(The picture is of the previous edition.) Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokm l translation of the "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has been published in several languages over the years. The translations are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue. The last time I checked, it complete text was available in English, Norwegian Bokm l, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish. In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese. The translation is conducted on the hosted weblate project page. Prospective translators are recommeded to subscribe to the translators mailing list and should also check out the instructions for contributors. I am one of the Norwegian Bokm l translators of this book, and we have just started. Your contribution is most welcome. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am happy observe that the The Debian Administrator's Handbook is available in six languages now. I am not sure which one of these are completely proof read, but the complete book is available in these languages:

• English
• Norwegian Bokm l
• German
• Indonesian
• Brazil Portuguese
• Spanish

This is the list of languages more than 70% complete, in other words with not too much left to do:

• Chinese (Simplified) - 90%
• French - 79%
• Italian - 79%
• Japanese - 77%
• Arabic (Morocco) - 75%
• Persian - 71%

I wonder how long it will take to bring these to 100%. Then there is the list of languages about halfway done:

• Russian - 63%
• Swedish - 53%
• Chinese (Traditional) - 46%
• Catalan - 45%

Several are on to a good start:

• Dutch - 26%
• Vietnamese - 25%
• Polish - 23%
• Czech - 22%
• Turkish - 18%

Finally, there are the ones just getting started:

• Korean - 4%
• Croatian - 2%
• Greek - 2%
• Danish - 1%
• Romanian - 1%

If you want to help provide a Debian instruction book in your own language, visit Weblate to contribute to the translations. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Review: The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator:	Pauline Baynes
Series:	Chronicles of Narnia #5
Publisher:	Collier Books
Copyright:	1954
Printing:	1978
ISBN:	0-02-044200-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	217

The Horse and His Boy was the fifth published book in the Chronicles of Narnia, but it takes place during the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in the midst of the golden age of Narnia. It's the only true side story of the series and it doesn't matter much where in sequence you read it, as long as it's after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and before The Last Battle (which would spoil its ending somewhat). MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. The Horse and His Boy is also the only book of the series that is not a portal fantasy. The Pevensie kids make an appearance, but as the ruling kings and queens of Narnia, and only as side characters. The protagonists are a boy named Shasta, a girl named Aravis, and horses named Bree and Hwin. Aravis is a Calormene, a native of the desert (and extremely Orientalist, but more on that later) kingdom to the south of Narnia and Archenland. Shasta starts the book as the theoretically adopted son but mostly slave of a Calormene fisherman. The Horse and His Boy is the story of their journey from Calormen north to Archenland and Narnia, just in time to defend Narnia and Archenland from an invasion. This story starts with a great hook. Shasta's owner is hosting a passing Tarkaan, a Calormene lord, and overhears a negotiation to sell Shasta to the Tarkaan as his slave (and, in the process, revealing that he rescued Shasta as an infant from a rowboat next to a dead man). Shasta starts talking to the Tarkaan's horse and is caught by surprise when the horse talks back. He is a Talking Horse from Narnia, kidnapped as a colt, and eager to return to Narnia and the North. He convinces Shasta to attempt to escape with him. This has so much promise. For once, we're offered a story where one of the talking animals of Narnia is at least a co-protagonist and has some agency in the story. Bree takes charge of Shasta, teaches him to ride (or, mostly, how to fall off a horse), and makes most of the early plans. Finally, a story that recognizes that Narnia stories don't have to revolve around the humans! Unfortunately, Bree is an obnoxious, arrogant character. I wanted to like him, but he makes it very hard. This gets even worse when Shasta is thrown together with Aravis, a noble Calormene girl who is escaping an arranged marriage on her own talking mare, Hwin. Bree is a warhorse, Hwin is a lady's riding mare, and Lewis apparently knows absolutely nothing about horses, because every part of Bree's sexist posturing and Hwin's passive meekness is awful and cringe-worthy. I am not a horse person, so will link to Judith Tarr's much more knowledgeable critique at Tor.com, but suffice it to say that mares are not meekly deferential or awed by stallions. If Bree had behaved that way with a real mare, he would have gotten the crap beaten out of him (which might have improved his attitude considerably). As is, we have to put up with rather a lot of Bree's posturing and Hwin (who I liked much better) barely gets a line and acts disturbingly like she was horribly abused. This makes me sad, because I like Bree's character arc. He's spent his whole life being special and different from those around him, and while he wants to escape this country and return home, he's also gotten used to being special. In Narnia, he will just be a normal talking horse. To get everything else he wants, he also has to let go of the idea that he's someone special. If Lewis had done more with this and made Bree a more sympathetic character, this could have been very effective. As written, it only gets a few passing mentions (mostly via Bree being weirdly obsessed with whether talking horses roll) and is therefore overshadowed by Shasta's chosen one story and Bree's own arrogant behavior. The horses aside, this is a passable adventure story with some well-done moments. The two kids and their horses end up in Tashbaan, the huge Calormene capital, where they stumble across the Narnians and Shasta is mistaken for one of their party. Radagast, the prince of Calormen, is proposing marriage to Susan, and the Narnians are in the process of realizing he doesn't plan to take no for an answer. Aravis, meanwhile, has to sneak out of the city via the Tisroc's gardens, which results in her hiding behind a couch as she hears Radagast's plans to invade Archenland and Narnia to take Susan as his bride by force. Once reunited, Shasta, Aravis, and the horses flee across the desert to bring warning to Archenland and then Narnia. Of all the Narnia books, The Horse and His Boy leans the hardest into the personal savior angle of Christianity. Parts of it, such as Shasta's ride over the pass into Narnia, have a strong "Footprints" feel to them. Most of the events of the book are arranged by Aslan, starting with Shasta's early life. Readers of the series will know this when a lion shows up early to herd the horses where they need to go, or when a cat keeps Shasta company in the desert and frightens away jackals. Shasta only understands near the end. I remember this being compelling stuff as a young Christian reader. This personal attention and life shaping from God is pure Christian wish fulfillment of the "God has a plan for your life" variety, even more so than Shasta turning out to be a lost prince. As an adult re-reader, I can see that Lewis is palming the theodicy card rather egregiously. It's great that Aslan was making everything turn out well in the end, but why did he have to scare the kids and horses half to death in the process? They were already eager to do what he wanted, but it's somehow inconceivable that Aslan would simply tell them what to do rather than manipulate them. There's no obvious in-story justification why he couldn't have made the experience much less terrifying. Or, for that matter, prevented Shasta from being kidnapped as an infant in the first place and solved the problem of Radagast in a more direct way. This sort of theology takes as an unexamined assumption that a deity must refuse to use his words and instead do everything in weirdly roundabout and mysterious ways, which makes even less sense in Narnia than in our world given how directly and straightforwardly Aslan has acted in previous books. It was also obvious to me on re-read how unfair Lewis's strict gender roles are to Aravis. She's an excellent rider from the start of the book and has practiced many of the things Shasta struggles to do, but Shasta is the boy and Aravis is the girl, so Aravis has to have girl adventures involving tittering princesses, luxurious baths, and eavesdropping behind couches, whereas Shasta has boy adventures like riding to warn the king or bringing word to Narnia. There's nothing very objectionable about Shasta as a character (unlike Bree), but he has such a generic character arc. The Horse and Her Girl with Aravis and Hwin as protagonists would have been a more interesting story, and would have helpfully complicated the whole Narnia and the North story motive. As for that storyline, wow the racism is strong in this one, starting with the degree that The Horse and His Boy is deeply concerned with people's skin color. Shasta is white, you see, clearly marking him as from the North because all the Calormenes are dark-skinned. (This makes even less sense in this fantasy world than in our world because it's strongly implied in The Magician's Nephew that all the humans in Calormen came from Narnia originally.) The Calormenes all talk like characters from bad translations of the Arabian Nights and are shown as cruel, corrupt slavers with a culture that's a Orientalist mishmash of Arab, Persian, and Chinese stereotypes. Everyone is required to say "may he live forever" after referencing the Tisroc, which is an obvious and crude parody of Islam. This stereotype fest culminates in the incredibly bizarre scene that Aravis overhears, in which the grand vizier literally grovels on the floor while Radagast kicks him and the Tisroc, Radagast's father, talks about how Narnia's freedom offends him and the barbarian kingdom would be more profitable and orderly when conquered. The one point to Lewis's credit is that Aravis is also Calormene, tells stories in the same style, and is still a protagonist and just as acceptable to Aslan as Shasta is. It's not enough to overcome the numerous problems with Lewis's lazy world-building, but it makes me wish even more that Aravis had gotten her own book and more meaningful scenes with Aslan. I had forgotten that Susan appears in this book, although that appearance doesn't add much to the general problem of Susan in Narnia except perhaps to hint at Lewis's later awful choices. She is shown considering marriage to the clearly villainous Radagast, and then only mentioned later with a weird note that she doesn't ride to war despite being the best archer of the four. I will say again that it's truly weird to see the Pevensie kids as (young) adults discussing marriage proposals, international politics, and border wars while remembering they all get dumped back into their previous lives as British schoolkids. This had to have had dramatic effects on their lives that Lewis never showed. (I know, the real answer is that Lewis is writing these books according to childhood imaginary adventure logic, where adventures don't have long-term consequences of that type.) I will also grumble once more at how weirdly ineffectual Narnians are until some human comes to tell them what to do. Calormen is obviously a threat; Susan just escaped from an attempted forced marriage. Archenland is both their southern line of defense and is an ally separated by a mountain pass in a country full of talking eagles, among other obvious messengers. And yet, it falls to Shasta to ride to give warning because he's the human protagonist of the story. Everyone else seems to be too busy with quirky domesticity or endless faux-medieval chivalric parties. The Horse and His Boy was one of my favorites when I was a kid, but reading as an adult I found it much harder to tolerate Bree or read past the blatant racial and cultural stereotyping. The bits with Aslan also felt less magical to me than they did as a kid because I was asking more questions about why Aslan had to do everything in such an opaque and perilous way. It's still not a bad adventure; Aravis is a great character, the bits in Tashbaan are at least memorable, and I still love the Hermit of the Southern March and want to know more about him. But I would rank it below the top tier of Narnia books, alongside Prince Caspian as a book with some great moments and some serious flaws. Followed in original publication order by The Magician's Nephew. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Unconquerable Sun, by Kate Elliott

Series:	Sun Chronicles #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	1-250-19725-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	526

Sun is the daughter and heir of the mercurial Queen-Marshal Eirene, ruler of the Republic of Chaonia. Chaonia, thanks to Eirene and her ancestors, has carved out a fiercely independent position between the Yele League and the Phene Empire. Sun's father, Prince Jo o, is one of Eirene's three consorts, all chosen for political alliances to shore up that fragile position. Jo o is Gatoi, a civilization of feared fighters and supposed barbarians from outside Chaonia who normally ally with the Phene, which complicates Sun's position as heir. Sun attempts to compensate for that by winning battles for the Republic, following in the martial footsteps of her mother. The publisher's summary of this book is not great (I'm a huge fan of Princess Leia, but that is... not the analogy that comes to mind), so let me try to help. This is gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space. However, it is gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space with her Companions, which means the DNA of this novel is half space opera and half heist story (without, to be clear, an actual heist, although there are some heist-like maneuvers). It's also worth mentioning that Sun, like Alexander, is not heterosexual. The other critical thing to know before reading, mostly because it will get you through the rather painful start, is that the most interesting viewpoint character in this book is not Sun, the Alexander analogue. It's Persephone, who isn't introduced until chapter seven. Significant disclaimer up front: I got a reasonably typical US grade school history of Alexander the Great, which means I was taught that he succeeded his father, conquered a whole swath of the middle of the Eurasian land mass at a very young age, and then died and left his empire to his four generals who promptly divided it into four uninteresting empires that no one's ever heard of, and that's why Rome is more important than Greece. (I put in that last bit to troll one specific person.) I am therefore not the person to judge the parallels between this story and known history, or to notice any damage done to Greek pride, or to pick up on elements that might cause someone with a better grasp of that history to break out in hives. I did enough research to know that one scene in this book is lifted directly out of Alexander's life, but I'm not sure how closely the other parallels track. Yele is probably southern Greece and Phene is probably Persia, but I'm not certain even of that, and some of the details don't line up. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that Elliott has probably mangled history sufficiently to make it clear that this isn't intended to be a retelling, but if the historical parallels are likely to bother you, you may want to do more research before reading. What I can say is that the space opera setup, while a bit stock, has all the necessary elements to make me happy. Unconquerable Sun is firmly in the "lost Earth" tradition: The Argosy fleet fled the now-mythical Celestial Empire and founded a new starfaring civilization without any contact with their original home. Eventually, they invented (or discovered; the characters don't know) the beacons, which allow for instantaneous travel between specific systems without the long (but still faster-than-light) journeys of the knnu drive. More recently, the beacon network has partly collapsed, cutting off the characters' known world from the civilization that was responsible for the beacons and guarded their secrets. It's a fun space opera history with lots of lost knowledge to reference and possibly discover, and with plot-enabling military choke points at the surviving beacons that link multiple worlds. This is all background to the story, which is the ongoing war between Chaonia and the Phene Empire mixed with cutthroat political maneuvering between the great houses of the Chaonian Republic. This is where the heist aspects come in. Each house sends one representative to join the household of the Queen-Marshal and (more to the point for this story) another to join her heir. Sun has encouraged the individual and divergent talents of her Companions and their cee-cees (an unfortunate term that I suspect is short for Companion's Companion) and forged them into a good working team. A team that's about to be disrupted by the maneuverings of a rival house and the introduction of a new team member whom no one wants. A problem with writing tactical geniuses is that they often aren't good viewpoint characters. Sun's tight third-person chapters, which is a little less than half the book, advance the plot and provide analysis of the interpersonal dynamics of the characters, but aren't the strength of the story. That lies with the interwoven first-person sections that follow Persephone, an altogether more interesting character. Persephone is the scion of the house that is Sun's chief rival, but she has no interest in being part of that house or its maneuverings. When the story opens, she's a cadet in a military academy for recruits from the commoners, having run away from home, hidden her identity, and won a position through the open entrance exams. She of course doesn't stay there; her past catches up with her and she gets assigned to Sun, to a great deal of mutual suspicion. She also is assigned an impeccably dressed and stunningly beautiful cee-cee, Tiana, who has her own secrets and who was my favorite character in the book. Somewhat unusually for the space opera tradition, this is a book that knows that common people exist and have interesting lives. It's primarily focused on the ruling houses, but that focus is not exclusive and the rulers do not have a monopoly on competence. Elliott also avoids narrowing the political field too far; the Gatoi are separate from the three rival powers, and there are other groups with traditions older than the Chaonian Republic and their own agendas. Sun and her Companions are following a couple of political threads, but there is clearly more going on in this world than that single plot. This is exactly the kind of story I think of when I think space opera. It's not doing anything that original or groundbreaking, and it's not going to make any of my lists of great literature, but it's a fun romp with satisfyingly layered bits of lore, a large-scale setting with lots of plot potential, and (once we get through the confusing and somewhat tedious process of introducing rather too many characters in short succession) some great interpersonal dynamics. It's the kind of book in which the characters are in the middle of decisive military action in an interstellar war and are also near-teenagers competing for ratings in an ad hoc reality TV show, primarily as an excuse to create tactical distractions for Sun's latest scheme. The writing is okay but not great, and the first few chapters have some serious infodumping problems, but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole book and will pre-order the sequel. One Amazon review complained that Unconquerable Sun is not a space opera like Hyperion or Use of Weapons. That is entirely true, but if that's your standard for space opera, the world may be a disappointing place. This is a solid entry in a subgenre I love, with some great characters, sarcasm, competence porn, plenty of pages to keep turning, a few twists, and the promise of more to come. Recommended. Followed by the not-yet-published Furious Heaven. Rating: 7 out of 10

More than a month has passed since the last update of TeX Live packages in Debian, so here is a new checkout!
All arch all packages have been updated to the tlnet state as of 2020-06-29, see the detailed update list below. Enjoy. New packages akshar, beamertheme-pure-minimalistic, biblatex-unified, biblatex-vancouver, bookshelf, commutative-diagrams, conditext, courierten, ektype-tanka, hvarabic, kpfonts-otf, marathi, menucard, namedef, pgf-pie, pwebmac, qrbill, semantex, shtthesis, tikz-lake-fig, tile-graphic, utf8add. Updated packages abnt, achemso, algolrevived, amiri, amscls, animate, antanilipsum, apa7, babel, bangtex, baskervillef, beamerappendixnote, beamerswitch, beamertheme-focus, bengali, bib2gls, biblatex-apa, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-phys, biblatex-software, biblatex-swiss-legal, bibleref, bookshelf, bxjscls, caption, ccool, cellprops, changes, chemfig, circuitikz, cloze, cnltx, cochineal, commutative-diagrams, comprehensive, context, context-vim, cquthesis, crop, crossword, ctex, cweb, denisbdoc, dijkstra, doclicense, domitian, dps, draftwatermark, dvipdfmx, ebong, ellipsis, emoji, endofproofwd, eqexam, erewhon, erewhon-math, erw-l3, etbb, euflag, examplep, fancyvrb, fbb, fbox, fei, fira, fontools, fontsetup, fontsize, forest-quickstart, gbt7714, genealogytree, haranoaji, haranoaji-extra, hitszthesis, hvarabic, hyperxmp, icon-appr, kpfonts, kpfonts-otf, l3backend, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, latex-amsmath-dev, latexbangla, latex-base-dev, latexdemo, latexdiff, latex-graphics-dev, latexindent, latex-make, latexmp, latex-mr, latex-tools-dev, libertinus-fonts, libertinust1math, lion-msc, listings, logix, lshort-czech, lshort-german, lshort-polish, lshort-portuguese, lshort-russian, lshort-slovenian, lshort-thai, lshort-ukr, lshort-vietnamese, luamesh, lua-uca, luavlna, lwarp, marathi, memoir, mnras, moderntimeline, na-position, newcomputermodern, newpx, nicematrix, nodetree, ocgx2, oldstandard, optex, parskip, pdfcrop, pdfpc, pdftexcmds, pdfxup, pgf, pgfornament, pgf-pie, pgf-umlcd, pgf-umlsd, pict2e, plautopatch, poemscol, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-func, pstricks, pwebmac, pxjahyper, quran, rec-thy, reledmac, rest-api, sanskrit, sanskrit-t1, scholax, semantex, showexpl, shtthesis, suftesi, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texinfo, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tkz-doc, tlshell, toptesi, tuda-ci, tudscr, twemoji-colr, univie-ling, updmap-map, vancouver, velthuis, witharrows, wtref, xecjk, xepersian-hm, xetex-itrans, xfakebold, xindex, xindy, xltabular, yathesis, ydoc, yquant, zref.

Halloween is here, time to upload a new set of scary packages of TeX Live. About a month has passed, so there is the usual big stream up updates. There was actually an intermediate release to get out some urgent fixes, but I never reported the news here. So here are the accumulated changes and updates. My favorite this time is wallcalendar, a great class to design all kind of calendars, it looks really well done. I immediately will start putting one together. On the font side there is the new addition coelacanth. To quote from the README: Coelacanth is inspired by the classic Centaur type design of Bruce Rogers, described by some as the most beautiful typeface ever designed. It aims to be a professional quality type family for general book typesetting. And indeed it is beautiful! Other noteworthy addition is the Spark font that allows creating sparklines in the running text with LaTeX. Enjoy. New packages algobox, amscls-doc, beilstein, bib2gls, coelacanth, crossreftools, dejavu-otf, dijkstra, ducksay, dynkin-diagrams, eqnnumwarn, fetchcls, fixjfm, glossaries-finnish, hagenberg-thesis, hecthese, ifxptex, isopt, istgame, ku-template, limecv, mensa-tex, musicography, na-position, notestex, outlining, pdfreview, spark-otf, spark-otf-fonts, theatre, unitn-bimrep, upzhkinsoku, wallcalendar, xltabular. Updated packages acmart, amsmath, animate, arabluatex, arara, babel, babel-french, bangorexam, baskervillef, beebe, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-source-division, bibletext, bidi, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bxpapersize, bytefield, classicthesis, cochineal, complexity, cooking-units, curves, datetime2-german, dccpaper, doclicense, docsurvey, eledmac, epstopdf, eqparbox, esami, etoc, fbb, fei, fithesis, fmtcount, fnspe, fonts-tlwg, fontspec, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, hecthese, hepthesis, hvfloat, ifplatform, ifptex, inconsolata, jfmutil, jsclasses, ketcindy, knowledge, koma-script, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, langsci, latex2man, latexbug, lato, leadsheets, libertinust1math, listofitems, luatexja, luatexko, luatodonotes, lwarp, markdown, mcf2graph, media9, newtx, novel, numspell, ocgx2, overpic, philokalia, phonenumbers, platex, poemscol, pst-exa, pst-geometrictools, pst-ovl, pst-plot, pst-pulley, pst-tools, pst-vehicle, pst2pdf, pstool, pstricks, pstricks-add, pxchfon, pxjahyper, quran, randomlist, rec-thy, reledmac, robustindex, scratch, skrapport, spectralsequences, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texcount, texdoc, tikzducks, tikzsymbols, toptesi, translation-biblatex-de, unicode-math, updmap-map, uplatex, widetable, xcharter, xepersian, xetexko, xetexref, xsim, zhlipsum.

A full month or more has past since the last upload of TeX Live, so it was high time to prepare a new package. Nothing spectacular here I have to say, two small bugs fixed and the usual long list of updates and new packages. From the new packages I found fontloader-luaotfload and interesting project. Loading fonts via lua code in luatex is by now standard, and this package allows for experiments with newer/alternative font loaders. Another very interesting new-comer is pdfreview which lets you set pages of another PDF on a lined background and add notes to it, good for reviewing. Enjoy. New packages abnt, algobox, beilstein, bib2gls, cheatsheet, coelacanth, dijkstra, dynkin-diagrams, endofproofwd, fetchcls, fixjfm, fontloader-luaotfload, forms16be, hithesis, ifxptex, komacv-rg, ku-template, latex-refsheet, limecv, mensa-tex, multilang, na-box, notes-tex, octave, pdfreview, pst-poker, theatre, upzhkinsoku, witharrows. Updated packages 2up, acmart, acro, amsmath, animate, babel, babel-french, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer, beebe, biblatex-gost, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-source-division, bibletext, bidi, bpchem, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bytefield, checkcites, chemmacros, chet, chickenize, complexity, curves, cweb, datetime2-german, e-french, epstopdf, eqparbox, esami, etoc, fbb, fithesis, fmtcount, fnspe, fontspec, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, hvfloat, ifptex, invoice2, jfmutil, jlreq, jsclasses, koma-script, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, libertinust1math, luatexja, lwarp, markdown, mcf2graph, media9, nddiss, newpx, newtx, novel, numspell, ocgx2, philokalia, phfqit, placeat, platex, poemscol, powerdot, pst-barcode, pst-cie, pst-exa, pst-fit, pst-func, pst-geometrictools, pst-ode, pst-plot, pst-pulley, pst-solarsystem, pst-solides3d, pst-tools, pst-vehicle, pst2pdf, pstricks, pstricks-add, ptex-base, ptex-fonts, pxchfon, quran, randomlist, reledmac, robustindex, scratch, skrapport, spectralsequences, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texcount, texdef, texinfo, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, tikzducks, tikzsymbols, tocloft, translations, updmap-map, uplatex, widetable, xepersian, xetexref, xint, xsim, zhlipsum.

Yesterday I uploaded the first packages of TeX Live 2017 to Debian/unstable, meaning that the new release cycle has started. Debian/stretch was released over the weekend, and this opened up unstable for new developments. The upload comprised the following packages: asymptote, cm-super, context, context-modules, texlive-base, texlive-bin, texlive-extra, texlive-extra, texlive-lang, texworks, xindy.
I mentioned already in a previous post the following changes:

• several packages have been merged, some are dropped (eg. texlive-htmlxml) and one new package (texlive-plain-generic) has been added
• luatex got updated to 1.0.4, and is now considered stable
• updmap and fmtutil now require either -sys or -user
• tlmgr got a shell mode (interactive/scripting interface) and a new feature to add arbitrary TEXMF trees (conf auxtrees)

The last two changes are described together with other news (easy TEXMF tree management) in the TeX Live release post. These changes more or less sum up the new infra structure developments in TeX Live 2017. Since the last release to unstable (which happened in 2017-01-23) about half a year of package updates have accumulated, below is an approximate list of updates (not split into new/updated, though). Enjoy the brave new world of TeX Live 2017, and please report bugs to the BTS! Updated/new packages:
academicons, achemso, acmart, acro, actuarialangle, actuarialsymbol, adobemapping, alkalami, amiri, animate, aomart, apa6, apxproof, arabluatex, archaeologie, arsclassica, autoaligne, autobreak, autosp, axodraw2, babel, babel-azerbaijani, babel-english, babel-french, babel-indonesian, babel-japanese, babel-malay, babel-ukrainian, bangorexam, baskervaldx, baskervillef, bchart, beamer, beamerswitch, bgteubner, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-archaeology, biblatex-arthistory-bonn, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-caspervector, biblatex-cheatsheet, biblatex-chem, biblatex-chicago, biblatex-claves, biblatex-enc, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-iso690, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-oxref, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-publist, biblatex-shortfields, biblatex-subseries, bibtexperllibs, bidi, biochemistry-colors, bookcover, boondox, bredzenie, breqn, bxbase, bxcalc, bxdvidriver, bxjalipsum, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bxnewfont, bxorigcapt, bxpapersize, bxpdfver, cabin, callouts, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, chemschemex, childdoc, circuitikz, cje, cjhebrew, cjk-gs-integrate, cmpj, cochineal, combofont, context, conv-xkv, correctmathalign, covington, cquthesis, crimson, crossrefware, csbulletin, csplain, csquotes, css-colors, cstldoc, ctex, currency, cweb, datetime2-french, datetime2-german, datetime2-romanian, datetime2-ukrainian, dehyph-exptl, disser, docsurvey, dox, draftfigure, drawmatrix, dtk, dviinfox, easyformat, ebproof, elements, endheads, enotez, eqnalign, erewhon, eulerpx, expex, exsheets, factura, facture, fancyhdr, fbb, fei, fetamont, fibeamer, fithesis, fixme, fmtcount, fnspe, fontmfizz, fontools, fonts-churchslavonic, fontspec, footnotehyper, forest, gandhi, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, gofonts, gotoh, graphics, graphics-def, graphics-pln, grayhints, gregoriotex, gtrlib-largetrees, gzt, halloweenmath, handout, hang, heuristica, hlist, hobby, hvfloat, hyperref, hyperxmp, ifptex, ijsra, japanese-otf-uptex, jlreq, jmlr, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, karnaugh-map, keyfloat, knowledge, komacv, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, l3, l3build, ladder, langsci, latex, latex2e, latex2man, latex3, latexbug, latexindent, latexmk, latex-mr, leaflet, leipzig, libertine, libertinegc, libertinus, libertinust1math, lion-msc, lni, longdivision, lshort-chinese, ltb2bib, lualatex-math, lualibs, luamesh, luamplib, luaotfload, luapackageloader, luatexja, luatexko, lwarp, make4ht, marginnote, markdown, mathalfa, mathpunctspace, mathtools, mcexam, mcf2graph, media9, minidocument, modular, montserrat, morewrites, mpostinl, mptrees, mucproc, musixtex, mwcls, mweights, nameauth, newpx, newtx, newtxtt, nfssext-cfr, nlctdoc, novel, numspell, nwejm, oberdiek, ocgx2, oplotsymbl, optidef, oscola, overlays, pagecolor, pdflatexpicscale, pdfpages, pdfx, perfectcut, pgfplots, phonenumbers, phonrule, pkuthss, platex, platex-tools, polski, preview, program, proofread, prooftrees, pst-3dplot, pst-barcode, pst-eucl, pst-func, pst-ode, pst-pdf, pst-plot, pstricks, pstricks-add, pst-solides3d, pst-spinner, pst-tools, pst-tree, pst-vehicle, ptex2pdf, ptex-base, ptex-fontmaps, pxbase, pxchfon, pxrubrica, pythonhighlight, quran, ran_toks, reledmac, repere, resphilosophica, revquantum, rputover, rubik, rutitlepage, sansmathfonts, scratch, seealso, sesstime, siunitx, skdoc, songs, spectralsequences, stackengine, stage, sttools, studenthandouts, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texosquery, texproposal, thaienum, thalie, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tikz-kalender, tikzmark, tikz-optics, tikz-palattice, tikzpeople, tikzsymbols, titlepic, tl17, tqft, tracklang, tudscr, tugboat-plain, turabian-formatting, txuprcal, typoaid, udesoftec, uhhassignment, ukrainian, ulthese, unamthesis, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, unicode-math, uplatex, upmethodology, uptex-base, urcls, variablelm, varsfromjobname, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xepersian, xetexko, xevlna, xgreek, xsavebox, xsim, ycbook.

Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG s (role-playing games) which didn t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games. Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4 4 when starting (you don t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8 8 or at the very grand 12 12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people s grand creations of their houses and couldn t understand why they made such big houses. Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called Stranded Deep . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need. What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house. When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing. Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org While I do condemn the molestation as it s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity. Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job. I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are looking for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn t be easy. I don t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves. Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour. Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place. I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute. So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply. See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms. The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn t hear anything much after that. Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches. Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change. While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my toilet experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well. Looking back at last year s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given. I have heard that this year s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #386, #accessibility, #air-travel, #Computers, #differently-abled, #Railways, gaming

As the freeze of the next release is closing in, I have updated a bunch of packages around TeX: All of the TeX Live packages (binaries and arch independent ones) and tex-common. I might see whether I get some updates of ConTeXt out, too.
The changes in the binaries are mostly cosmetic: one removal of a non-free (unclear-free) file, and several upstream patches got cherrypicked (dvips, tltexjp contact email, upmendex, dvipdfmx). I played around with including LuaTeX v1.0, but that breaks horribly with the current packages in TeX Live, so I refrained from it. The infrastructure package tex-common got a bugfix for updates from previous releases, and for the other packages there is the usual bunch of updates and new packages. Enjoy! New packages arimo, arphic-ttf, babel-japanese, conv-xkv, css-colors, dtxdescribe, fgruler, footmisx, halloweenmath, keyfloat, luahyphenrules, math-into-latex-4, mendex-doc, missaali, mpostinl, padauk, platexcheat, pstring, pst-shell, ptex-fontmaps, scsnowman, stanli, tinos, undergradmath, yaletter. Updated packages acmart, animate, apxproof, arabluatex, arsclassica, babel-french, babel-russian, baskervillef, beamer, beebe, biber, biber.x86_64-linux, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-chem, biblatex-dw, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-sbl, bidi, calxxxx-yyyy, chemgreek, churchslavonic, cochineal, comicneue, cquthesis, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, dataref, denisbdoc, diagbox, dozenal, dtk, dvipdfmx, dvipng, elocalloc, epstopdf, erewhon, etoolbox, exam-n, fbb, fei, fithesis, forest, glossaries, glossaries-extra, glossaries-french, gost, gzt, historische-zeitschrift, inconsolata, japanese-otf, japanese-otf-uptex, jsclasses, latex-bin, latex-make, latexmk, lt3graph, luatexja, markdown, mathspec, mcf2graph, media9, mendex-doc, metafont, mhchem, mweights, nameauth, noto, nwejm, old-arrows, omegaware, onlyamsmath, optidef, pdfpages, pdftools, perception, phonrule, platex-tools, polynom, preview, prooftrees, pst-geo, pstricks, pst-solides3d, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-fonts, qcircuit, quran, raleway, reledmac, resphilosophica, sanskrit, scalerel, scanpages, showexpl, siunitx, skdoc, skmath, skrapport, smartdiagram, sourcesanspro, sparklines, tabstackengine, tetex, tex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tocdata, uantwerpendocs, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, withargs, wtref, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint, xlop, yathesis.

As we are moving closer to the Debian release freeze, I am shipping out a new set of packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the regular updates and a security fix that was only reported internally. Add sugar and a few minor bug fixes.
I have been silent for quite some time, busy at my new job, busy with my little monster, writing papers, caring for visitors, living. I have quite a lot of things I want to write, but not enough time, so very short only this one. Enjoy. New packages awesomebox, baskervillef, forest-quickstart, gofonts, iscram, karnaugh-map, tikz-optics, tikzpeople, unicode-bidi. Updated packages acmart, algorithms, aomart, apa, apa6, appendix, apxproof, arabluatex, asymptote, background, bangorexam, beamer, beebe, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-mla, biblatex-morenames, bibtexperllibs, bidi, bookcover, bxjalipsum, bxjscls, c90, cals, cell, cm, cmap, cmextra, context, cooking-units, ctex, cyrillic, dirtree, ekaia, enotez, errata, euler, exercises, fira, fonts-churchslavonic, formation-latex-ul, german, glossaries, graphics, handout, hustthesis, hyphen-base, ipaex, japanese, jfontmaps, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex2e-help-texinfo-fr, layouts, listofitems, lshort-german, manfnt, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, mflogo, ms, multirow, newpx, newtx, nlctdoc, notes, patch, pdfscreen, phonenumbers, platex, ptex, quran, readarray, reledmac, shapes, showexpl, siunitx, talk, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-en, texlive-scripts, texworks, tikz-dependency, toptesi, tpslifonts, tracklang, tugboat, tugboat-plain, units, updmap-map, uplatex, uspace, wadalab, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint.

Finally a new update of many TeX related packages: all the texlive-* including the binary packages, and biber have been updated to the latest release. This upload was delayed by my travels around the world, as well as the necessity to package a new Perl module (libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl) as required by new Biber. Also, my new job leaves me only the weekends for packaging. Anyway, the packages are now uploaded and should appear soon on your friendly local server. There are several highlights: The binaries have been patched with several upstream fixes (tex4ht and XeTeX compatibility, as well as various Japanese TeX engine fixes), updated biber and biblatex, and as usual loads of new and updated packages. Last but not least I want to thank one particular author: His package was removed from TeX Live due to the addition of a rather unusual clause in the license. Instead of simply uploading new packages to Debian with the rather important removed, I contacted the author and asked for clarification. And to my great pleasure he immediately answered with an update of the package with fixed license. All of us user of these many packages should be grateful to the authors of the packages who invest loads of their free time into supporting our community. Thanks! Enough now, here as usual the list of new and updated packages with links to their respective CTAN pages. Enjoy. New packages addfont, apalike-german, autoaligne, baekmuk, beamerswitch, beamertheme-cuerna, beuron, biblatex-claves, biolett-bst, cooking-units, cstypo, emf, eulerpx, filecontentsdef, frederika2016, grant, latexgit, listofitems, overlays, phonenumbers, pst-arrow, quicktype, revquantum, richtext, semantic-markup, spalign, texproposal, tikz-page, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, uspace. Updated packages achemso, acmart, acro, adobemapping, alegreya, allrunes, animate, arabluatex, archaeologie, asymptote, attachfile, babel-greek, bangorcsthesis, beebe, biblatex, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-chem, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-phys, biblatex-realauthor, biblatex-science, biblatex-true-citepages-omit, bibleref, bidi, chemformula, circuitikz, cochineal, colorspace, comment, covington, cquthesis, ctex, drawmatrix, ejpecp, erewhon, etoc, exsheets, fancyhdr, fei, fithesis, footnotehyper, fvextra, geschichtsfrkl, gnuplottex, gost, gregoriotex, hausarbeit-jura, ijsra, ipaex, jfontmaps, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, latexdiff, leadsheets, libertinust1math, luatexja, markdown, mcf2graph, minutes, multirow, mynsfc, nameauth, newpx, newtxsf, notespages, optidef, pas-cours, platex, prftree, pst-bezier, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-optic, pstricks, pstricks-add, refenums, reledmac, rsc, shdoc, siunitx, stackengine, tabstackengine, tagpair, tetex, texlive-es, texlive-scripts, ticket, translation-biblatex-de, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uplatex, xebaposter, xecjk, xepersian, xpinyin. Enjoy.

I gave a talk about the early days of Linux at the jubilee symposium arranged by the University of Helsinki CS department. Below is an outline of what I meant to speak about, but the actual talk didn't follow it exactly. You can compare these to the video once it comes online.

• Linus and I met at uni, the only 2 Swedish speaking new students that year, so we naturally migrated towards each other.
• After a year away for military service, got back in touch, summer of
  1. .
• C & Unix course fall of 1990; Minix.
• Linus didn't think atime updates in real time were plausible, but I showed him; funnily enough, atime updates have been an issue in Linux until fairly recently, since they slow things down (without being particularly useful)
• Jan 5, 1991 bought his first PC (i386 + i387 + 4 MiB RAM and a small hard disk); he had a Sinclair QL before that.
• Played Prince of Persia for a couple of months.
• Then wanted to learn i386 assembly and multitasking.
• A/B threading demo.
• Terminal emulation, Usenet access from home.
• Hard disk driver, mistaking hard disk for a modem.
• More ambition, announced Linux to the world for the first time
• first ever Linux installation.
• Upload to ftp.funet.fi, directory name by Ari Lemmke.
• Originally not free software, licence changed early 1992.
• First mailing list was created and introduced me to a flood of email (managed with VAX/VMS MAIL and later mush on Unix).
• I talked a lot with Linus about design at this time, but never really participated in the kernel work (partly because disagreeing with Linus is a high-stress thing).
• However, I did write the first sprintf for the kernel, since Linus hadn't learnt about varargs functions in C; he then ruined it and added the comment "Wirzenius wrote this portably..." (add google hit count for wirzenius+fucked).
• During 1992 Linux grew fast, and distros happened, and a lot of packaging and porting of software; porting was easier because Linus was happy to add/change things in the kernel to accomodate software
• A lot of new users during 1992 as well.
• End of 1992 I and a few others founded the Linux Documentation Project to help all the new users, some of who didn't come from a Unix background.
• In fact, things progressed so fast in 1992 that Linus thought he'd release 1.0 very soon, resulting in a silly sequence of version numbers: 0.12, 0.95, 0.96, 0.96b, 0.96c, 0.96c++2.
• X server ported to Linux; almost immediate prediction of the year of the Linux desktop never happening unless ALL the graphics cards were supported immediately.
• Linus was of the opinion that you needed one process (not thread) per window in X; I taught him event driven programming.
• Bug in network code, resulting in ban on uni network.
• Pranks in the shared office room.
• We released 1.0 in an event at the CS dept in March, 1994; this included some talks and a ritual compilation of the release version during the event.

The sources of TeX Live binaries are now (hopefully) frozen, and barring unpleasant surprises, these will be code going into the final release (one fix for luatex is coming, though). Thus, I thought it is time to upload TeX Live 2016 packages to Debian/unstable to expose them to a wider testing area packages in experimental receive hardly any testing. The biggest changes are with Luatex, where APIs were changed fundamentally and practically each package using luatex specific code needs to be adjusted. Most of the package authors have already uploaded fixed versions to CTAN and thus to TeX Live, but some are surely still open. I have taken the step to provide driver files for pgf and pgfplots to support pgf with luatex (as I need it myself). One more thing to be mentioned is that the binaries finally bring support for reproducible builds by supporting the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. Please send bug reports, suggestions, and improvements (patches welcome!) to improve the quality of the packages. In particular, lintian complains a lot about various man page problems. If someone wants to go through all that it would help a lot. Details on request. Other than that, many packages have been updated or added since the last Debian packages, here are the incomplete lists (I had accidentally deleted the tlmgr.log file at some point): new: acmart, chivo, coloring, dvisvgm-def, langsci, makebase, pbibtex-base, platex, ptex-base, ptex-fonts, rosario, uplatex, uptex-base, uptex-fonts. updated: achemso, acro, arabluatex, arydshln, asymptote, babel-french, biblatex-ieee, bidi, bookcover, booktabs, bxjscls, chemformula, chemmacros, cslatex, csplain, cstex, dtk, dvips, epspdf, fibeamer, footnotehyper, glossaries, glossaries-extra, gobble, graphics, gregoriotex, hyperref, hyperxmp, jadetex, jslectureplanner, koma-script, kpathsea, latex-bin, latexmk, lollipop, luaotfload, luatex, luatexja, luatexko, mathastext, mcf2graph, mex, microtype, msu-thesis, m-tx, oberdiek, pdftex, pdfx, pgf, pgfplots, platex, pmx, pst-cie, pst-func, pst-ovl, pst-plot, ptex, ptex-fonts, reledmac, shdoc, substances, tasks, tetex, tools, uantwerpendocs, ucharclasses, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, velthuis, xassoccnt, xcolor, xepersian, xetex, xgreek, xmltex. Enjoy.

Before I disappear into the Japanese winter holidays, here the Christmas update of all TeX Live packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the usual bunch of updates of loads of packages. There is a bug with respect to a file move from one package to another, will be fixed in an upload soon. Updated packages apnum, appendix, archaeologie, babel, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer-verona, bhcexam, bibarts, bidi, bxjscls, chemfig, commado, comprehensive, context, cslatex, csplain, ctanify, doclicense, dvips, ejpecp, exsheets, fbb, fibeamer, fithesis, fontools, francais-bst, gitinfo2, glossaries, gnuplottex, greek-fontenc, hyph-utf8, indextools, ksp-thesis, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexcourse-rug, lollipop, lstbayes, lualibs, luaotfload, luatexja, luatexko, luatodonotes, make4ht, mcf2graph, media9, mex, mfirstuc, mhchem, mptopdf, nameauth, nevelok, newtx, nicetext, nucleardata, ocgx2, pageslts, petri-nets, phonrule, pkuthss, powerdot, proofread, proposal, pst-labo, pst-solides3d, reledmac, sapthesis, serbian-lig, showlabels, t2, tcolorbox, tempora, testhyphens, tetex, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, texsis, thuthesis, toptesi, tudscr, ucharcat, versonotes, xcharter, xepersian, xifthen, xindy, xint. New packages beamertheme-detlevcm, beamertheme-metropolis, beamertheme-phnompenh, beamer-verona, bitpattern, carbohydrates, delimseasy, drawmatrix, einfuehrung2, ellipse, ffslides, gitlog, greektonoi, ksp-thesis, longfbox, options, simpler-wick, unicode-data. Enjoy.

One month has passed since the big multiarch update, and not one bug report concerning it did come in, that are good news. So here is a completely boring update with nothing more than the usual checkout from the TeX Live tlnet distribution as of yesterday. I cannot recall anything particular to mention here, so this time let me go with the list of updated and new packages only: Updated packages alegreya, algorithm2e, animate, archaeologie, articleingud, attachfile, bankstatement, beebe, biber, biblatex, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, bidi, br-lex, bytefield, catcodes, chemfig, chemformula, chemgreek, comprehensive, computational-complexity, ctable, datetime2, dowith, dvipdfmx, dvipdfmx-def, dynamicnumber, e-french, epspdf, etoc, fetamont, findhyph, fix2col, gitinfo2, gradstudentresume, indextools, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-utils, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latex2e-help-texinfo, lisp-on-tex, ltxfileinfo, luatexja, makedtx, mathastext, mathtools, mcf2graph, media9, medstarbeamer, morehype, nameauth, nicetext, ocgx2, perltex, preview, prftree, pst-eucl, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, selnolig, substances, tcolorbox, tetex, teubner, tex4ht, texdoc, texinfo, texlive-scripts, toptesi, translations, turabian-formatting, uptex, xepersian, xetex, xetex-def, xint. New packages asciilist, babel-macedonian, bestpapers, bibtexperllibs, fixcmex, iffont, nucleardata, srcredact, texvc, xassoccnt. Enjoy.

A big update of all related packages (tex-common 6.04, texlive-bin 2015.20150524.37493-7, texlive-base/lang/extra package 2015.20151016-1) due to the move to support multi-arch. Of course, the regular updates of the TeX Live are included, too. With this change it should be possible to run a multi-arch system with only one TeX Live installed. Thanks to the excellent support and testing of the Multi-arch guys, in particular Thorsten Glaser, Helmut Grohne, Johannes Schauer, and Wookey, I learned a lot about multi-arch, and I hope that the current setup is safe. All the packages but the various lib* packages are tagged as Multi-Arch: foreign, while the lib packages are tagged Multi-Arch: same. Anyway, if you find a bug concerning multi-arch, that is that some of the programs exhibit architecture information, please let us know via a bug report. Updated packages acro, alegreya, amiri, assoccnt, attachfile, babel-french, babel-hungarian, barr, beebe, biblatex-philosophy, bidi, bnumexpr, caption, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, cjk-gs-integrate, csplain, dantelogo, dataref, dtxgen, dvipdfmx-def, dvips, eledmac, elements, fcolumn, fithesis, fontspec, genealogytree, gradstudentresume, gtl, jfontmaps, knuth-local, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-plain, kotex-utf, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latexconfig, ledmac, ltxfileinfo, lualatex-math, luamplib, luatex, luatexbase, luatexja, luatexko, make4ht, mcf2graph, mflogo, modiagram, multiexpand, newtx, odsfile, old-arrows, paracol, pdfpages, pdftex, plain, pst-stru, pxchfon, randomwalk, reledmac, resumecls, rubik, selnolig, showhyphens, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, teubner, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tipfr, tools, tudscr, uassign, unicode-math, unravel, visualfaq, xepersian, xetex-def, xint. New packages archaeologie, ctablestack, dynamicnumber, exercises, fibeamer, h2020proposal, imfellenglish, lstbayes, tempora, xellipsis. Enjoy.

Q: The title for a governor in ancient Persia? A: It s satrap!

Harfbuzz (more correctly harfbuzz-ng) is a Text Layout/shaping engine. Mostly supporting rendering of Text including complex scripts. A quote taken from Wikipedia which describes harfbuzz

HarfBuzz (in Persian: ) is a layout/shaping engine for OpenType fonts. Its purpose is to standardize text layout in FOSS; its code originally started as part of the FreeType project, was then developed separately in Qt and Pango, and finally merged back into a common repository. Both Qt and Pango currently use HarfBuzz; other standalone users include Firefox and Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Coming directly to the point. You can get Harfbuzz from its Git repository hosted on Freedesktop. It requires following library and binary compilation

    1. ragel: Finite state machine code compiler
    2. libglib2.0-dev: Glib Development files
    3. libcairo2-dev : Cairo 2D graphics library development files
    4. libicu-dev: Development components for International components for Unicode
    5. libgraphite2-dev: Development files for libgraphite2
    6. libfreetype6-dev: Freetype 2 library development files

Once you install all the above package. Follow following commands to build the harfbuzz. You can skip make install if you don't like it to be installed on system.I actually wanted to work on the Debian package of Harfbuzz but since there is some one already working on it. Probably I will wait till the guy completes package. I will write on testing the text rendering of your language using harfbuzz in my next post. Till then Cya.

Not much progress ATM (most translations are complete and D-I has been frozen to prepare its release anyway).

• Arabic completes level 3
• Progress for Uyghur in level 2

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 55 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bn bs ca cs cy da de el eo es et eu fa fi fr gl gu he hi id it ja kk km kn ko lo lv mr nb nl pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru si sk sl sr sv ta te th tr ug uk vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 1 language 98%: ga
• 2 languages 97%: hu lt
• 4 languages 95%: dz hr is mk
• 1 language 92%: ml
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 39 languages 100%: ast be bg ca cs cy da de eo es eu fa fr gl gu he id is it ja kk km lt lv mr nb nl pl pt ru si sk sl sv th tr uk zh_CN zh_TW
• 3 languages 99%: fi hr vi
• 4 languages 98%: dz pt_BR ro ug
• 1 languages 97%: ta
• 2 languages 94%: ar el
• 1 language 92%: sr
• 5 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 42 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bs ca cs cy da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk km lt lv nb nl pl pt ru sk sl sr sv th tr vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 4 languages 98%: hu pt_BR ug uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 32 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Persian, French, Galician, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Latvian, Norwegian Bokm l, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese