurus will know, will fail. Solutions are using eval that are complicated. Recently I realized a much simpler method using bash arrays: Assume the program show_arguments just prints the arguments passed in, maybe something like (again in bash): 
#!/bin/bash
for i in "$@" ; do
  echo "=== $i"
done
The program under consideration would be in the broken version: 
#!/bin/bash
# Variant 1 - NOT WORKING
myargs='-filter_complex "arg with space"'
show_arguments $myargs
This would give 
=== -filter_complex
=== "arg
=== with
=== space"
which is not what we want. The solution is to stuff the arguments into an array, and expand that as arguments. 
#!/bin/bash
# Variant 2 - WORKING
declare -a myargs
myargs=(-filter_complex "arg with space")
show_arguments "$ myargs[@] "
which, correctly, would give 
=== -filter_complex
=== arg with space
Now I only need to remember that trick for the next time it bites me!

30 April 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: restart service killed by OOM killer, revert mirror redirection
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The flower/sptag work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 April 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Debugging

Review

Administration
  • Debian packages: migrate flower git repo from alioth-archive to salsa
  • Debian: restart bacula-director after PostgreSQL restart
  • Debian wiki: block spammer, clean up spam, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The librecaptcha/libpst/flower/marco work was sponsored by my employers. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 March 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: fix permissions for XMPP anti-spam git
  • Debian wiki: workaround moin bug with deleting deprecated pages, unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
  • Edited and sent Debian DevNews #54

Sponsors The purple-discord/harmony/librecaptcha/libemail-outlook-message-perl work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

31 January 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian ports: fix header on incoming.ports.d.o/buildd
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Initiate discussions about aptly, Linux USB gadgets maintenance
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
  • Invite organisations to post on FOSSjobs

Sponsors The samba work, apt-listchanges work, pytest-rerunfailures upload, python-testfixtures/python-scrapy bugs and python-scrapy related backports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

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