It s been a while since my last what s been happening behind the scenes e-mail so I m here to report on what has been happening within the GNOME Infrastructure, its future plans and my personal sensations about a challenge that started around three (3) years ago when Sriram Ramkrishna and Jeff Schroeder proposed my name as a possible candidate for coordinating the team that runs the systems behind the GNOME Project. All this followed by the official hiring achieved by Karen Sandler back in February 2013. The GNOME Infrastructure has finally reached stability both in terms of reliability and uptime, we didn t have any service disruption this and the past year and services have been running smoothly as they were expected to in a project like the one we are managing. As many of you know service disruptions and a total lack of maintenance were very common before I joined back in 2013, I m so glad the situation has dramatically changed and developers, users, passionates are now able to reach our websites, code repositories, build machines without experiencing slowness, downtimes or
unreachability. Additionally all these groups of people now have a reference point they can contact in case they need help when coping with the infrastructure they daily use. The ticketing system allows users to get in touch with the members of the Sysadmin Team and receive support right away within a very short period of time (Also thanks to Pagerduty, service the Foundation is kindly sponsoring) Before moving ahead to the future plans I d like to provide you a summary of what has been done during these roughly three years so you can get an idea of why I define the changes that happened to the infrastructure a complete revamp:

1. Recycled several ancient machines migrating services off of them while consolidating them by placing all their configuration on our central configuration management platform ran by Puppet. This includes a grand total of 7 machines that were replaced by new hardware and extended warranties the Foundation kindly sponsored.
2. We strenghten our websites security by introducing SSL certificates everywhere and recently replacing them with SHA2 certificates.
3. We introduced several services such as Owncloud, the Commits Bot, the Pastebin, the Etherpad, Jabber, the GNOME Github mirror.
4. We restructured the way we backup our machines also thanks to the Fedora Project sponsoring the disk space on their backup facility. The way we were used to handle backups drastically changed from early years where a magnetic tape facility was in charge of all the burden of archiving our data to today where a NetApp is used together with rdiff-backup.
5. We upgraded Bugzilla to the latest release, a huge thanks goes to Krzesimir Nowak who kindly helped us building the migration tools.
6. We introduced the GNOME Apprentice program open-sourcing our internal Puppet repository and cleansing it (shallow clones FTW!) from any sensitive information which now lives on a different repository with restricted access.
7. We retired Mango and our OpenLDAP instance in favor of FreeIPA which allows users to modify their account information on their own without waiting for the Accounts Team to process the change.
8. We documented how our internal tools are customized to play together making it easy for future Sysadmin Team members to learn how the infrastructure works and supersede existing members in case they aren t able to keep up their position anymore.
9. We started providing hosting to the GIMP and GTK projects which now completely rely on the GNOME Infrastructure. (DNS, email, websites and other services infrastructure hosting)
10. We started providing hosting not only to the GIMP and GTK projects but to localized communities as well such as GNOME Hispano and GNOME Greece
11. We configured proper monitoring for all the hosted services thanks to Nagios and Check-MK
12. We migrated the IRC network to a newer ircd with proper IRC services (Nickserv, Chanserv) in place.
13. We made sure each machine had a configured management (mgmt) and KVM interface for direct remote access to the bare metal machine itself, its hardware status and all the operations related to it. (hard reset, reboot, shutdown etc.)
14. We upgraded MoinMoin to the latest release and made a substantial cleanup of old accounts, pages marked as spam and trashed pages.
15. We deployed DNSSEC for several domains we manage including gnome.org, guadec.es, gnomehispano.es, guadec.org, gtk.org and gimp.org
16. We introduced an account de-activation policy which comes into play when a contributor not committing to any of the hosted repositories at git.gnome.org since two years is caught by the script. The account in question is marked as inactive and the gnomecvs (from the old cvs days) and ftpadmin groups are removed.
17. We planned mass reboots of all the machines roughly every month for properly applying security and kernel updates.
18. We introduced Mirrorbrain (MB), the mirroring service serving GNOME and related modules tarballs and software all over the world. Before introducing MB GNOME had several mirrors located in all the main continents and at the same time a very low amount of users making good use of them. Many organizations and companies behind these mirrors decided to not host GNOME sources anymore as the statistics of usage were very poor and preferred providing the same service to projects that really had a demand for these resources. MB solved all this allowing a proper redirect to the closest mirror (through mod_geoip) and making sure the sources checksum matched across all the mirrors and against the original tarball uploaded by a GNOME maintainer and hosted at master.gnome.org.

I can keep the list going for dozens of other accomplished tasks but I m sure many of you are now more interested in what the future plans actually are in terms of where the GNOME Infrastructure should be in the next couple of years. One of the main topics we ve been discussing will be migrating our Git infrastructure away from cgit (which is mainly serving as a code browsing tool) to a more complete platform that is surely going to include a code review tool of some sort. (Gerrit, Gitlab, Phabricator) Another topic would be migrating our mailing lists to Mailman 3 / Hyperkitty. This also means we definitely need a staging infrastructure in place for testing these kind of transitions ideally bound to a separate Puppet / Ansible repository or branch. Having a different repository for testing purposes will also mean helping apprentices to test their changes directly on a live system and not on their personal computer which might be running a different OS / set of tools than the ones we run on the GNOME Infrastructure. What I also aim would be seeing GNOME Accounts being the only authentication resource in use within the whole GNOME Infrastructure. That means one should be able to login to a specific service with the same username / password in use on the other hosted services. That s been on my todo list for a while already and it s probably time to push it forward together with Patrick Uiterwijk, responsible of Ipsilon s development at Red Hat and GNOME Sysadmin. While these are the top priority items we are soon receiving new hardware (plus extended warranty renewals for two out of the three machines that had their warranty renewed a while back) and migrating some of the VMs off from the current set of machines to the new boxes is definitely another task I d be willing to look at in the next couple of months (one machine (ns-master.gnome.org) is being decommissioned giving me a chance to migrate away from BIND into NSD). The GNOME Infrastructure is evolving and it s crucial to have someone maintaining it. On this side I m bringing to your attention the fact the assigned Sysadmin funds are running out as reported on the Board minutes from the 27th of October. On this side Jeff Fortin started looking for possible sponsors and came up with the idea of making a brochure with a set of accomplished tasks that couldn t have been possible without the Sysadmin fundraising campaign launched by Stormy Peters back in June 2010 being a success. The Board is well aware of the importance of having someone looking at the infrastructure that runs the GNOME Project and is making sure the brochure will be properly reviewed and published. And now some stats taken from the Puppet Git Repository:

$ cd /git/GNOME/puppet && git shortlog -ns
3520 Andrea Veri
506 Olav Vitters
338 Owen W. Taylor
239 Patrick Uiterwijk
112 Jeff Schroeder
71 Christer Edwards
4 Daniel Mustieles
4 Matanya Moses
3 Tobias Mueller
2 John Carr
2 Ray Wang
1 Daniel Mustieles Garc a
1 Peter Baumgarten

and from the Request Tracker database (52388 being my assigned ID):

mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  3613  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388' and Status = 'Resolved';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  1596  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

It s been a long run which made me proud, for the things I learnt, for the tasks I ve been able to accomplish, for the great support the GNOME community gave me all the time and most of all for the same fact of being part of the team responsible of the systems hosting the GNOME Project. Thank you GNOME community for your continued and never ending backing, we daily work to improve how the services we host are delivered to you and the support we receive back is fundamental for our passion and enthusiasm to remain high!

Dear readers, There is a very useful tool for finding and merging shared permanent storage, and its name is fdupes. There was a terrible occurrence in the software after version 1.51, however. They removed the -L argument because too many people were complaining about lost data. It sounds like user error to me, and so I continue to use this one. I have to build from source, since the newer versions do not have the -L option. https://github.com/tobiasschulz/fdupes And so there you are. I recommend using it, even though this most useful feature has been deprecated and removed from the software. Perhaps there should be a fdupes-danger package in Debian?

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Scott Kitterman uploaded python3-defaults/3.4.3-7 which changes py3versions to list versions in a consistent order. Issue reported by Santiago Vila with a tentative patch by Chris Lamb. Sadly, it appears the problem is not entirely solved.
• Martin Pitt uploaded init-system-helpers/1.24 which makes the order of unit files in maintainer scripts stable. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• Niko Tyni uploaded libextutils-xsbuilder-perl/0.28-3 which makes the generated XS code reproducible.

Niko Tyni wrote a new patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. This would complement or replace the previously implemented POD_MAN_DATE environment variable in a more generic way. Niko Tyni proposed a fix to prevent mtime variation in directories due to debhelper usage of cp --parents -p. Packages fixed The following 119 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aac-tactics, aafigure, apgdiff, bin-prot, boxbackup, calendar, camlmix, cconv, cdist, cl-asdf, cli-common, cluster-glue, cppo, cvs, esdl, ess, faucc, fauhdlc, fbcat, flex-old, freetennis, ftgl, gap, ghc, git-cola, globus-authz-callout-error, globus-authz, globus-callout, globus-common, globus-ftp-client, globus-ftp-control, globus-gass-cache, globus-gass-copy, globus-gass-transfer, globus-gram-client, globus-gram-job-manager-callout-error, globus-gram-protocol, globus-gridmap-callout-error, globus-gsi-callback, globus-gsi-cert-utils, globus-gsi-credential, globus-gsi-openssl-error, globus-gsi-proxy-core, globus-gsi-proxy-ssl, globus-gsi-sysconfig, globus-gss-assist, globus-gssapi-error, globus-gssapi-gsi, globus-net-manager, globus-openssl-module, globus-rsl, globus-scheduler-event-generator, globus-xio-gridftp-driver, globus-xio-gsi-driver, globus-xio, gnome-control-center, grml2usb, grub, guilt, hgview, htmlcxx, hwloc, imms, kde-l10n, keystone, kimwitu++, kimwitu-doc, kmod, krb5, laby, ledger, libcrypto++, libopendbx, libsyncml, libwps, lprng-doc, madwimax, maria, mediawiki-math, menhir, misery, monotone-viz, morse, mpfr4, obus, ocaml-csv, ocaml-reins, ocamldsort, ocp-indent, openscenegraph, opensp, optcomp, opus, otags, pa-bench, pa-ounit, pa-test, parmap, pcaputils, perl-cross-debian, prooftree, pyfits, pywavelets, pywbem, rpy, signify, siscone, swtchart, tipa, typerep, tyxml, unison2.32.52, unison2.40.102, unison, uuidm, variantslib, zipios++, zlibc, zope-maildrophost. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• autoconf2.13/2.13-67 uploaded by Ben Pfaff, original patch by Santiago Vila.
• ding/1.8-3 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• dropbear/2015.68-1 by Guilhem Moulin. First set of patches (#777324, #793006) by Chris Lamb and akira.
• nvram-wakeup/1.1-3 by Tobias Grimm.
• original-awk/2012-12-20-5 by Santiago Vila.
• resiprocate/1:1.10.0-1 uploaded by Daniel Pocock, patch by Reiner Herrmann merged upstream.
• sbuild/0.66.0-5 by Johannes Schauer, reported by Jakub Wilk.
• scribus/1.4.5+dfsg1-4 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• sgmltools-lite/3.0.3.0.cvs.20010909-19 by Santiago Vila.
• unicode-data/8.0-2 uploaded by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Esa Peuha.
• xmoto/0.5.11+dfsg-3 by Stephen Kitt.

Packages which could not be tested:

• mp4h/1.3.1-11 by Axel Beckert (shared memory issue on reproducible.debian.net).
• nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx/304.128-5 by Andreas Beckmann (non-free).

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• libvirt/1.2.20-1 by Guido G nther.
• libgpars-groovy-java/1.2.1-4 by Emmanuel Bourg.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #801520 on libapache2-mod-perl2 by Niko Tyni: sort the list of files used to build the documentation.
• #801523 on perl by Niko Tyni: sort the list of input files in PPPort_xs.PL. Forwarded upstream.
• #801864 on ncurses by Esa Peuha: use C locale when sorting the list of keys.
• #802042 on libchado-perl by Niko Tyni: sort keys in installed configuration file.

Lunar reported that test strings depend on default character encoding of the build system in ongl. reproducible.debian.net The 189 packages composing the Arch Linux core repository are now being tested. No packages are currently reproducible, but most of the time the difference is limited to metadata. This has already gained some interest in the Arch Linux community. An explicit log message is now visible when a build has been killed due to the 12 hours timeout. (h01ger) Remote build setup has been made more robust and self maintenance has been further improved. (h01ger) The minimum age for rescheduling of already tested amd64 packages has been lowered from 14 to 7 days, thanks to the increase of hardware resources sponsored by ProfitBricks last week. (h01ger) diffoscope development diffoscope version 37 has been released on October 15th. It adds support for two new file formats (CBFS images and Debian .dsc files). After proposing the required changes to TLSH, fuzzy hashes are now computed incrementally. This will avoid reading entire files in memory which caused problems for large packages. New tests have been added for the command-line interface. More character encoding issues have been fixed. Malformed md5sums will now be compared as binary files instead of making diffoscope crash amongst several other minor fixes. Version 38 was released two days later to fix the versioned dependency on python3-tlsh. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.013-1 has been uploaded to the archive. It fixes an issue with nonconformant PNG files with trailing garbage reported by Roland Rosenfeld. disorderfs development disorderfs version 0.4.1-1 is a stop-gap release that will disable lock propagation, unless --share-locks=yes is specified, as it still is affected by unidentified issues. Documentation update Lunar has been busy creating a proper website for reproducible-builds.org that would be a common location for news, documentation, and tools for all free software projects working on reproducible builds. It's not yet ready to be published, but it's surely getting there. Package reviews 103 reviews have been removed, 394 added and 29 updated this week. 72 FTBFS issues were reported by Chris West and Niko Tyni. New issues: random_order_in_static_libraries, random_order_in_md5sums.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20151004 which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when running dh_auto_* (patch by Dhole). dh now also calls dh_strip_nondeterminism during build (patch by Andrew Ayer). The only remaining change regarding reproducibility in the custom debhelper is related to mtimes in data.tar which might be fixed directly in dpkg instead.
• Niels Thykier made another upload of debhelper/9.20151005 the next day to sort Build IDs added by dh_strip in control files.

Scott Kitterman fixed an issue with non-deterministic Depends generated by dh-python identified by Santiago Vila and Chris Lamb. Lunar updated the patch against dpkg which makes the order of files in control.tar.gz deterministic using the new --sort=name option available in GNU Tar 1.28. josch released sbuild version 0.66.0-1 with several fixes and improvements. The most notable one for reproducible builds is the new --build-path option and $build_path configuration variable added by akira which allows to explicitly chose a given build path. Reiner Herrmann wrote a new patch for dh-systemd to sort the list of unit files in the generated maintainer scripts. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aoeui, apron, camlmix, cudf, findlib, glpk-java, hawtjni, haxe, java-atk-wrapper, llvm-py, misery, mtasc, ocamldsort, optcomp, spamoracle. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• classified-ads/0.08-1 uploaded by Antti J rvinen, fix merged upstream, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• criu/1.7-3 uploaded by Salvatore Bonaccorso, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• doomsday/1.15.4-1 by Michael Gilbert.
• ejabberd/15.07-1~exp1 by Philipp Huebner.
• libxbean-java/4.4-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• markdown/1.0.1-8 uploaded by Matt Kraai, original patches by Chris Lamb (#776925) and akira (#793701).
• nedit/1:5.6a-3 by Paul Gevers.
• nvidia-settings/340.93-1 uploaded by Andreas Beckmann, original patch by Lunar.
• ocaml/4.02.3-2 by St phane Glondu.
• polygen/1.0.6.ds2-14 uploaded by Mehdi Dogguy, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• stsci.distutils/0.3.7-4 by Aurelien Jarno.
• vdr/2.2.0-4 by Tobias Grimm.
• vdr-plugin-xineliboutput/1.1.0+cvs20150907-3 by Tobias Grimm.
• w3c-markup-validator/1.3+dfsg-3 by Santiago Vila.
• xcolorsel/1.1a-19 by Santiago Vila.
• xmoto/0.5.11+dfsg-3 by Stephen Kitt.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• ognl/2.7.3-6 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• enblend-enfuse/4.1.4+dfsg-2 by Andreas Metzler.

Untested

• nvidia-xconfig/340.93-1 by Andreas Beckmann.
• nvidia-settings-legacy-304xx/304.128-1 by Andreas Beckmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #801212 on unicode-data by Esa Peuha: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.

reproducible.debian.net ProfitBricks once again increased their support for reproducible builds in Debian and in other free software projects by adding 58 new cores and 138 GiB of RAM to the already existing setup. Two new amd64 build nodes and 16 new amd64 build jobs have been added which doubles the build capacity per day and allows us to spot many kind of problems earlier. The size of the tmpfs where builds are performed has also been increased from 70 to 200 GiB on all amd64 build nodes. Huge thanks! When examining a package, a link now points to a table listing all previous recorded tests for the same package. (Mattia) The menu on the package pages has also been improved. (h01ger) Packages in the depwait state are now rescheduled automatically after five days. (h01ger) Links to documentation and other projects being tested have been made more visible on the landing page. (h01ger) To reduce noise on the team IRC channel five different types of notifications have been turned into mail notifications. The remaining ones have been shortened and the status changes have been limited to unstable and experimental. (h01ger) Maintainer notifications about status changes in a package will only be sent out once per day, and not on each status change. (h01ger) diffoscope development Some more experiments of concurrent processing have been made. None were good and reliable enough to be shared, though. Package reviews 48 reviews have been removed, 189 added and 23 updated this week. 9 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger met with Levente Polyak to discuss testing Arch Linux on Debian continuous test system with an easily extensible framework. The idea is to also allow testing of other distributions, and provide a nice package based view like the one for Debian.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Barry Warsaw uploaded wheel/0.26.0-1 which now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP and uses time.gmtime() to avoid timezone issues. Patches by Chris Lamb and Reiner Herrmann.

Andreas Metzler uploaded autogen/1:5.18.6-1 in experimental with several patches for reproducibility issues written by Valentin Lorentz. Groovy upstream has merged a change proposed by Emmanuel Bourg to remove timestamps generated by groovydoc. Ben Hutchings submitted a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in linux-kbuild as an alternate way to specify the build timestamp. Reiner Herrman has sent a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in docbook-utils. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: commons-csv. fest-reflect, sunxi-tools, xfce4-terminal, The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• httpcomponents-client/4.5.1-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• jhead/1:3.00-2 by Ludovic Rousseau.
• libvigraimpex/1.10.0+dfsg-10 by Daniel Stender.
• linux/4.2-1~exp1 by Ben Hutchings.
• maelstrom/1.4.3-L3.0.6+main-7 by Santiago Vila.
• nedit/1:5.6a-3 by Paul Gevers.
• pitivi/0.94-4 by Sebastian Dr ge, reported by Scott Kitterman.
• procenv/0.40-2 by James Hunt.
• seyon/2.20c-32 by Santiago Vila.
• slib/3b1-5 by Santiago Vila.
• spock/0.7-groovy-2.0-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• u-boot/2015.10~rc4+dfsg1-1 by Vagrant Cascadian.
• vdr-plugin-remote/0.7.0-1 by Tobias Grimm.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• dutch/1:2.10-4 uploaded by Thijs Kinkhorst, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #800776 on cluster-glue: exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in debian/rules.

Tomasz Rybak uploaded pycuda/2015.1.3-1 which should fix reproducibility issues. The package has not been tested as it is in contrib. akira found an embedded code copy of texi2html in fftw. reproducible.debian.net Email notifications are now only sent once a day per package, instead of on each status change. (h01ger) disorderfs has been temporarily disabled to see if it had any impact on the disk space issues. (h01ger) When running out of disk space, build nodes will now automatically detect the problem. This means test results will not be recorded as FTBFS and the problem will be reported to Jenkins maintainers. (h01ger) The navigation menu of package pages has been improved. (h01ger) The two amd64 builders now use two different kernel versions: 3.16 from stable and 4.1 from backports on the other. (h01ger) We now graph the number of packages which needs to be fixed. (h01ger) Munin now creates graphs on how many builds were performed by build nodes (example). (h01ger) A migration plan has been agreed with DSA on how to turn Jenkins into an official Debian service. A backport of jenkins-job-builder for Jessie is currently missing. (h01ger) Package reviews 119 reviews have been removed, 103 added and 45 updated this week. 16 fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Mattia Rizzolo. New issue this week: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_docbook_utils. Misc. Allan McRae has submitted a patch to make ArchLinux pacman record a .BUILDINFO file.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Ben Hutchings uploaded linux-tools/4.2-1 which makes the tarball generated by genorig.py reproducible.

Packages fixed The following 22 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: breathe, cdi-api, geronimo-jpa-2.0-spec, geronimo-validation-1.0-spec, gradle-propdeps-plugin, jansi, javaparser, libjsr311-api-java, mac-widgets, mockito, mojarra, pastescript, plexus-utils2, powerline, python-psutil, python-sfml, python-tldap, pythondialog, tox, trident, truffle, zookeeper. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• cloudprint/0.14-1 uploaded by David Steele, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• cpl-plugin-sinfo/2.6.5+dfsg-2 by Ole Streicher.
• fonts-stix/1.1.1-4 uploaded by Hugo Lefeuvre, original patch by Dhole.
• gstreamermm-1.0/1.4.3+dfsg-5 by Philip Rinn.
• hspell/1.2-3 uploaded by Tzafrir Cohen, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libmodule-extractuse-perl/0.33-2 by gregor herrmann.
• mariadb-10.0/10.0.21-1 by Otto Kek l inen.
• mkvtoolnix/8.4.0-1 uploaded by Christian Marillat, fixed upstream.
• mlpack/1.0.12-5 by Barak A. Pearlmutter.
• module-assistant/0.11.8 by Andreas Beckmann.
• pitivi/0.94-4 uploaded by Sebastian Dr ge, reported by Scott Kitterman.
• privoxy/3.0.23-4 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• qtop/2.3.1-1 uploaded by Hugo Lefeuvre, fixed upstream.
• seyon/2.20c-32 by Santiago Vila.
• subvertpy/0.9.3-2 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• twitter-bootstrap/2.0.2+dfsg-8 by Santiago Vila, reported by Chris Lamb.
• vdr-plugin-remote/0.7.0-1 by Tobias Grimm.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• fldigi/3.23.01-1 by Kamal Mostafa.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #799871 on console-data by Chris Lamb: grep all keymap files as text.
• #800007 on anarchism by Holger Levsen: use C locale when converting HTML to text files.
• #800107 on dutch by Chris Lamb: grep wordlist files as text.

diffoscope development The changes to make diffoscope run under Python 3, along with many small fixes, entered the archive with version 35 on September 21th. Another release was made the very next day fixed two encoding-related issues discovered when running diffoscope on more Debian packages. strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.12.0 now preserves file permissions on modified zip files and dh_strip_nondeterminism has been made compatible with older debhelper. disorderfs development Version 0.3.0 implemented a multi-user mode that was required to build Debian packages using disorderfs. It also added command line options to control the ordering of files in directory (either shuffled or reversed) and another to do arbitrary changes to the reported space used by files on disk. A couple days later, version 0.4.0 was released to support locks, flush, fsync, fsyncdir, read_buf, and write_buf. Almost all known issues have now been fixed. reproducible.debian.net disorderfs is now used during the second build. This makes file ordering issue very easy to identify as such. (h01ger) Work has been done on making the distributed build setup more reliable. (h01ger) Documentation update Matt Kraii fixed the example on how to fix issues related to dates in Sphinx. Recent Sphinx versions should also be compatible with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Package reviews 53 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 13 updated this week. 46 packages failing to build from source has been identified by Chris Lamb, Chris West, and Niko Tyni. Chris Lamb was the lucky reporter of bug #800000 on vdr-plugin-prefermenu. Issues related to disorderfs are being tracked with a new issue.

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students¹ to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone² once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this: So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine³ This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification⁴ of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:

• Easyprove, an interactive tool to create textual proofs by clicking on rules.
• Domino On Acid represents natural deduction rules in propositional logic with and as a game of dominoes.
• Proofscape visualizes the dependencies between proofs as graphs, i.e. it operates on a higher level than The Incredible Proof Machine.
• Proofmood is a nice interactive interface to conduct proofs in Fitch-style.
• Proof-Game represents proofs trees in a sequent calculus with boxes with different shapes that have to match.
• JAPE is an editor for proofs in a number of traditional proof styles. (Thanks to Alfio Martini for the pointer.)
• Logitext, written by Edward Z. Yang, is an online tool to create proof trees in sequent style, with a slick interface, and is even backed by Coq! (Thanks to Lev Lamberov for the pointer.)
• Carnap is similar in implementation to The Incredible Proof Machine (logical core in Haskell, generic unification-based solver). It currently lets you edit proof trees, but there are plans to create something more visual.
• Clickable Proofs is a (non-free) iOS app that incorporates quite a few of the ideas that are behind The Incredible Proof Machine. It came out of a Bachelor s thesis of Tim Selier and covers propositional logic.
• Euclid the game by Kasper Peulen is a nice game to play with geometric constructions.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Bdale Garbee uploaded tar/1.28-1 which includes the --clamp-mtime option. Patch by Lunar.

Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-2 by Stefan Fritsch.
• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-6 by Santiago Vila.
• buxon/0.0.5-5 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• cdtool/2.1.8-release-3 by Santiago Vila.
• check/0.10.0-1 by Tobias Frost.
• ffe/0.3.4-2 by Santiago Vila.
• flowscan-cuflow/1.7-9 by Santiago Vila.
• gmt/5.1.2+dfsg1-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• gtkspellmm/3.0.3+dfsg-2 by Philip Rinn.
• htp/1.19-2 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• igerman98/20131206-6 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• intlfonts/1.2.1-9 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• irda-utils/0.9.18-14 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jackd2/1.9.10+20150825git1ed50c92~dfsg-1 uploaded by Adrian Knoth, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• jquery/1.11.3+dfsg-1 uploaded by Antonio Terceiro, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libapache2-authcookie-perl/3.22-3 by Niko Tyni.
• libaqbanking/5.6.1beta-2 fixed and uploaded by Micha Lenk.
• libcitygml/1.4.3-1 by Bas Couwenberg with a fixed new upstream release.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libgnome2-perl/1.046-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libmarc-charset-perl/1.35-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libtime-y2038-perl/20100403-5 by Niko Tyni.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• lpc21isp/1.97-2 by Agustin Henze.
• luakit/2012.09.13-r1-6 by Santiago Vila, also with a patch from akira.
• moarvm/2015.07-1 by Daniel Dehennin with a fixed new upstream release.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• ngircd/22.1-2 by Christoph Biedl.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• owncloud-client/2.0.0~rc1+dfsg-1 by Sandro Knau .
• postfix-gld/1.7-7 uploaded by Santiago Vila, patches for gzip by Chris Lamb and mtimes by akira.
• pppconfig/2.3.22 by Santiago Vila.
• prometheus/0.15.1+ds-2 by Mart n Ferrari.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• recode/3.6-22 by Santiago Vila.
• ruby-rmagick/2.15.4-1 by Antonio Terceiro.
• scite/3.6.0-1 by Antonio Valentino.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• tar/1.28-1 uploaded by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• uruk/20150810-1 uploaded by Joost van Baal-Ili , original patch by Lunar.
• webassets/3:0.11-2 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfonts-bolkhov/1.1.20001007-8 by Santiago Vila.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• cvs-buildpackage/5.24 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.5 by Stephen Kitt.
• vtk6/6.2.0+dfsg1-4 by Anton Gladky.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #797027 on zyne by Chris Lamb: switch to pybuild to get rid of .pyc files.
• #797180 on python-doit by Chris Lamb: sort output when creating completion script for bash and zsh.
• #797211 on apt-dater by Chris Lamb: fix implementation of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #797215 on getdns by Chris Lamb: fix call to dpkg-parsechangelog in debian/rules.
• #797254 on splint by Chris Lamb: support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for version string.
• #797296 on shiro by Chris Lamb: remove username from build string.
• #797408 on splitpatch by Reiner Herrmann: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to set manpage date.
• #797410 on eigenbase-farrago by Reiner Herrmann: sets the comment style to scm-safe which tells ResourceGen that no timestamps should be included.
• #797415 on apparmor by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C. CAPABILITIES
• #797419 on resiprocate by Reiner Herrmann: set the embedded hostname to a static value.
• #797427 on jam by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C.
• #797430 on ii-esu by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.
• #797431 on tatan by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.

Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Eric Dorlan uploaded automake-1.15/1:1.15-2 which makes the output of mdate-sh deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-8 which now honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to dh-python to make the order of the generated maintainer scripts deterministic. Chris also offered a fix for a source of non-determinism in dpkg-shlibdeps when packages have alternative dependencies. Dhole provided a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to gettext. Packages fixed The following 78 packages became reproducible in our setup due to changes in their build dependencies: chemical-mime-data, clojure-contrib, cobertura-maven-plugin, cpm, davical, debian-security-support, dfc, diction, dvdwizard, galternatives, gentlyweb-utils, gifticlib, gmtkbabel, gnuplot-mode, gplanarity, gpodder, gtg-trace, gyoto, highlight.js, htp, ibus-table, impressive, jags, jansi-native, jnr-constants, jthread, jwm, khronos-api, latex-coffee-stains, latex-make, latex2rtf, latexdiff, libcrcutil, libdc0, libdc1394-22, libidn2-0, libint, libjava-jdbc-clojure, libkryo-java, libphone-ui-shr, libpicocontainer-java, libraw1394, librostlab-blast, librostlab, libshevek, libstxxl, libtools-logging-clojure, libtools-macro-clojure, litl, londonlaw, ltsp, macsyfinder, mapnik, maven-compiler-plugin, mc, microdc2, miniupnpd, monajat, navit, pdmenu, pirl, plm, scikit-learn, snp-sites, sra-sdk, sunpinyin, tilda, vdr-plugin-dvd, vdr-plugin-epgsearch, vdr-plugin-remote, vdr-plugin-spider, vdr-plugin-streamdev, vdr-plugin-sudoku, vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, veromix, voxbo, xaos, xbae. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• analog/2:6.0-21 uploaded by Andreas Beckmann, original patch by Dhole.
• base-passwd/3.5.38 uploaded by Colin Watson, original patch by Juan Picca.
• debconf/1.5.57 uploaded by Colin Watson, original patch by Lunar.
• ipband/0.8.1-4 by Mats Erik Andersson.
• kfreebsd-10/10.1~svn274115-7 by Steven Chamberlain.
• libcommons-cli-java/1.3.1-1 by tony mancill.
• libpsl/0.7.1-1 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• maven-archiver/2.6-3 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• mtink/1.0.16-9 by Graham Inggs.
• ocamlweb/1.39-2 uploaded by Mehdi Dogguy, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• rbdoom3bfg/1.0.3+repack1+git20150625-1 by Tobias Frost.
• spatialite-tools/4.2.1~rc1-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• task/2.4.4+dfsg-1 by Sebastien Badia.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bullet/2.83.4+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany.
• cdo/1.6.6+dfsg.1-2 by Alastair McKinstry.
• fish/2.2.0-1 uploaded by Tristan Seligmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sympy/0.7.6-3 by Sergey B Kirpichev.
• xtables-addons/2.7-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #792178 on gunroar by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792181 on tth by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from generated HTML files.
• #792285 on pkgconf by Juan Picca: set LC_ALL=C when running sort.
• #792319 on jsmath-fonts by Chris Lamb: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792424 on swh-plugins by Chris Lamb: sort inputs in Makefile.
• #792525 on ruby-standalone by Reiner Herrmann: use UTC and C locale when formatting the manpage date for the documentation.
• #792528 on dict-foldoc by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when formatting the date for the documentation.
• #792529 on tomatoes by Reiner Herrmann: use date from debian/changelog in version string.
• #792593 on lives by Dhole: process a Perl hash in stable order.
• #792596 on jsmath by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792597 on jsmath-fonts-sprite by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792598 on libreoffice-canzeley-client by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792599 on openthesaurus by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792602 on fonts-stix by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792667 on jack-audio-connection-kit by use date from debian/changelog in manpages.
• #792668 on pyhoca-gui by remove date from package version number.
• #792671 on apertium-dbus by remove *.pyo and *.pyc from binary package.
• #792673 on bup by use date from debian/changelog when generating version strings.
• #792684 on cain by Chris Lamb: ensure stable permissions when creating source tarball.
• #792709 on dict-jargon by Dhole: set timestamp in archive using the latest entry of debian/changelog.
• #792727 on libaqbanking by Micha Lenk (upstream): sort source files in documentation.
• #792763 on docbook-dsssl by Chris Lamb: sort input files when creating changelog.
• #792770 on lynx-cur by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting configuration files.
• #792771 on mu-cade by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792772 on titanion by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792783 on linuxlogo by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792821 on pkg-config by Juan Picca: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792828 on tiger by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: use C locale when listing soure files.

reproducible.debian.net The statistics on the main page of reproducible.debian.net are now updated every five minutes. A random unreviewed package is suggested in the look at a package form on every build. (h01ger) A new package set based new on the Core Internet Infrastructure census has been added. (h01ger) Testing of FreeBSD has started, though no results yet. More details have been posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The build is run on a new virtual machine running FreeBSD 10.1 with 3 cores and 6 GB of RAM, also sponsored by Profitbricks. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released version 0.009 of strip-nondeterminism. The new version will strip locales from Javadoc, include the name of files causing errors, and ignore unhandled (but rare) zip64 archives. debbindiff development Lunar continued its major refactoring to enhance code reuse and pave the way to fuzzy-matching and parallel processing. Most file comparators have now been converted to the new class hierarchy. In order to support for archive formats, work has started on packaging Python bindings for libarchive. While getting support for more archive formats with a common interface is very nice, libarchive is a stream oriented library and might have bad performance with how debbindiff currently works. Time will tell if better solutions need to be found. Documentation update Lunar started a Reproducible builds HOWTO intended to explain the different aspects of making software build reproducibly to the different audiences that might have to get involved like software authors, producers of binary packages, and distributors. Package reviews 17 obsolete reviews have been removed, 212 added and 46 updated this week. 15 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and Mattia Rizzolo. Presentations Lunar presented Debian efforts and some recipes on making software build reproducibly at Libre Software Meeting 2015. Slides and a video recording are available. Misc. h01ger, dkg, and Lunar attended a Core Infrastructure Initiative meeting. The progress and tools mode for the Debian efforts were shown. Several discussions also helped getting a better understanding of the needs of other free software projects regarding reproducible builds. The idea of a global append only log, similar to the logs used for Certificate Transparency, came up on multiple occasions. Using such append only logs for keeping records of sources and build results has gotten the name Binary Transparency Logs . They would at least help identifying a compromised software signing key. Whether the benefits in using such logs justify the costs need more research.

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Brendan O'Dea uploaded help2man/1.47.1 which adds support setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the date for the generated pages.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-debian-helper/1.6.12 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded javatools/0.51 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Joachim Breitner uploaded haskell-devscripts/0.9.10 which will always run sorts in LC_ALL=C.

Andreas Henriksson has improved Johannes Schauer initial patch for pbuilder adding support for build profiles. Packages fixed The following 12 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: collabtive, eric, file-rc, form-history-control, freehep-chartableconverter-plugin , jenkins-winstone, junit, librelaxng-datatype-java, libwildmagic, lightbeam, puppet-lint, tabble. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• acorn/0.12.0-1 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• avarice/2.13+svn347-3 by Tobias Frost.
• br.ispell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• cpp-netlib/0.11.1+dfsg1-3 by Ximin Luo.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-3 by Guillem Jover.
• dnsmasq/2.73-1 uploaded by Simon Kelley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• eigen3/3.2.5-4 by Anton Gladky.
• eo-spell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• espa-nol/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• firejail/0.9.26-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.2 by Stephen Kitt.
• geoip-database/20150616-1 uploaded by Patrick Matth i, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• ikiwiki-hosting/0.20150614 by Simon McVittie.
• inkscape/0.91-5 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• jtreg/4.1-b12-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• libfile-scan-perl/1.43-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• libgpiv/0.6.1-4.2 by akira.
• libnet-twitter-lite-perl/0.12006-4 by Niko Tyni.
• mingw-w64/4.0.2-5 by Stephen Kitt.
• oslo.messaging/1.8.3-3 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Juan Picca.
• seabios/1.8.2-1 by Michael Tokarev. Suggested fix by Lunar based on recent upstream changes.
• thuban/1.2.2-7 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• tiptop/2.2-3 by Tomasz Buchert.
• ucl/1.03+repack-3 by Robert Luberda.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• amsynth/1.5.1-2 uploaded by Alessio Treglia, original patch by Dhole.
• brickos/0.9.0.dfsg-12 uploaded by Michael Tautschnig, original patch by akira.
• cucumber/2.0.0-1 by C dric Boutillier; currently FTBFS.
• netbeans/8.0.2+dfsg1-2 by Markus Koschany.
• pyopencl/2015.1-2 uploaded by Tomasz Rybak, original patch by Tomasz Rybak.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #788747 on 0xffff by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788752 on analog by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788757 on jacktrip by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #788868 on apophenia by akira: remove $date from the documentation footer.
• #788920 on orthanc by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #788955 on rivet by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789040 on liblo by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789049 on mpqc by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789071 on libxkbcommon by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789073 on libxr by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789076 on lvtk by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789087 on lmdb by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789184 on openigtlink by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789264 on openscenegraph by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789308 on trigger-rally-data by Mattia Rizzolo: call dh_fixperms even when overriding dh_fixperms.
• #789396 on libsidplayfp by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789399 on psocksxx by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789405 on qdjango by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789406 on qof by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789428 on qsapecng by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.

reproducible.debian.net Bugs with the ftbfs usertag are now visible on the bug graphs. This explain the recent spike. (h01ger) Andreas Beckmann suggested a way to test building packages using the funny paths that one can get when they contain the full Debian package version string. debbindiff development Lunar started an important refactoring introducing abstactions for containers and files in order to make file type identification more flexible, enabling fuzzy matching, and allowing parallel processing. Documentation update Ximin Luo detailed the proposal to standardize environment variables to pass a reference source date to tools that needs one (e.g. documentation generator). Package reviews 41 obsolete reviews have been removed, 168 added and 36 updated this week. Some more issues affecting packages failing to build from source have been identified. Meetings Minutes have been posted for Tuesday June 16th meeting. The next meeting is scheduled Tuesday June 23rd at 17:00 UTC. Presentations Lunar presented the project in French during Pas Sage en Seine in Paris. Video and slides are available.

On 22nd of October 2004 an event called OS04 took place in Seifenfabrik Graz/Austria and it marked the first official release of the Grml project. Grml was initially started by myself in 2003 I registered the domain on September 16, 2003 (so technically it would be 11 years already :)). It started with a boot-disk, first created by hand and then based on yard. On 4th of October 2004 we had a first presentation of grml 0.09 Codename Bughunter at Kunstlabor in Graz. I managed to talk a good friend and fellow student Martin Hecher into joining me. Soon after Michael Gebetsroither and Andreas Gredler joined and throughout the upcoming years further team members (Nico Golde, Daniel K. Gebhart, Mario Lang, Gerfried Fuchs, Matthias Kopfermann, Wolfgang Scheicher, Julius Plenz, Tobias Klauser, Marcel Wichern, Alexander Wirt, Timo Boettcher, Ulrich Dangel, Frank Terbeck, Alexander Steinb ck, Christian Hofstaedtler) and contributors (Hermann Thomas, Andreas Krennmair, Sven Guckes, Jogi Hofm ller, Moritz Augsburger, ) joined our efforts. Back in those days most efforts went into hardware detection, loading and setting up the according drivers and configurations, packaging software and fighting bugs with lots of reboots (working on our custom /linuxrc for the initrd wasn t always fun). Throughout the years virtualization became more broadly available, which is especially great for most of the testing you need to do when working on your own (meta) distribution. Once upon a time udev became available and solved most of the hardware detection issues for us. Nowadays X.org doesn t even need a xorg.conf file anymore (at least by default). We have to acknowledge that Linux grew up over the years quite a bit (and I m wondering how we ll look back at the systemd discussions in a few years). By having Debian Developers within the team we managed to push quite some work of us back to Debian (the distribution Grml was and still is based on), years before the Debian Derivatives initiative appeared. We never stopped contributing to Debian though and we also still benefit from the Debian Derivatives initiative, like sharing issues and ideas on DebConf meetings. On 28th of May 2009 I myself became an official Debian Developer. Over the years we moved from private self-hosted infrastructure to company-sponsored systems, migrated from Subversion (brr) to Mercurial (2006) to Git (2008). Our Zsh-related work became widely known as grml-zshrc. jenkins.grml.org managed to become a continuous integration/deployment/delivery home e.g. for the dpkg, fai, initramfs-tools, screen and zsh Debian packages. The underlying software for creating Debian packages in a CI/CD way became its own project known as jenkins-debian-glue in August 2011. In 2006 I started grml-debootstrap, which grew into a reliable method for installing plain Debian (nowadays even supporting installation as VM, and one of my customers does tens of deployments per day with grml-debootstrap in a fully automated fashion). So one of the biggest achievements of Grml is from my point of view that it managed to grow several active and successful sub-projects under its umbrella. Nowadays the Grml team consists of 3 Debian Developers Alexander Wirt (formorer), Evgeni Golov (Zhenech) and myself. We couldn t talk Frank Terbeck (ft) into becoming a DM/DD (yet?), but he s an active part of our Grml team nonetheless and does a terrific job with maintaining grml-zshrc as well as helping out in Debian s Zsh packaging (and being a Zsh upstream committer at the same time makes all of that even better :)). My personal conclusion for 10 years of Grml? Back in the days when I was a student Grml was my main personal pet and hobby. Grml grew into an open source project which wasn t known just in Graz/Austria, but especially throughout the German system administration scene. Since 2008 I m working self-employed and mainly working on open source stuff, so I m kind of living a dream, which I didn t even have when I started with Grml in 2003. Nowadays with running my own business and having my own family it s getting harder for me to consider it still a hobby though, instead it s more integrated and part of my business which I personally consider both good and bad at the same time (for various reasons). Thanks so much to anyone of you, who was (and possibly still is) part of the Grml journey! Let s hope for another 10 successful years! Thanks to Max Amanshauser and Christian Hofstaedtler for reading drafts of this.

This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria. Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter. We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 . Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC):

• #741806: pygresql: FTBFS: pgmodule.c:32:22: fatal error: postgres.h: No such file or directory
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch. The bug was introduced by the recent PostgreSQL development package reorganisation.
• #744229: qpdfview: FTBFS synctex/synctex_parser.c:275:20: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
  Talked to the maintainer, explaining the importance of the upload and verifying his fix.
• #744300: pexpect: missing dependency on dh-python
  Downgraded to wishlist after verifying the build dependency is only needed when building for Wheezy backports.
• #744917: luajit: FTBFS when /sbin is not in $PATH
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch, which later was canceled due to a maintainer upload with a slightly different fix.
• #742943: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_raid: wants mpt-statusd / mptctl
  Analyzed the situation, verified the status with the latest upstream version of the ckeck and commented on the bug.
• #732110: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_rbl error when nameserver available only in IPv6
  Verify that the bug is fixed in the latest release and mark it as done.
• #684726: nagios-plugins-contrib: RFP: check-v46 Icinga / Nagios plugin for dual stacked (IPv4 / IPv6) hosts
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #661167: nagios-plugins-contrib: please include nagios-check-printer-status
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #745895: nagios-plugins-contrib: does not compile against Varnish 4.0.0
  Write a patch for supporting the Varnish 3 and 4 APIs at the same time. Also proposed the patch upstream.
• #744922: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_packages: check for security updates broken
  Forward our security_updates_critical patch and Felix fixes to it upstream, then updating check_packages to the latest upstream version.
• #744248: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_cert_expire: support configurable warn/crit times
  Forward Helmut s patch upstream, then updating check_cert_expire to the latest upstream version.
• #745691: django-classy-tags: FTBFS: Sphinx documentation not found
  Analyze the issue and the fix proposed in SVN, comment on the bug.
• #713876: thinkfan: [PATCH] bugfix: use $MAINPID for ExecReload
  Prepare and upload of the latest upstream release, which includes Michael s patch.
• #713878: thinkfan: [PATCH] use dh-systemd for proper systemd-related maintscripts
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #728087: thinkfan: Document how to start thinkfan with systemd
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #742515: blktap-dkms: blktapblktap kernel module failed to build
  Upload an NMU with a patch based on the upstream fix.
• #745598: libkolab: FTBFS in dh_python2 (missing Build-Conflicts?)
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolab s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #745599: libkolabxml: FTBFS with undefined reference to symbol _ZTVN5boost6detail16thread_data_baseE
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, properly linking the tests to the Boost libraries.
• #746160: libcolabxml: FTBFS when both python2 and python3 development headers are installed
  Filling the bug while working on #745599, then uploading an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #714045: blcr-dkms: blcr module is not built on kernel 3.9.1
  Checking the status of the bug upstream, and marking it as forwarded.
• #653404: hdapsd: init.d status support
  Added Peter s patch to the Debian packaging, upload yet pending.
• #702199: hdapsd: Typo in package description
  Fixed typo in the description, upload yet pending.
• #745219: crmsh: should depends on python-yaml
  Verifying the bug with Stefan Bauer and sponsoring his NMU.
• #741600: 389-ds-base: CVE-2014-0132
  Sponsoring the NMU for Tobias Frost.

A couple of (non-free) pictures are available at Uwe s salzburg-cityguide.at. Thanks again to Bernd for organizing and conova and credativ for sponsoring!

0 comment(s) this blog is flattr enabled

Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that Simon Beck creates by walking in snow [1]. If you are an artist you can create art in any way, even by walking in patterns in the snow. Russ Altman gave an interesting TED talk about using DNA testing before prescribing drugs [2]. I was surprised by the amount of variation in effects of codeine based on genetics, presumably many other drugs have a similar range. Helen Epstein wrote an interesting article about Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who revolutionised child care and saved the lives of a huge number of children [3]. Her tenacity is inspiring. Also it s interesting to note that the US Republican party was awful even before the Southern Strategy . The part about some doctors opposing child care because it s the will of God for children to die and keep them in employment is chilling. Jonathan Weiler wrote an insightful article about the problems with American journalism in defending the government [4]. He criticises the media for paying more attention to policing decorum than to content. Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting post about the so-called socialised health-care in the US [5]. He suggests that Ronald Reagan socialised health-care by preventing hospitals from dumping dying people on the street. I guess if doing nothing for people until they have a medical emergency counts as socialised health-care then the US has it. Kelvin Thomson MP made some insightful comments about climate change, the recent heat-wave in Australia, and renewable energy [6]. Iwan Baan gave an interesting TED talk about ways that people have built cheap homes in unexpected places [7], lots of good pictures. Racialicious has an interesting article by Arturo R. Garc a about research into the effects of concussion and the way the NFL in the US tried to prevent Dr. Bennet Omalu publicising the results of his research [8]. Stani (Jan Schmidt) wrote an interesting post about how they won a competition to design a commemerative Dutch 5 Euro coin [9]. The coin design is really good (a candidate for the geekiest coin ever), I want one! Seriously if anyone knows how to get one at a reasonable price (IE close to face value for circulated or not unreasonably expensive for uncirculated) then please let me know. When writing about Edward Snowden, Nathan says Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor [10]. That s so right, that might make the US a country I d be prepared to live in. Andrew Solomon gave an interesting TED talk Love No Matter What about raising different children [11]. Aditi Shankardass gave an interesting TED talk about using an ECG to analyse people diagnosed wit severe Autism and other developmental disorders [12]. Apparently some severe cases of Autism have a root cause that can be treated with anti-seizure medication. George Monbiot wrote an insightful article about the way that Bono and Bob Geldoff promote G8 government intervention in Africa and steal air-time that might be given to allow Africans to represent themselves in public debates [13]. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about racism in Australian politics and how it is bad for job-seekers and the economy (in addition to being horribly wrong) [14]. Aeon Magazine has an interesting article by Anne Buchanan about the difference between scientists and farmers [15]. She has some interesting points about the way that the lack of general knowledge impacts research, but misses the point that in most fields of study there is a huge problem of people not knowing about recent developments in their own field. I don t think it s a pipe dream to be well educated in humanities and science, but I guess that depends on the definition of well educated . Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk titled Why We Need the Explorers about the benefits of scientific research [16]. Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an interesting paper about ZFS corruption in the face of disk and memory errors [17]. One thing to note is that turning off atime can reduce the probability of a memory error leading to corrupt data being written to disk, run zfs set atime=off tank to fix this. The comedian Solomon Georgio celebrated Martin Luther King day by tweeting I love you to racists [18]. It s an interesting approach and appears to have worked well.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k4eojcn
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/pp8o7l6
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/pq9xo4w
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/kgsloep
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/olsjgtf
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/md4wn2c
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/iwan_baan_ingenious_homes_in_unexpected_places.html
• [8] http://www.racialicious.com/2013/10/16/the-unsung-hero-of-league-of-denial/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/lmjf2vu
• [10] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=446
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/26zq53o
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qem2lmd
• [14] http://progressivedirection.com/australias-war-on-brains
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/mtecglz
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [17] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption-fast10.pdf
• [18] http://tinyurl.com/nrr68po

Being a bit hyperactive, I have been involved in the organization of two events. I am the main organizer with Alexandre Delano of the Mini Debconf 2014 in Paris, January 18 & 19th. The (great) planning is available here:
https://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
Saturday morning presentations will be general public, the beginning of Saturday afternoon will be used by the Debian France association to vote the new status (1901 law and Debian Trusted Organization).
Sunday will be more focused on Debian itself.
During the week end, I will be talking about the Debile project, the finance of Debian France and be part of the round table on compiler selection for Debian.
The (mandatory) registration should be done on the Wiki or meetup.com In parallel, with Tobias Grosser, we organized the LLVM devroom track at FOSDEM (Bruxelles), February 2nd (Sunday).
The schedule is a mix between core developers, third party software using LLVM / Clang and academic users.
https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/llvm/
I will be talking on how to become a LLVM contributor. Both events should be recorded.

Here in the US, the Affordable Care Act is finally going into effect, with accompanying drama. I managed to get signed up today at healthcare.gov. After not having health insurance since 2000, I will finally be covered starting January 1 2014. Since my income is mosty publically known anyway, I thought it might be helpful to blog about some details. I was uninsured for 14 years due to a combination of three factors:

1. Initially, youthful stupidity and/or a perfectly resonable cost/benefit analysis. (Take your pick.)
2. Due to the US health insurance system being obviously broken, and my preference to avoid things that are broken. Especially when the breakage involved insurers refusing to cover me at any sane level due to a minor and easily controlled pre-existing condition.
3. Since I'm not much motivated by income levels, and am very motivated to have time to work on things that are important to me, my income has been on average pretty low, and perhaps more importantly, I have intentionally avoided being a full-time employee of anyone at any point in the past 14 years (have rejected job offers), and so was not eligible for any employee plans which were the only reasonable way to be covered in the US. (See point #2.)

So, if you're stuck waiting in line on healthcare.gov (is this an entirely new online experience brought to us by the US government?), or have seen any of the dozen or so failure modes that I saw just trying to register for a login to the site, yeah, it's massively overloaded right now, and it's also quite broken on a number of technical levels. But you can eventually get though it. Based on some of the bugs I saw, it may help to have an large number of email addresses and use a different one for each application attempt. It also wouldn't hurt to write some programs to automate the attempts, because otherwise you may have to fill out the same form dozens of times. And no, you can't use "you+foo@bar.com" for your email; despite funding the development of RFC-822 in the 80's, the US government is clueless about what consititutes a valid email address. But my "favorite" misfeature of the site is that it refuses to let you enter any accented characters, or characters not in the latin alphabet when signing up. Even if they're, you know, part of your name. (Welcome back to Ellis Island..) I want to check the git repository to see if I can find the backstory for these and other interesting technical decisions, but they have forgotten to push anything to it for over 3 months. The good news is that once you get past the initial signup process, and assuming you get the confirmation mail before the really short expiration period of apparently less than 1 hour (another interesting technical choice, given things like greylisting), the actual exchange is not badly overloaded, and nor is it very buggy (comparatively). I was able to complete an application in about an hour. The irony is that after all that, I was only able to choose from one health insurer covering my area on the so-called "exchange". (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) I also signed up for dental insurance (it was a welcome surprise that the site offers this at all) and had a choice of two insurers for that. The application process was made more uncertian for me since I have no idea what I'll end up doing for money once my current crowdsourced year of work is done. The site wants you to know how much income you'll have in 2014, and my guess is anywhere between $6000 (from a rental property) and about what I made this year (approx $25000 before taxes). Or up, if I say, answered the Google pings. The best choice seemed to be to answer what I made this year, which is also close to what I made last year. So, I'll be paying around $200/month for a combination of not very good health insurance, and not very good dental insurance. There is around $750/year of financial aid to people at my guesstimated 2014 income level, which would drop that to $140/month, but I will let them refund me whatever that turns out to be in a lump sum later instead. For comparison, I am lucky to spend rather less renting a three bedroom house situated in 25 acres of woods.. It's strange to think that all of this is an improvement to the system here in the US, especially given all the better options that could have been passed instead, but it seems that it probably is. Especially when I consider the many people around me who are less fortunate than myself. If you'd like a broader perspective on this, see Tobias Buckell's "American healthcare was already socialized by Reagan, we re just fighting about how to pay for it".

Laurent Bigonville reported Debian bug #720000 on Saturday August 17th 2013, against the drizzle package. This bug is already marked pending by Tobias Frost, the package maintainer. Bug #710000 was reported as of May 27th: 2 months and 21 days for 10,000 bugs. For once, this is a rate acceleration which we can probably explain by the release of wheezy and the work strongly resumed by many maintainers for the release of jessie. It is indeed interesting to see that this 720000th bug report happened nearly on Debian's 20th birthday. To make it short, we could then say that Debian had 36,000 bug reports every year in average (which is not exactly true as the BTS records start in 1996). Funnily also, this is the first time since I'm doing this recurrent post every 10,000 bugs that one happens *during* a DebConf, a few hours before DebConf 13 officially ends up.

The last week was quite productive as I was on vacation and at home town but sadly I couldn't complete this post so again merging the work with this week but this week ain't much productive as I was tired from journey back and didn't get enough time to recover. So here it goes. Debian Related

• I did a little more fine tuning of friendica package to enable http://localhost/friendica on installation and shipped virtual host configuration for Apache and Nginx which user can simply copy to setup a proper friendica instance. I'm not sure if this is right to do or not but Drupal package does this but only it doesn't enable it during installation and leaves it up to user to create required symlink to enable http://localhost/drupal7. Well this is my first time in packaging webapp so I'm all open for suggestions
• Helped Tobias Diekershoff prepare and upload the friendica package to mentors and file RFS bug. We got bug number #693504 and now we are looking for sponsors, if you are a DD reading this post and interested in federated social networking and can sponsor us it would be great :-)
• Started learning CDBS and converted the Kiwix package to CDBS. I'm glad that Jonas is helping me out when I'm struck some where. Also kiwix is now updated to latest version 0.9~rc2 and I need to do some more fine tuning before asking for upload from Jonas.
• I started helping Jonas to put up CDBS documentation. He suggested me to take over the documentation from duckcorp and then merge other documentation in CDBS git tree. As of now I only managed to separate out the chapters from docbook to markdown format. The conversion was done using pandoc but code formatting in docbook was not proper I guess so after conversion it needed some manual intervention in fixing and formatting code blocks. The repository for CDBS doc is here and as of now doesn't contain any new things.
• Converted one more of my font package fonts-gubbi to CDBS format but I'm now facing a issue that CDBS is including docs inside the generated udeb which is not right, I already posted the question on how to handle this to build-common-hackers and waiting for Jonas to reply back.
• I claimed the ITP #651600 on Roboto fonts from Android OS. After a short discussion with Fabian on pkg-fonts-devel I agreed to merge it with existing fonts-droid and renamed the source package to fonts-android which now builds fonts-droid and fonts-roboto. Package is ready but I'm still seeing if I can fix any bugs on fonts-droid before asking for a upload.
• Wrote a simple script which was derived from droid fonts package from Fedora to get the android fonts from the upstream repository automatically. Enabled this in get-orig-source target for fonts-android. Since cloning a more than 600M repository is PITA I have a local copy of fonts-android and use it to create new release of fonts-android. Additionally I should say script is not well tested ;-)
• suckless-tools has entered into Debian Experimental thanks to Jakub Wilk for a very nice review of the package which went in a long thread of more than 50 mails in debian-mentors. The package itself closed a shit load of bugs, but after upload I noticed there are still some pending bugs which I missed from adding to changelog. So I closed #606148 and #689199. Still there are 2 more bugs which seems like fixed in newer version but I need to confirm before closing them, thus making suckless-tools a bug free package.

Upstream Related I raised a pull request #8 on Gubbi fixing the Makefile to more organized and introducing xz compression in it. Additionally I removed distribution specific stuffs from Makefile and made it generic. That's all for the two weeks. This week there will be foss.in and we will be having some Debian specific mini conference, including some Debian basics to newbies and some bug squashing if any :-). So more to report next week, till then Cya.

good news: from looking through RC bugs in the BTS, it seems that more & more people are starting to join the RCBW effort!

& here's my usual list for the past week:

• #633935 src:fim: "fim: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  do as the bug report says, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634400 src:morituri: "morituri: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add upstream patch (via Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen), upload to DELAYED/2
• #643464 src:radeontool: "radeontool: FTBFS: radeontool.c:42:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  apply patch from Jonathan Nieder, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643473 src:python-kinterbasdb: "python-kinterbasdb: FTBFS with firebird-dev (2.5) -- removed defines"
  do a QA upload with the patch from Damyan Ivanov
• #650788 src:python-osd: "python-osd: binary-indep doesn't build python-osd"
  update build-* target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #652245 src:tomoe: "tomoe: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source --after-build tomoe-0.6.0 gave error exit status 1"
  send ideas for fix to BTS, later NMUd by a fellow DD
• #652700 haildb: "haildb ftbfs if libcloog-ppl0 is not installed"
  sponsor NMU by Tobias Frost, upload to DELAYED/2
• #654255 src:cmucl: "cmucl: FTBFS: Error: Unbound symbol."
  suggest manual close, done by maintainer
• #654257 src:newlib: "newlib: FTBFS: cannot find the library sys/linux/liblinux.la' or unhandled argument sys/linux/liblinux.la'"
  apply patch from Ubuntu / Wookey and Steve Langasek, upload to DELAYED/2

Around the first bunch of postings in my Useful but Unknown Unix Tools, Tobias Klauser of inotail and Symlink fame came up with the idea of making a Planet (i.e. a blog aggregator) of all the comandline blogs and blog categories out there. A first Planet Venus running prototype based on the template and style sheets of Planet Symlink was quickly up and running. I just couldn t decide if I should use an amber or phosphor green style for this new planet. Marius Rieder finally had the right idea to solve this dilemma: Offer both, an amber and a phosphor green style. Christian Herzog pointed me to the right piece of code at A List Apart. So here is it, available in you favourite screen colors:

Planet Commandline For a beginning, the following feeds are included:

• Myon s Unix blog category
• Evgeni Golov s Desktop in a Shell column
• My Useful but Unknown Unix Tools column
• My Shell blog category
• The GRML Development Blog
• Chr tertee (Swiss-German)
• Commandline Magic s identi.ca feed

Which leads us to the discussion what kind of feeds should be included in Planet Commandline. Of course, all blogs or blog categories which (nearly) solely post neat tips and tricks about the command line in English are welcome. Microblogging feeds containing (only) small but useful command line tips are welcome, too, if they neither permanently contain dozens of posts per day nor have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately most identi.ca groups do, so they re not suitable for such a planet. What I m though unsure about are non-English feeds. Yes, there s one in already, but I noticed this only after including Beat s Chr tertee and his FreeBSD command line tips are really good. So if it doesn t go overboard, I think it s ok. If there are too many non-English feeds, I ll probably split Planet Commandline off into at least three Planets: One with all feeds, one with English only and one with all non-English feeds or maybe even one feed per language. But for now that s still a long way off. Another thing I m unsure about are more propgram specific blogs like the impressive Mastering Emacs blog about mastering the world s best text editor . *g* (Yeah, I didn t include that one yet. But as soon someone shows me the vi-equivalent of that blog, I ll include both. Anyone thinks, spf13 s vim category is up to that?) Oh, and sure, any shell-specific (zsh, tcsh, bash, mksh, busybox) tips & tricks blogs don t count as program-specific blogs like some $EDITOR, $BROWSER, or $VCS specific blogs do. :-) Of course I m happy about further suggestions for feeds to include in Planet Commandline. Just remember that the feed should provide (at least nearly) exclusively command line tips, tricks or howtos. Suggestions for links to other commandline related planets are welcome, too.