Something I ve found myself doing as the pandemic rolls on is picking out and (re-)reading through sections of the GNU Emacs manual and the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual. This has got me (too) interested in some of the recent history of Emacs development, and I did some digging into archives of emacs-devel from 2008 (15M mbox) regarding the change to turn Transient Mark mode on by default and set mark-even-if-inactive to true by default in Emacs 23.1. It s not always clear which objections to turning on Transient Mark mode by default take into account the mark-even-if-inactive change. I think that turning on Transient Mark mode along with mark-even-if-inactive is a good default. The question that remains is whether the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode are significant enough that experienced Emacs users should consider altering Emacs default behaviour to mitigate them. Here s one popular blog arguing for some mitigations. How might Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? The suggestion is that it makes using the mark for navigation rather than for acting on regions less convenient:

1. setting a mark just so you can jump back to it (i) is a distinct operation you have to think of separately; and (ii) requires two keypresses, C-SPC C-SPC, rather than just one keypress
2. using exchange-point-and-mark activates the region, so to use it for navigation you need to use either C-u C-x C-x or C-x C-x C-g, neither of which are convenient to type, or else it will be difficult to set regions at the place you ve just jumped to because you ll already have one active.

There are two other disadvantages that people bring up which I am disregarding. The first is that it makes it harder for new users to learn useful ways in which to use the mark when it s deactivated. This happened to me, but it can be mitigated without making any behavioural changes to Emacs. The second is that the visual highlighting of the region can be distracting. So far as I can tell, this is only a problem with exchange-point-and-mark, and it s subsumed by the problem of that command actually activating the region. The rest of the time Emacs automatic deactivation of the region seems sufficient. How might disabling Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? When Transient Mark mode is on, many commands will do something usefully different when the mark is active. The number of commands in Emacs which work this way is only going to increase now that Transient Mark mode is the default. If you disable Transient Mark mode, then to use those features you need to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode. This can be fiddly and/or require a lot of keypresses, depending on exactly where you want to put the region. Without being able to see the region, it might be harder to know where it is. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for wanting Transient Mark mode to be the default, to avoid confusing new users. I don t think this is likely to affect experienced Emacs users often, however, and on occasions when more precision is really needed, C-u C-x C-x will make the region visible. So I m not counting this as a disadvantage. How might we mitigate these two sets of disadvantages? Here are the two middle grounds I m considering. Mitigation #1: Transient Mark mode, but hack C-x C-x behaviour We avoid turning Transient Mark mode off, but mitigate the second of the two disadvantages given above. I can t figure out why it was thought to be a good idea to make C-x C-x reactivate the mark and require C-u C-x C-x to use the action of exchanging point and mark as a means of navigation. There needs to a binding to reactivate the mark, but in roughly ten years of having Transient Mark mode turned on, I ve found that the need to reactivate the mark doesn t come up often, so the shorter and longer bindings seem the wrong way around. Not sure what I m missing here. Mitigation #2: disable Transient Mark mode, but enable it temporarily more often Here we remove both of the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above, and mitigate the main disadvantage of not activating Transient Mark mode by making it more convenient to activate it temporarily. For example, this enables using C-M-SPC C-M-SPC M-( to wrap the following two function arguments in parentheses. And you can hit M-h a few times to mark some blocks of text or code, then operate on them with commands like M-% and C-/ which behave differently when the region is active.¹ Comparing these mitigations Both of these mitigations handle the second of the two disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above. What remains, then, is

1. under the effects of mitigation #1, how much of a barrier to using marks for navigational purposes is it to have to press C-SPC C-SPC instead of having a single binding, C-SPC, for all manual mark setting²
2. under the effects of mitigation #2, how much of a barrier to taking advantage of commands which act differently when the region is active is it to have to temporarily enable Transient Mark mode with C-SPC C-SPC, M-= or one of the mark-* commands?

These are unknowns.³ So I m going to have to experiment, I think, to determine which mitigation to use, if either. In particular, I don t know whether it s really significant that setting a mark for navigational purposes and for region marking purposes are distinct operations under mitigation #1. My plan is to start with mitigation #2 because that has the additional advantage of allowing me to confirm or disconfirm my belief that not being able to see where the region is will only rarely get in my way.

I realised this week that for some years I have been applying Inbox Zero indiscriminately to all e-mail that I receive, but this does not make sense, and has some downsides. My version of Inbox Zero works very well when applied to mail addressed directly to me, and for mail to certain mailing lists, where each post to the list might as well be addressed directly to me, in addition to the list. However, I also receive by e-mail the following things to which I now believe Inbox Zero should not be applied:

• discussion lists like debian-devel, notmuch@notmuchmail.org, etc.
• mail to aliases like ftpmaster@debian.org (except when that mail is in reply to mail written by me from that address)
• automated notifications received via Debian team mailing lists, where I m not solely responsible for the Debian package in question, such as notifications received via the Debian Perl Group s mailing list
• RSS feed articles supplied by my (years old but still going strong) rss2email cronjob.

I believe that applying Inbox Zero to these sorts of things is not only incorrect but is actually harming my engagement with these mediums. Let us distinguish

1. processing e-mail this means applying the Inbox Zero decision procedure to incoming messages, at set times during the day (I do it once, around 4pm)
2. browsing and sometimes catching up RSS articles and list mail looking through unread items, replying if I think I have something useful to say, leaving things for later, and occasionally marking all as read if I ve not had time for that group of lists lately.

These should be kept apart. The easy case to see is why you shouldn t apply the browsing/catching up approach to e-mail which should rather be processed that s just the original wisdom of Inbox Zero. And clearly you don t want ever to have to resort to just marking all mail addressed directly to you as read. What goes wrong, then, if you misapply the processing mentality to e-mail which should, rather, be browsed/caught up? Well, the core of Inbox Zero is deciding whether to read and reply to something right now, add it to your todo list to handle later, or decide the mail cannot be dealt with quickly but is not important enough to go on that todo list. If you apply this to RSS articles and discussion list mail, then the third option is basically ruled out, because almost nothing on mailing lists or on blogs that I follow is important enough to go on my list of Real Tasks. But then you re faced with either reading the article/post right now, or discarding it. There is no option to leave the item marked as unread and then maybe come back to it, or postpone discarding it until you ve decided to catch up the group. Applying Inbox Zero to discussion lists and RSS feeds creates a false sense of urgency. I ve realised that my implicit response to this has been reluctance to subscribe to new mailing lists and feeds, because I don t have things set up to allow me to read them in a leisurely way. But then I m missing out on discussions and writing that might be relevant and beneficial to me if I could only approach them when I m in a frame of mind other than time to get my inbox down to zero . This also means that subscribing to new mailing lists just in order to post something has an unreasonably high cost: introducing all mail on those lists into my Inbox Zero processing window. So, what s needed is to make the virtual folder views which I use to read new mail correspond cleanly to the distinction between mail to be processed and mail to be browsed. I.e. for each virtual folder it should be clear whether mail there is to be processed or to be browsed. Then I can continue to use my processing views once per day, and access the browsing views at leisure. (Indeed, I ve created a keybinding to cycle through the new browsing views, and another to catch them up.) As I mentioned, some list mail ought to be processed. For example, I want to process rather than browse the debian-policy mailing list, as one of the Policy Editors. With notmuch, it s easy to include this mail in the relevant processing views (I ve long had one processing view for weekdays and another for weekends). Additionally, I ve used a bit of Emacs Lisp to create a dynamic uncategorised unread view which catches mail to be browsed which (i) doesn t show up in one of the other virtual folders for mail to be browsed, and (ii) doesn t show up in one of the processing views. So now subscribing to a mailing list is cheap: mail will end up in the uncategorised view, and I can decide whether to leave it there for a low traffic list; create a new virtual folder for the list (trivial as it s all just more Emacs Lisp, no actual moving of files required); or unsubscribe. I ve been experiencing nostalgia for my time in secondary school when my friends and I had all sorts of interesting stuff flowing into our mailstores, from RSS feeds to each other s blogs where we d post both our own content and links elsewhere, RSS feeds to stranger s blogs, and e-mails sent to each other with links. We didn t have to worry about processing anything back then, as our e-mail accounts were used for intellectual enrichment but not the completion of tasks. I think I can recapture something of that with my new virtual folders for browsing.

Before uploading stuff to Debian, I build in a clean chroot, and then run piuparts, autopkgtest and lintian. For some of my packages this can take around an hour on my laptop, which is fairly old. Normally I don t mind waiting, but sometimes I want to put my laptop away, and then it would be good for things to be faster. It occurred to me that I could make use of my builds.sr.ht account to run these tests on more powerful hardware. This build manifest seems to work:

# BEGIN CONFIGURABLE
sources:
  - https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/libgit-annex-perl.git
environment:
  source: libgit-annex-perl
  quilt:  auto
# END CONFIGURABLE
image: debian/unstable
packages:
  - autopkgtest
  - devscripts
  - dgit
  - lintian
  - piuparts
  - sbuild
tasks:
  - setup:  
      cd $source
      source_version=$(dpkg-parsechangelog -SVersion)
      echo "source_version=$source_version" >>~/.buildenv
      git deborig   origtargz
      sudo sbuild-createchroot --command-prefix=eatmydata --include=eatmydata unstable /srv/chroot/unstable-amd64-sbuild
      sudo sbuild-adduser $USER
  - build:  
      cd $source
      dgit --quilt=$quilt sbuild -d unstable --no-run-lintian
  - lintian:  
      lintian $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes
  - piuparts:  
      sudo piuparts --no-eatmydata --schroot unstable-amd64-sbuild $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes
  - autopkgtest:  
      autopkgtest $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes -- schroot unstable-amd64-sbuild

And here s my script.

sbuild is a tool used by those maintaining packages in Debian, and derived distributions such as Ubuntu. When used correctly, it can catch a lot of categories of bugs before packages are uploaded. It does this by building the package in a clean environment, and then running the package through the Lintian, piuparts, adequate and autopkgtest tools. However, configuring sbuild so that it makes use of all of these tools is cumbersome. In response to this complexity, I wrote a module for the Propellor configuration management system to prepare a system such that a user can just go ahead and run the sbuild(1) command. This module is useful on one s development laptop if you need to reinstall your OS, you don t have to look up the instructions for setting up sbuild again. But it s also useful on throwaway build boxes. I can instruct propellor to provision a new virtual machine to build packages with sbuild, and all the different tools mentioned above will be connected together for me. I just uploaded Propellor version 5.1.0 to Debian unstable. The version overhauls the API and internals of the Sbuild module to take better advantage of Propellor s design. I won t get into those details in this post. What I d like to do is demonstrate how you can set up sbuild on your own machines, using Propellor. Getting started with Propellor apt-get install propellor, and then propellor --init. You ll be offered two setups, options A and B. I suggest starting with option B. If you never use Propellor for anything other than provisioning sbuild, you can stick with option B. If this tutorial makes you want to check out more features of Propellor, you might consider switching to option A and importing your old configuration. Open ~/.propellor/config.hs. You will see something like this: You ll want to customise this so that it reflects your computer. My laptop is called iris, so I might replace the above with this: The list of lines beginning with & are the properties of the host iris. Here, I ve removed all properties except the osDebian property, which informs propellor that iris runs Debian testing and has the amd64 architecture. The effect of this is that Propellor will not try to change anything about iris. In this tutorial, we are not going to let Propellor configure anything about iris other than setting up sbuild. (The osDebian property is a pure info property, which means that it tells Propellor information about the host to which other properties might refer, but it doesn t itself change anything about iris.) Telling Propellor to configure sbuild First, add to the import lines at the top of config.hs the lines: to enable use of the Sbuild module. Here is the full config for iris, which I ll go through line-by-line:

• Apt.useLocalCacher set up apt-cacher-ng and points apt on iris at the cacher. This is the most efficient way to share a cache of packages between apt on iris, and apt within the sbuild chroot.
• sidSchrootBuilt builds the sbuild schroot. Unfortunately, we have to use a where clause because of Haskell s rules about operator precedence. But it s just a simple substitution: imagine that & Sbuild.built ... replaces & sidSchrootBuilt.
  • osDebian specifies that this is a Debian unstable chroot. You can easily change this, or add another chroot, for building stable backports, etc.
  • Sbuild.UseCcache enables ccache for builds in this chroot. You can replace this with Sbuild.NoCcache when building a package which is broken by ccache, which happens from time-to-time.
  • Sbuild.update updates the chroot once per day.
  • Sbuild.useHostProxy iris causes Propellor to propagate iris s apt proxy into the chroot, so that apt in the chroot will also use iris s apt cacher.
• Sbuild.usableBy adds spwhitton to the right group, so that he is allowed to invoke sbuild(1).
• Schroot.overlaysInTmpfs configures sbuild to install build dependencies and build packages in tmpfs. You can omit this property on machines with low amounts of memory.
• Cron.runPropellor sets up a cron job to re-run propellor once per hour. This is needed to ensure that things like Sbuild.update actually happen. It will also normalise sbuild configuration files, replace chroots that you accidently deleted, etc.

Running Propellor to configure your laptop propellor iris.silentflame.com. In this configuration, you don t need to worry about whether the hostname iris.silentflame.com actually resolves to your laptop. However, it must be possible to ssh root@localhost. This should be enough that spwhitton can:

$ sbuild -A --run-lintian --run-autopkgtest --run-piuparts foo.dsc

Further configuration It is easy to add new schroots; for example, for building backports: You can also add additional properties to configure your chroot. Perhaps on your LAN you need sbuild to install packages via https, and you already have an apt cacher available. You can replace the apt-cacher-ng configuration like this: Thanks Thanks to Propellor s author, Joey Hess, for help navigating Propellor s type system while performing the overhaul included in version 5.1.0. Also for a conversation at DebConf17 which enabled this work by clearing some misconceptions of mine.

Here s are some of the bugs against the Debian Policy Manual. In particular, there really are quite a few patches needing seconds from DDs. Consensus has been reached and help is needed to write a patch: #759316 Document the use of /etc/default for cron jobs #761219 document versioned Provides #767839 Linking documentation of arch:any package to arch:all #770440 policy should mention systemd timers #773557 Avoid unsafe RPATH/RUNPATH #780725 PATH used for building is not specified #793499 The Installed-Size algorithm is out-of-date #810381 Update wording of 5.6.26 VCS-* fields to recommend encryption #823256 Update maintscript arguments with dpkg >= 1.18.5 #833401 virtual packages: dbus-session-bus, dbus-default-session-bus #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #838777 Policy 11.8.4 for x-window-manager needs update for freedesktop menus #845715 Please document that packages are not allowed to write outside thei #853779 Clarify requirements about update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d usage in mai #874019 Note that the -e argument to x-terminal-emulator works like #874206 allow a trailing comma in package relationship fields Wording proposed, awaiting review from anyone and/or seconds by DDs: #688251 Built-Using description too aggressive #737796 copyright-format: support Files: paragraph with both abbreviated na #756835 Extension of the syntax of the Packages-List field. #786470 [copyright-format] Add an optional License-Grant field #810381 Update wording of 5.6.26 VCS-* fields to recommend encryption #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #845255 Include best practices for packaging database applications #846970 Proposal for a Build-Indep-Architecture: control file field #850729 Documenting special version number suffixes #864615 please update version of posix standard for scripts (section 10.4) #874090 Clarify wording of some passages #874095 copyright-format: Use the synopsis term established in the de Merged for the next release: #683495 perl scripts: #!/usr/bin/perl MUST or SHOULD? #877674 [debian-policy] update links to the pdf and other formats of the do #878523 [PATCH] Spelling fixes

I just released Debian Policy version 4.1.1.0. There are only two normative changes, and neither is very important. The main thing is that this upload fixes a lot of packaging bugs that were found since we converted to build with Sphinx. There are still some issues remaining; I hope to submit some patches to the www-team s scripts to fix those.

Here s a summary of the bugs against the Debian Policy Manual. Please consider getting involved, whether or not you re an existing contributor. Consensus has been reached and help is needed to write a patch #172436 BROWSER and sensible-browser standardization #273093 document interactions of multiple clashing package diversions #299007 Transitioning perms of /usr/local #314808 Web applications should use /usr/share/package, not /usr/share/doc/ #425523 Describe error unwind when unpacking a package fails #452393 Clarify difference between required and important priorities #476810 Please clarify 12.5, Copyright information #484673 file permissions for files potentially including credential informa #491318 init scripts should support start/stop/restart/force-reload - why #556015 Clarify requirements for linked doc directories #568313 Suggestion: forbid the use of dpkg-statoverride when uid and gid ar #578597 Recommend usage of dpkg-buildflags to initialize CFLAGS and al. #582109 document triggers where appropriate #587991 perl-policy: /etc/perl missing from Module Path #592610 Clarify when Conflicts + Replaces et al are appropriate #613046 please update example in 4.9.1 (debian/rules and DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS) #614807 Please document autobuilder-imposed build-dependency alternative re #628515 recommending verbose build logs #664257 document Architecture name definitions #682347 mark editor virtual package name as obsolete #685506 copyright-format: new Files-Excluded field #685746 debian-policy Consider clarifying the use of recommends #688251 Built-Using description too aggressive #749826 [multiarch] please document the use of Multi-Arch field in debian/c #757760 please document build profiles #759316 Document the use of /etc/default for cron jobs #761219 document versioned Provides #767839 Linking documentation of arch:any package to arch:all #770440 policy should mention systemd timers #773557 Avoid unsafe RPATH/RUNPATH #780725 PATH used for building is not specified #793499 The Installed-Size algorithm is out-of-date #810381 Update wording of 5.6.26 VCS-* fields to recommend encryption #823256 Update maintscript arguments with dpkg >= 1.18.5 #833401 virtual packages: dbus-session-bus, dbus-default-session-bus #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #838777 Policy 11.8.4 for x-window-manager needs update for freedesktop menus #845715 Please document that packages are not allowed to write outside thei #853779 Clarify requirements about update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d usage in mai #874019 Note that the -e argument to x-terminal-emulator works like #874206 allow a trailing comma in package relationship fields Wording proposed, awaiting review from anyone and/or seconds by DDs #515856 remove get-orig-source #542288 Versions for native packages, NMU s, and binary only uploads #582109 document triggers where appropriate #610083 Remove requirement to document upstream source location in debian/c #645696 [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: #649530 [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: #662998 stripping static libraries #682347 mark editor virtual package name as obsolete #683222 say explicitly that debian/changelog is required in source packages #688251 Built-Using description too aggressive #737796 copyright-format: support Files: paragraph with both abbreviated na #756835 Extension of the syntax of the Packages-List field. #786470 [copyright-format] Add an optional License-Grant field #810381 Update wording of 5.6.26 VCS-* fields to recommend encryption #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #845255 Include best practices for packaging database applications #850729 Documenting special version number suffixes #874090 Clarify wording of some passages #874095 copyright-format: Use the synopsis term established in the de Merged for the next release #661928 recipe for determining shlib package name #679751 please clarify package account and home directory location in policy #683222 say explicitly that debian/changelog is required in source packages #870915 [5.6.30] Testsuite: There are much more defined values #872893 Chapters, sections, appendices and numbering #872895 Include multi-page HTML in package #872896 An html.tar.gz has leaked into the .deb? #872900 Very generic info file name #872950 Too much indirection in info file menus #873819 upgrading-checklist.txt: typo pgpsignurlmangle in section 4.11 of V #874411 missing line breaks in summary of ways maintainers scripts are call

This semester I am taking JPN 530, Haruki Murakami and the Literature of Modern Japan . My department are letting me count it for the Philosophy Ph.D., and in fact my supervisor is joining me for the class. I have no idea what the actual class sessions will be like first one this afternoon and I m anxious about writing a literature term paper. But I already know that my weekends this semester are going to be great because I ll be reading Murakami s novels. What s particularly wonderful about this, and what I wanted to write about, is how nourishing I find reading literary fiction to be. For example, this weekend I read

This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world. Potentiality knocks at the door of my heart.

and I was fed for the day. All my perceived needs dropped away; that s all it takes. This stands in stark contrast to reading philosophy, which is almost always draining rather than nourishing even philosophy I really want to read. Especially having to read philosophy at the weekend. (quotation is from On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl on a Beautiful April Morning)

At the Debian Policy BoF at DebConf17, Solveig suggested that we could post summaries of recent activity in policy bugs to Planet Debian, as a kind of call for participation. Russ Allbery had written a script to generate such a summary some time ago, but it couldn t handle the usertags the policy team uses to progress bugs through the policy changes process. Today I enhanced the script to handle usertags and I m pleased to be able to post a summary of our bugs. Consensus has been reached and help is needed to write a patch #172436 BROWSER and sensible-browser standardization #273093 document interactions of multiple clashing package diversions #299007 Transitioning perms of /usr/local #314808 Web applications should use /usr/share/package, not /usr/share/doc/ #425523 Describe error unwind when unpacking a package fails #452393 Clarify difference between required and important priorities #476810 Please clarify 12.5, Copyright information #484673 file permissions for files potentially including credential informa #491318 init scripts should support start/stop/restart/force-reload - why #556015 Clarify requirements for linked doc directories #568313 Suggestion: forbid the use of dpkg-statoverride when uid and gid ar #578597 Recommend usage of dpkg-buildflags to initialize CFLAGS and al. #582109 document triggers where appropriate #587279 Clarify restrictions on main to non-free dependencies #587991 perl-policy: /etc/perl missing from Module Path #592610 Clarify when Conflicts + Replaces et al are appropriate #613046 please update example in 4.9.1 (debian/rules and DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS) #614807 Please document autobuilder-imposed build-dependency alternative re #616462 clarify wording of parenthetical in section 2.2.1 #628515 recommending verbose build logs #661928 recipe for determining shlib package name #664257 document Architecture name definitions #682347 mark editor virtual package name as obsolete #683222 say explicitly that debian/changelog is required in source packages #685506 copyright-format: new Files-Excluded field #685746 debian-policy Consider clarifying the use of recommends #688251 Built-Using description too aggressive #757760 please document build profiles #759316 Document the use of /etc/default for cron jobs #761219 document versioned Provides #767839 Linking documentation of arch:any package to arch:all #770440 policy should mention systemd timers #773557 Avoid unsafe RPATH/RUNPATH #780725 PATH used for building is not specified #793499 The Installed-Size algorithm is out-of-date #810381 Update wording of 5.6.26 VCS-* fields to recommend encryption #823256 Update maintscript arguments with dpkg >= 1.18.5 #833401 virtual packages: dbus-session-bus, dbus-default-session-bus #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #838777 Policy 11.8.4 for x-window-manager needs update for freedesktop menus #845715 Please document that packages are not allowed to write outside thei #853779 Clarify requirements about update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d usage in mai Wording proposed, awaiting review from anyone and/or seconds by DDs #542288 Versions for native packages, NMU s, and binary only uploads #582109 document triggers where appropriate #630174 forbid installation into /lib64 #645696 [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: #648271 11.8.3 Packages providing a terminal emulator says xterm passes - #649530 [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: #662998 stripping static libraries #732445 debian-policy should encourage verification of upstream cryptograph #737796 copyright-format: support Files: paragraph with both abbreviated na #756835 Extension of the syntax of the Packages-List field. #786470 [copyright-format] Add an optional License-Grant field #835451 Building as root should be discouraged #844431 Packages should be reproducible #845255 Include best practices for packaging database applications #850729 Documenting special version number suffixes Merged for the next release #587279 Clarify restrictions on main to non-free dependencies #616462 clarify wording of parenthetical in section 2.2.1 #732445 debian-policy should encourage verification of upstream cryptograph #844431 Packages should be reproducible

According to Daniel Pocock s talk at DebConf17 s Open Day, hearing a ping from your messaging or e-mail app or seeing a visual notification of a new unread message has an equivalent effect on your ability to concentrate as

• a 10 point drop in your IQ; or
• drinking a glass of wine.

This effect is probably at least somewhat mitigated by reading the message, but that is a context switch, and we all know what those do to your concentration. So if you want to get anything done, be sure to turn off notifications.

In addition to my personal reflections on DebCamp/DebConf17, here is a brief summary of the activities that I had a hand in co-ordinating. I won t discuss here many other small items of work and valuable conversations that I had during the two weeks; hopefully the fruits of these will show themselves in my uploads to the archive over the next year. Debian Policy sprint & BoF

• released version 4.0.1.0 of the Policy Manual
• figured out documenting reproducibility in policy. Formulating the wording turned out to be easier than I had expected
• approx. ten years after they were first published, incorporated marga s maintscript flowcharts into policy proper
• converted policy from docbook to rST built with the Sphinx toolchain. Many, many thanks to Hideki Yamane and David Bremner for helping Russ and I get this merged to our master branch
• triage of every single bug against policy, and mass closure of inactive bugs, bringing the total down from more than 200 to around 125
• conversations with Technical Committee members about how the two teams can help each other s work (mainly us helping them to help us!)
• conversations about how we handle disagreement and plans to streamline our overly complex BTS usertags (watch this space)
• very useful input from policy consumers about how the upgrading checklist is formatted, and how we can recruit more people to get patches written

Debian Emacs Team meeting/sprint

• plans to finally drop our emacsXY binary packages, and just have a single version of Emacs in the archive, so that we no longer have to deal with bugs due to someone still having emacs21 installed (David s idea; Rob s implementation; Sean s mostly-helpful comments)
• other plans to simplify and otherwise improve the Debian Emacsen policy
• finally finished off the work needed to RM emacs24 nine months later including a lot of NMUs
• mentoring a junior team member

Unfortunately we didn t make any significant progress towards converting all addons to use dh_elpa, as the work is not that much fun. Might be worth a more focused sprint next year. Report on team website Git for Debian packaging BoF & follow-up conversations The BoF was far more about dgit than I had wanted; however, I think that this was mostly because people had questions about dgit, rather than any unintended lecturing by me. I believe that several people came away from DebConf thinking that starting to use dgit would improve Debian for themselves and for users of their packages.

This year s group photo (by Aigars Mahinovs). I really like the tagline

On Sunday night I got back from Montr al, where I attended both DebCamp17 and DebConf17. It was a wonderful two weeks. All I really did was work on Debian for roughly eight hours per day, interspersed with getting to know both people I ve been working with since I first began contributing to Debian in late 2015, and people I didn t yet know. But this was all I really needed to be doing. There was no need to engage in distracting myself. I enjoyed the first week more. There were sufficiently few people present that you could know at least all of their faces, and interesting-sounding talks didn t interrupt making progress on one s own work or unblocking other people s work. In the second week it was great to meet people who were only present for the second week, but it felt more like regular Debian, in that I was often waiting on other people or they were waiting on me. While I spent one morning actually writing fresh code, and I did a fair amount of pure packaging work, the majority of my time was poured into (i) Debian Policy; (ii) discussions within the Emacs team; and (iii) discussions about dgit. This was as I expected. During DebConf, it s not that useful to seclude oneself and sufficiently reacquaint oneself with a codebase that one can start producing patches, because that can be done anywhere in the world, without everyone else around. It s far more useful to bring different people together to get projects unblocked. I did some of that for my own work, and also tried to help other people s, including those who weren t able to attend the conference. In my ordinary life, taking a step back from the methods by which I protect my PGP keys and other personal data, I can appear to myself as a paranoid extremist, or some kind of data hoarder. It was comforting to find at DebConf plenty of people who go way further than me: multiple user accounts on their laptop, with separate X servers, for tasks of different security levels; PGP keys on smartcards; refusal to sign my PGP key based on government-issued ID alone; use of Qubes OS. One thing that did surprise me was to find myself in a minority for using the GNOME desktop; I had previously assumed that most people deep in Debian development didn t bother with tiling window managers. Turns out they are enthusiastic to talk about the trade-offs between window managers while riding the subway train back to our accommodation at midnight who knew such people existed? I was pleased to find them. One evening, I received a tag-teamed live tutorial in using i3 s core keybindings, and the next morning GNOME seemed deeply inelegant. The insinuation began, but I was immediately embroiled in inner struggle over the fact that i3 is a very popular tiling window manager, so it wouldn t be very cool if I were to start using it. This difficulty was compounded when I learned that the Haskell team lead still uses xmonad. The struggle continues. I hope that I ve been influenced by the highly non-judgemental and tolerant attitudes of the attendees of the conference. While most people at the conference were pretty ordinary aside from wanting to talk about the details of Debian packaging and processes! there were several people who rather visibly rejected social norms about how to present themselves. Around these people there was nothing of the usual tension. Further, in contrast with my environment as a graduate student, everyone was extremely relaxed about how everyone was spending their time. People drinking beer in the evenings were sitting at tables where other people were continuing to silently work on Debian. It is nice to have my experience in Montr al as a reference to check my own judgemental tendencies. I came away with a lot more than a new MUA: a certainty that I want to try to get to next year s conference; friends; a real life community behind what was hitherto mostly a hobby; a long list of tasks and the belief that I can accomplish them; a list of PGP fingerprints to sign; a new perspective on the arguments that occur on Debian mailing lists; an awareness of the risk of unconsciously manipulating other community members into getting work done. With regard to the MUA, I should say that I did not waste a lot of DebConf time messing with its configuration. I had actually worked out a notmuch configuration some months ago, but couldn t use it because I couldn t figure out how to incorporate my old mail archives into its index. Fortunately notmuch s maintainer is also on the Emacs team he was able to confirm that the crazy solution I d come up with was not likely to break notmuch s operating assumptions, and so I was able to spend about half an hour copying and pasting the configuration and scripts I d previously developed into my homedir, and then start using notmuch for the remainder of the conference. The main reason for wanting to use notmuch was to handle Debian mailing list volume more effectively than I m able to with mutt, so I was very happy to have the opportunity to pester David with newbie questions. Many, many thanks to all the volunteers whose efforts made DebCamp17 and DebConf17 possible.

Here s what I m planning to work on please get in touch if you want to get involved with any of these items. In rough order of priority/likelihood of completion:

• Debian Policy sprint
• conversations about using git for Debian packaging, especially with regard to dgit
  • writing up or following up on feature requests
• Emacs team sprint
  • talking to maintainers about transitioning their packages to use dh-elpa
• submitting and revising patch series to dgit
• writing a test suite for git-remote-gcrypt

Hey Sega, Why the Hell is There No Skies of Arcadia Sequel? USgamer

There was still plenty of world left to be explored, if it came to that

I don t understand this remark there really wasn t much left. They d have to make changes in order to squash more in, as I ve found when trying to convert the world of Arcadia to D&D.

Since arriving back in the UK I ve found myself appreciating Sheffield, and indeed British life more generally, far more than I expected, and far more than I have on any previous return, during the time I ve been working and now studying abroad. On Sunday, John Prescott came to give a speech to those of us campaigning for Labour, before we set to work. A heckler came over and shouted at Prescott: how could he vote for Labour with Corbyn in charge? Prescott did not break his stride, shouting something in response to the man and then returning to his speech, and someone went to the man and said, he came here to speak to us, please don t interrupt, come over here and let s talk about Corbyn. And the man did. Real democracy on a street corner, where people are able to fully express themselves without watching their words, or being told they re being uncivil, and without any hint of police or security (note, for those outside the UK reading this post, that John Prescott was the Deputy Prime Minister for 8 years he arrived in a squat people carrier). I think that living in the US had made me believe that this kind of engagement with politics was over. Since I value these battles for ideas so highly, it makes me want to leave Arizona sooner rather than later. In last night s Corbyn vs. May , in which each of the two answered audience questions and were then interviewed by the aggressive Jeremy Paxman May has refused to engage in a head-to-head debate we saw Corbyn at his best. I don t think that there was a clear loser, but there was an opportunity to see that Corbyn is quite capable of oratory. For me, there were two highlights. A small businessman asked Corbyn how he could vote for someone who was raising both corporation tax and the minimum wage. Without showing a grain of disrespect, Corbyn challenged him to reconsider his position on the grounds that we are all better off if everyone is better off. The second highlight was Corbyn s firm response to Paxman going on and on about why abolishing the monarchy was not in the manifesto, while Corbyn is a known republican: we re not going to abolish the monarchy because I m fighting this election for social justice (paraphrased). This is the slightly old-fashioned sense of social justice : truly universal entitlement to health and education, because that is the mark of a civilised nation. What a privilege it is to be able to both campaign and vote for such a man. I ve been thinking about the responses we should make to neo-liberals who say that pouring money into health and education for those who can already afford it results in inefficiency and waste, rendering everyone worse off. There are many such people in the Arizona philosophy department. I do not believe that this economic argument has yet been won by the neo-liberals. A different response, though, is to think about the opportunities for the development of virtue that are lost when we introduce markets. I think that fear is one of the greatest barriers to the development of the virtues. It closes us down. Fundamentally, social justice is about the removal of fear, so that people are able to flourish. The neo-liberals would rather encourage and exploit fear, in all stratas of society (they want themselves to be afraid of being a bit less rich, and respond accordingly).

Most people I know can handle a single coffee per day, sometimes even forgetting to drink it. I never could understand how they did it. Talking about this with a therapist I realised that the problem isn t necessary the caffeine, it s my low tolerance of less than razor sharp focus. Most people accept they have slumps in their focus and just work through them. binarybear on reddit

Recently I heard a different reason suggested as to why there are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs in philosophy. University administrators are taking control of the tenure review process; previously departments made decisions and the administrators rubber-stamped them. The result of this is that it is easier to get tenure. This is because university administrators grant tenure based on quantitively-measurable achievements, rather than a qualitative assessment of the candidate qua philosopher. If a department thought that someone shouldn t get tenure, the administration might turn around and say that they are going to grant it because the candidate has fulfilled such-and-such requirements. Since it is easier to get tenure, hiring someone at the assistant professor level is much riskier for a philosophy department: they have to assume the candidate will get tenure. So the pre-tenure phase is no longer a probationary period. That is being pushed onto post-docs and graduate students. This results in the intellectual maturity of published work going down. There are various assumptions in the above that could be questioned, but what s interesting is that it takes a lot of the blame for the current situation off the shoulders of faculty members (there have been accusations that they are not doing enough). If tenure-track hires are a bigger risk for the quality of the academic philosophers who end up with permanent jobs, it is good that they are averse to that risk.

I ve been playing in a 5e campaign for around two months now. In the past ten days or so I ve been reading various source books and Internet threads regarding the design of 5th edition. I d like to draw some comparisons and contrasts between 5th edition, and the 3rd edition family of games (DnD 3.5e and Paizo s Pathfinder, which may be thought of as 3.75e). The first thing I d like to discuss is that wizards and clerics are no longer Vancian spellcasters. In rules terms, this is the idea that individual spells are pieces of ammunition. Spellcasters have a list of individual spells stored in their heads, and as they cast spells from that list, they cross off each item. Barring special rules about spontaneously converting prepared spells to healing spells, for clerics, the only way to add items back to the list is to take a night s rest. Contrast this with spending points from a pool of energy in order to use an ability to cast a fireball. Then the limiting factor on using spells is having enough points in your mana pool, not having further castings of the spell waiting in memory. One of the design goals of 5th edition was to reduce the dominance of spellcasters at higher levels of play. The article to which I linked in the previous paragraph argues that this rebalancing requires the removal of Vancian magic. The idea, to the extent that I ve understood it, is that Vancian magic is not an effective restriction on spellcaster power levels, so it is to be replaced with other restrictions adding new restrictions while retaining the restrictions inherent in Vancian magic would leave spellcasters crippled. A further reason for removing Vancian magic was to defeat the so-called five minute adventuring day . The compat ability of a party that contains higher level Vancian spellcasters drops significantly once they ve fired off their most powerful combat spells. So adventuring groups would find themselves getting into a fight, and then immediately retreating to fully rest up in order to get their spells back. This removes interesting strategic and roleplaying possibilities involving the careful allocation of resources, and continuing to fight as hit points run low. There are some other related changes. Spell components are no longer used up when casting a spell. So you can use one piece of bat guano for every fireball your character ever casts, instead of each casting requiring a new piece. Correspondingly, you can use a spell focus, such as a cool wand, instead of a pouch full of material components since the pouch never runs out, there s no mechanical change if a wizard uses an arcane focus instead. 0th level spells may now be cast at will (although Pathfinder had this too). And there are decent 0th level attack spells, so a spellcaster need not carry a crossbow or shortbow in order to have something to do on rounds when it would not be optimal to fire off one of their precious spells. I am very much in favour of these design goals. The five minute adventuring day gets old fast, and I want it to be possible for the party to rely on the cool abilities of non-spellcasters to deal with the challenges they face. However, I am concerned about the flavour changes that result from the removal of Vancian magic. These affect wizards and clerics differently, so I ll take each case in turn. Firstly, consider wizards. In third edition, a wizard had to prepare and cast Read Magic (the only spell they could prepare without a spellbook), and then set about working through their spellbook. This involved casting the spells they wanted to prepare, up until the last few triggering words or gestures that would cause the effect of the spell to manifest. They would commit these final parts of the spell to memory. When it came to casting the spell, the wizard would say the final few words and make the required gestures, and bring out relevant material components from their component pouch. The completed spell would be ripped out of their mind, to manifest its effect in the world. We see that the casting of a spell is a highly mentally-draining activity it rips the spell out of the caster s memory! not to be undertaken lightly. Thus it is natural that a wizard would learn to use a crossbow for basic damage-dealing. Magic is not something that comes very naturally to the wizard, to be deployed in combat as readily as the fighter swings their sword. They are not a superhero or video game character, pew pew ing their way to victory. This is a very cool starting point upon which to roleplay an academic spellcaster, not really available outside of tabletop games. I see it as a distinction between magical abilities and real magic. Secondly, consider clerics. Most of the remarks in the previous paragraph apply, suitably reworked to be in terms of requesting certain abilities from the deity to whom the cleric is devoted. Additionally, there is the downgrading of the importance of the cleric s healing magic in 5th edition. Characters can heal themselves by taking short and long rests. Previously, natural healing was very slow, so a cleric would need to convert all their remaining magic to healing spells at the end of the day, and hope that it was enough to bring the party up to fighting shape. Again, this made the party of adventurers seem less like superheroes or video game characters. Magic had a special, important and unique role, that couldn t be replaced by the abilities of other classes. I would like to find ways to restore the feel and flavour of Vancian clerics and wizards to 5th edition, without sacrificing the improvements that have been made that let other party members do cool stuff too. I hope it is possible to keep magic cool and unique without making it dominate the game. It would be easy to forbid the use of arcane foci, and say that material component pouches run out if the party do not visit a suitable marketplace often enough. This would not have a significant mechanical effect, and could enhance roleplaying possibilities. I am not sure how I could deal with the other issues I ve discussed without breaking the game. The second thing I would like to discuss is bounded accuracy. Under this design principle, the modifiers to dice rolls grow much more slowly. The gain of hit points remains unbounded. Under third edition, it was mechanically impossible for a low-level monster to land a hit on a higher-level adventurer, rendering them totally useless even in overwhelming numbers. With bounded accuracy, it s always possible for a low-level monster to hit a PC, even if they do insigificant damage. That means that multiple low-level monsters pose a threat. This change opens up many roleplaying opportunities by keeping low-level character abilities relevant, as well as monster types that can remain involves in stories without giving them implausible new abilities so they don t fall far behind the PCs. However, I m a little worried that it might make high level player characters feel a lot less powerful to play. I want to cease a be a fragile adventurer and become a world-changing hero at later levels, rather than forever remain vulnerable to the things that I was vulnerable to at the start of the game. This desire might just be the result of the video games which I played growing up. In the JRPGs I played and in Diablo II, enemies in earlier areas of the map were no threat at all once you d levelled up by conquering higher-level areas. My concerns about bounded accuracy might just be that it clashes with my own expectations of how fantasy heroes work. A good DM might be able to avoid these worries entirely. The final thing I d like to discuss is the various simplifications to the rules of 5th edition, when it is compared with 3rd edition and Pathfinder. Attacks of opportunity are only provoked when leaving a threatened square; you can go ahead and cast a spell when in melee with someone. There is a very short list of skills, and party members are much closer to each other in skills, now that you can t pump more and more ranks into one or two abilities. Feats as a whole are an optional rule. At first I was worried about these simplifications. I thought that they might make character building and tactics in combat a lot less fun. However, I am now broadly in favour of all of these changes, for two reasons. Firstly, they make the game so much more accessible, and make it far more viable to play without relying on a computer program to fill in the boxes on your character sheet. In my 5th edition group, two of us have played 3rd edition games, and the other four have never played any tabletop games before. But nobody has any problems figuring out their modifiers because it is always simply your ability bonus or penalty, plus your proficiency bonus if relevant. And advantage and disadvantage is so much more fun than getting an additional plus or minus two. Secondly, these simplifications downplay the importance of the maths, which means it is far less likely to be broken. It is easier to ensure that a smaller core of rules is balanced than it is to keep in check a larger mass of rules, constantly being supplemented by more and more addon books containing more and more feats and prestige classes. That means that players make their characters cool by roleplaying them in interesting ways, not making them cool by coming up with ability combos and synergies in advance of actually sitting down to play. Similarly, DMs can focus on flavouring monsters, rather than writing up longer stat blocks. I think that this last point reflects what I find most worthwhile about tabletop RPGs. I like characters to encounter cool NPCs and cool situations, and then react in cool ways. I don t care that much about character creation. (I used to care more about this, but I think it was mainly because of interesting options for magic items, which hasn t gone away.) The most important thing is exercising group creativity while actually playing the game, rather than players and DMs having to spend a lot of time preparing the maths in advance of playing. Fifth edition enables this by preventing the rules from getting in the way, because they re broken or overly complex. I think this is why I love Exalted: stunting is vital, and there is social combat. I hope to be able to work out a way to restore Vancian magic, but even without that, on balance, fifth edition seems like a better way to do group storytelling about fantasy heroes. Hopefully I will have an opportunity to DM a 5th edition campaign. I am considering disallowing all homebrew and classes and races from supplemental books. Stick to the well-balanced core rules, and do everything else by means of roleplaying and flavour. This is far less gimmicky, if more work for unimaginative players (such as myself!). Some further interesting reading:

• Rules versus rulings over the five editions
• Threat creation using bounded accuracy
• Pathfinder vs. 5e on reddit
• Pathfinder vs. 5e on StackExchange this claims that 5e is like 2e in being low fantasy, with constant character deaths and thus little longterm character development, but this has not been my experience so far
• On the Defining Characteristic of 5th Edition

On Friday night I attended a talk by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age . Here are my notes.

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Turkle is an anthropologist who interviews people from different generations about their communication habits. She has observed cross-generational changes thanks to (a) the proliferation of instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger; and (b) fast web searching from smartphones. Her main concern is that conversation is being trivialised. Consider six or seven college students eating a meal together. Turkle s research has shown that the etiquette among such a group has shifted such that so long as at least three people are engaged in conversation, others at the table feel comfortable turning their attention to their smartphones. But then the topics of verbal conversation will tend away from serious issues you wouldn t talk about your mother s recent death if anyone at the table was texting. There are also studies that purport to show that the visibility of someone s smartphone causes them to take a conversation less seriously. The hypothesis is that the smartphone is a reminder of all the other places they could be, instead of with the person they are with. A related cause of the trivialisation of conversation is that people are far less willing to make themselves emotionally vulnerable by talking about serious matters. People have a high degree of control over the interactions that take place electronically (they can think about their reply for much longer, for example). Texting is not open-ended in the way a face-to-face conversation is. People are unwilling to give up this control, so they choose texting over talking. What is the upshot of these two respects in which conversation is being trivialised? Firstly, there are psycho-social effects on individuals, because people are missing out on opportunities to build relationships. But secondly, there are political effects. Disagreeing about politics immediately makes a conversation quite serious, and people just aren t having those conversations. This contributes to polarisation. Note that this is quite distinct from the problems of fake news and the bubbling effects of search engine algorithms, including Facebook s news feed. It would be much easier to tackle fake news if people talked about it with people around them who would be likely to disagree with them. Turkle understands connection as a capacity for solitude and also for conversation. The drip feed of information from the Internet prevents us from using our capacity for solitude. But then we fail to develop a sense of self. Then when we finally do meet other people in real life, we can t hear them because we just use them to try to establish a sense of self. Turkle wants us to be more aware of the effects that our smartphones can have on conversations. People very rarely take their phone out during a conversation because they want to escape from that conversation. Instead, they think that the phone will contribute to that conversation, by sharing some photos, or looking up some information online. But once the phone has come out, the conversation almost always takes a turn for the worse. If we were more aware of this, we would have access to deeper interactions. A further respect in which the importance of conversation is being downplayed is in the relationships between teachers and students. Students would prefer to get answers by e-mail than build a relationship with their professors, but of course they are expecting far too much of e-mail, which can t teach them in the way interpersonal contact can. All the above is, as I said, cross-generational. Something that is unique to millenials and below is that we seek validation for the way that we feel using social media. A millenial is not sure how they feel until they send a text or make a broadcast (this makes them awfully dependent on others). Older generations feel something, and then seek out social interaction (presumably to share, but not in the social media sense of share ). What does Turkle think we can do about all this? She had one positive suggestion and one negative suggestion. In response to student or colleague e-mails asking for something that ought to be discussed face-to-face, reply I m thinking. And you ll find they come to you. She doesn t want anyone to write empathy apps in response to her findings. For once, more tech is definitely not the answer. Turkle also made reference to the study reported here and here and here.

The Sorcerer s Code This is a well-written biographical piece on Stallman.