Search Results: "zack"

24 August 2014

Lucas Nussbaum: on the Dark Ages of Free Software: a Free Service Definition ?

Stefano Zacchiroli opened DebConf 14 with an insightful talk titled Debian in the Dark Ages of Free Software (slides available, video available soon). He makes the point (quoting slide 16) that the Free Software community is winning a war that is becoming increasingly pointless: yes, users have 100% Free Software thin client at their fingertips [or are really a few steps from there]. But all their relevant computations happen elsewhere, on remote systems they do not control, in the Cloud. That give-up on control of computing is a huge and important problem, and probably the largest challenge for everybody caring about freedom, free speech, or privacy today. Stefano rightfully points out that we must do something about it. The big question is: how can we, as a community, address it? Towards a Free Service Definition? I believe that we all feel a bit lost with this issue because we are trying to attack it with our current tools & weapons. However, they are largely irrelevant here: the Free Software Definition is about software, and software is even to be understood strictly in it, as software programs. Applying it to services, or to computing in general, doesn t lead anywhere. In order to increase the general awareness about this issue, we should define more precisely what levels of control can be provided, to understand what services are not providing to users, and to make an informed decision about waiving a particular level of control when choosing to use a particular service. Benjamin Mako Hill pointed out yesterday during the post-talk chat that services are not black or white: there aren t impure and pure services. Instead, there s a graduation of possible levels of control for the computing we do. The Free Software Definition lists four freedoms how many freedoms, or types of control, should there be in a Free Service Definition, or a Controlled-Computing Definition? Again, this is not only about software: the platform on which a particular piece of software is executed has a huge impact on the available level of control: running your own instance of WordPress, or using an instance on wordpress.com, provides very different control (even if as Asheesh Laroia pointed out yesterday, WordPress does a pretty good job at providing export and import features to limit data lock-in). The creation of such a definition is an iterative process. I actually just realized today that (according to Wikipedia) the very first occurrence of an attempt at a Free Software Definition was published in 1986 (GNU s bulletin Vol 1 No.1, page 8) I thought it happened a couple of years earlier. Are there existing attempts at defining such freedoms or levels of controls, and at benchmarking such criteria against existing services? Such criteria would not only include control over software modifications and (re)distribution, but also likely include mentions of interoperability and open standards, both to enable the user to move to a compatible service, and to avoid forcing the user to use a particular implementation of a service. A better understanding of network effects is also needed: how much and what type of service lock-in is acceptable on social networks in exchange of functionality? I think that we should inspire from what was achieved during the last 30 years on Free Software. The tools that were produced are probably irrelevant to address this issue, but there s a lot to learn from the way they were designed. I really look forward to the day when we will have: Exciting times!

6 June 2014

Stefano Zacchiroli: debsources paper at ESEM2014

Debsources: Live and Historical Views on Macro-Level Software Evolution The paper entitled Debsources: Live and Historical Views on Macro-Level Software Evolution, which I've co-authored with Matthieu Caneill, has been accepted at ESEM 2014: the 8th international symposium on Emprical Software Engineering and Measurement. In the paper we have described Debsources as a software platform for monitoring the evolution of Free Software through the lenses of Debian, and used the main Debsources instance (http://sources.debian.net) to replicate and extend a former study on macro-level software evolution. Now we "just" have to integrate all the nice charts and data we have extracted for the paper into Debsources' stats page... /o\

6 April 2014

Stefano Zacchiroli: historical overview of debian source code

moar, and moar, and moar debsources stats A while ago I've announced the availability of several stats about Debian source code on http://sources.debian.net. Since then the statistical basis of those stats has increased a lot, and now includes all Debian historical releases, from hamm (July 1998) onward. This allows to appreciate macro-level evolution trends in Free Software, over a period of more than 15 years, through the eyes of a distro that sits at the nice intersection of the eldest, largest, and most reputed distros. To get there I've added support for sticky suites to the plumbing layer of debsources, and then injected historical releases from http://archive.debian.org. The injection process took about a week (without any sort of parallelism, pretty slow disks, and computing sha256 checksums, ctags, and sloccount on all source files) and has been an "interesting" experience. When you go back decades in technology time, bit rot is just around the corner, and I've found my share while injecting archive.d.o into sources.d.n. In both cases the respective maintainers (Guillem and Ganneff, kudos) have been positive about and helpful in improving the situation, despite the low impact of the bugs I've found on the average user. That's quite important for the long-term preservation of digital information in general, and for the perennity of access to Free Software in the specific case of Debian. While we are it, I'm now maintaining a list of bugs affecting sources.d.n but belonging to other packages, in case you fancy helping out but are not a Python hacker. Interestingly enough, quite a bit of those bugs are related to the fact that tools debsources uses (e.g. ctags, sloccount) are also starting to show their age. You might wander why buzz, rex, and bo are still missing from sources.d.n. That's in fact for similar reasons. Before hamm Debian didn't have complete archive coverage in terms of Sources indexes and .dsc files. Given that debsources rely on both to extract source packages, it first needs to grow an additional abstraction layer that can cope with their absence. It's SMOP, and planned. And now let's have fun with ctags bombs. Yours truly,
Stefano Indiana Zacchiroli
(credits: KiBi, #debian-ftp)

27 February 2014

Stefano Zacchiroli: moar stats for sources.debian.net

Debian: watch your stats! Over the past few weeks, myself and Matthieu Caneill have worked quite a bit on Debsources. As we have now deployed most of the new features on http://sources.debian.net, it's time for another "What's new with Debsources?" blog post. Here is what's new: Want more? Sure, we'll be happy to! But it'll happen faster if you help. Speaking of which: we've got Debsources into the new contributors game (see announcement) and we're looking forward to mentor new contributors.

10 February 2014

Bits from Debian: skyrocketing how-can-i-help popcon count

This is a repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post how-can-i-help by Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will inform you of new contribution opportunities. how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things, how-can-i-help shows bugs tagged "gift" related to packages you use. how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc. (As highly unscientific evidence: I've noticed a rather quick turnover of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.) So, if you haven't yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW. I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime I'll settle for making how-can-i-help's popcon count skyrocket. As of today, it looks like this: Alt how-can-i-help popularity contest graph 10/02/2014 which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about how-can-i-help. And let's see what we can collectively do to that graph. how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I'm convinced it can do wonders in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.

Stefano Zacchiroli: apt-get install how-can-i-help

skyrocketing how-can-i-help popcon count how-can-i-help by Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will inform you of new contribution opportunities. how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things, how-can-i-help shows bugs tagged "gift" related to packages you use. how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc. (As highly unscientific evidence: I've noticed a rather quick turnover of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.) So, if you haven't yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW. I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime I'll settle for making how-can-i-help's popcon count skyrocket. As of today, it looks like this:
how-can-i-help popularity contest graph, 10/02/2014
which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about how-can-i-help. And let's see what we can collectively do to that graph. how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I'm convinced it can do wonders in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.

14 January 2014

Stefano Zacchiroli: forthcoming talks

Over the next few weeks I'll be on the road, attending a few Free Software events and giving talks. In particular: See you "there"?

17 October 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: org-mutt ported to org-capture

org-mutt with org-mode >= 8 Thanks to Don I just remembered that I haven't yet announced org-mutt support for org-mode >= 8. Let's catch up! Since a few weeks I've been aware of the fact that my mutt/org-mode glue, AKA org-mutt, was no longer working with org-mode >= 8, due to the ditching of org-remember in favor of org-capture. Allegedly, org-capture should have been backward compatible, but it clearly is not. Before I had time to fix it myself, Mako came to my rescue and submitted a patch (now accepted) that does the needed porting. Free Software is truly amazing, isn't it? I've just updated the canonical org-mutt blog post, so that the documentation in there is up to date again. If you're using org-mutt, I suggest to refer to the Git repository as the canonical location for future updates, if any. Thanks Don, thanks Mako!

Don Armstrong: Using Mutt with Org Mode (with refile)

I use org mode extensively, and had added Zack's workflow for integrating mutt with org mode to my ~/.emacs some time ago. However, I've been annoyed that refiling closes the org-capture frame before refiling finishes. The following trivial modification to Zack's code (which I previously modified to work with org-mode >= 0.8) waits to close the frame until you've finished refiling.
 (require 'org-protocol)
 (add-hook 'org-capture-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
 (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
 (defadvice org-capture-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
   "Delete frame at remember finalization"
   (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
          (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
 (defadvice org-capture-refile (around delete-frame-after-refile activate)
   "Delete frame at remember refile"
   (if my-org-protocol-flag
       (progn
         (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
         ad-do-it
         (delete-frame))
     ad-do-it)
   )
 (defadvice org-capture-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
   "Delete frame at remember abort"
   (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
          (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
 (defadvice org-protocol-capture (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
   (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))
Now, the frame automatically disappears after you refile it, keeping my refile.org clean.

7 October 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: so long F2C423BC

and thanks for all the sigs Bandwagoning just a bit, and only a few days past the 3-year anniversary of my 4096R GPG key, I've finally got my acts together and revoked my old 1024D GPG key. If you haven't yet switched to a GPG key stronger than 1024D, you definitely should.
Think of the kittens.

17 September 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: sources.debian.net - advanced search and other news

all your ctag (and checksum) are belong to us A few months after the initial announcement, here are some news about the sources.d.n service. I've been late in blogging this, but most of it has been implemented by myself and Matthieu Caneill during DebConf13, which has been a great DebConf, totally exceeding my expectations (and they were already fairly high!). First, you might have noticed some user-visible changes: On the other hand, under the hood: As you usual, your bug reports (and patches!) are more than welcome, just check BUGS before reporting to avoid duplicates.
That's all!

8 August 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Hello from DebCamp

DebConf flag (minus the wind) Small update as someone was complaining about the lack of pictures from DebCamp on planet. Not to worry, everything is going fine, and some of the most important stuff is ready s3kr3t You can see a few pictures from the gallery. The view from the venue is quite outstanding (it was better when there was some sun on Tuesday, but my camera battery was out ). On my TODO-list: See you there!

11 July 2013

Daniel Pocock: Using debcheckout to build strongSwan 5.0 on Debian wheezy

Normally most people try to use packages from a stable Linux distribution because of their convenience and security support. Sometimes it's necessary to use a newer version, I recently had to do this with strongSwan and I'm sharing the procedure for other people to try. These days, it is actually very very easy to build a new version of a package from source and this procedure will work for many Debian packages. Debian wheezy ships with strongSwan version 4.5 packages. These are lacking support for a couple of features I needed, including dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 virtual IPs on a single user connection and maintaining the DNS server list on road-warriors Oddly enough, for a variety of reasons, I had to rebuild strongSwan on all the platforms where I wanted to use it (not just on Debian). I recently described how to build it with ECDSA support on Fedora and also how to build it with ECDSA support on OpenWRT. Following all of these procedures you will end up with strongSwan packages on all systems that can interoperate using dual stack IPv4, IPv6 and establish connections quickly, securely and reliably using ECC certificates. Get the build dependencies Many packages require extra tools and header files when building. These are packages that are not usually installed or required when running the package. However, they are very easy to get. For strongSwan:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install devscripts fakeroot
sudo apt-get build-dep strongswan
This should download and install the necessary dependencies. Notice we also installed the devscripts package, it provides the very handy debcheckout utility. Obtain and build the package Now for the real work. Fortunately this is not too hard either:
mkdir ~/ws
cd ~/ws
debcheckout strongswan
cd strongswan
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
Look in the directory ~/ws and you will find the .deb package files. Problems? On my own system, I observed that I could upgrade from the existing packages to the v5.0.4-6 package without any change to the configuration files. It just worked. Hopefully, these packages will eventually end up in Debian's backports catalog where you can install them without compiling. Nonetheless, problems for these packages can still be submitted through Debian's bug tracker - just make sure you clearly indicate that you built the package from source and give the git commit number (output of the command cd ~/ws/strongswan && git show head -1) Before trying the package and definitely before reporting any problem, it is worth checking the bug tracker and the Package Tracking System for known issues

2 July 2013

Bits from Debian: all Debian source are belong to us

This is a verbatim repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post TL;DR: go to http://sources.debian.net and enjoy.
Debsources is a new toy I've been working on at IRILL together with Matthieu Caneill. In essence, debsources is a simple web application that allows to publish an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web. You can deploy Debsources where you please, but there is a main instance at http://sources.debian.net (sources.d.n for short) that you will probably find interesting. sources.d.n follows closely the Debian archive in two ways:
  1. it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
  2. it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental), *-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)
Via sources.d.n you can therefore browse the content of Debian source packages with usual code viewing features like syntax highlighting. More interestingly, you can search through the source code (of unstable only, though) via integration with http://codesearch.debian.net. You can also use sources.d.n programmatically to query available versions or link to specific lines, with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages (example). In fact, you might have stumbled upon sources.d.n already in the past few days, via other popular Debian services where it has already been integrated. In particular: codesearch.d.n now defaults to show results via sources.d.n, and the PTS has grown new "browse source code" hyperlinks that point to it. If you've ideas of other Debian services where sources.d.n should be integrated, please let me know. I find Debsources and sources.d.n already quite useful but, as it often happens, there is still a lot TODO. Obviously, it is all Free Software (released under GNU AGPLv3). Do not hesitate to report new bugs and, better, to submit patches for the outstanding ones. Acknowledgements PS in case you were wondering: at present sources.d.n requires ~381 GB of disk space to hold all uncompressed source packages, plus ~83 GB for the local (compressed) source mirror

Stefano Zacchiroli: introducing sources.debian.net

all Debian source are belong to us TL;DR: go to http://sources.debian.net and enjoy.
Debsources is a new toy I've been working on at IRILL together with Matthieu Caneill. In essence, debsources is a simple web application that allows to publish an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web. You can deploy Debsources where you please, but there is a main instance at http://sources.debian.net (sources.d.n for short) that you will probably find interesting. sources.d.n follows closely the Debian archive in two ways:
  1. it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
  2. it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental), *-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)
Via sources.d.n you can therefore browse the content of Debian source packages with usual code viewing features like syntax highlighting. More interestingly, you can search through the source code (of unstable only, though) via integration with http://codesearch.debian.net. You can also use sources.d.n programmatically to query available versions or link to specific lines, with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages (example). In fact, you might have stumbled upon sources.d.n already in the past few days, via other popular Debian services where it has already been integrated. In particular: codesearch.d.n now defaults to show results via sources.d.n, and the PTS has grown new "browse source code" hyperlinks that point to it. If you've ideas of other Debian services where sources.d.n should be integrated, please let me know. I find Debsources and sources.d.n already quite useful but, as it often happens, there is still a lot TODO. Obviously, it is all Free Software (released under GNU AGPLv3). Do not hesitate to report new bugs and, better, to submit patches for the outstanding ones. Acknowledgements PS in case you were wondering: at present sources.d.n requires ~381 GB of disk space to hold all uncompressed source packages, plus ~83 GB for the local (compressed) source mirror

24 April 2013

Joachim Breitner: The carbondioxide footprint of Debian's Haskell packages

By now, Debian ships quite a lot of Haskell packages (~600). Because of GHC's ABI volatility, whenever we upload a new version of a library, we have to rebuild all libraries that depend on that. In particular, if we upload a new version of the compiler itself, we have to rebuild all Haskell library packages. So we have to rebuild stuff a lot. Luckily, Debian has a decent autobuilding setup so that I just need to tell it what to rebuild, and the rest happens automatically (including figuring out the actual order to build things).
I was curious how much we use the buildd system compared to other packages, and also how long the builders are busy building Haskell packages. All the data is in a postgresql database on buildd.debian.org, so with some python and javascript code, I can visualize this. The graphs show the number of all uploads by autobuilder on the amd64 architecture, with haskell uploads specially marked, and the second graph does the same for the build time. You can select time ranges and get aggregate statistics for that time span. During the last four days a complete rebuild was happening, due to the upload of GHC 7.6.3. During these 2 days and 18 hours building 537 packages took 48 hours of build time and produced 15kg of CO2. That is 94% of all uploads and 91% the total build time. The numbers are lower for the whole of last year: 52% of uploads, 31% of build time and 57kg of CO2. (The CO2 numbers are very rough estimates.)
Note that amd64 is a bit special, as most packages are uploaded on this architecture by the developers, so no automatic builds are happening. On other architectures have, every upload of a (arch:any) package is built, so the share of Haskell packages will be lower. Unfortunately, at the moment the database does not provide me with a table across all architectures (and I was too lazy to make it configurable yet).

16 April 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for March-April 2013

Dear Project Members,
   "Now that I have your attention, I would like to make the following
delegations:"

... nah, scrap that. In my last day in office I first of all owe you a report of DPL activities for the last reporting period of this term, i.e. March 8th until today. Here it is! Highlights Talks Over the past month or so I've attended and spoken on behalf of Debian in the following occasions: Assets I've approved the budget for the following forthcoming sprints: Also, we've bought a 3-year warranty pack for the disk array that powers ftp-master.d.o (~900 USD). On the income side, Brian Gupta has started an interesting matching fund experiment, in order to raise funds for the forthcoming DebConf13. The matching fund will be open until April 30th, so your help in spreading news would be welcome. Many thanks to Brian for the idea and to his company, Brandorr Group, for funding it. DPL helpers Three more DPL helpers IRC meetings have been held; minutes are available at the usual place. Legal Spring Cleaning I've finally cleaned up the pile of pending legal matters (but I'm sure new ones will show up for the delight of the next DPL :-P) Once again, I'd like to thank SFLC for the pro bono and very high quality legal advice they keep on offering to Debian. Miscellaneous
Now, before I get sentimental, let me thank Gergely, Lucas, and Moray for running in the recently concluded DPL election. Only thinking of running and then go through a campaign denote a very high commitment to the Project; we should all be thankful to them. Then I'd like to congratulate Lucas for his election. I've known him for a long time, and I can testify about his clear vision of the role Debian has to play in Free Software and on what Debian needs to improve to do so. Best wishes for the term ahead, Lucas! Finally, I'd like to thank you all for the support you've shown me over the past 3 years. Serving as DPL is a great honor, but also a very demanding job. Thank to you all, and to how cool Debian is, it has been for me an incredibly rewarding experience. I had no idea what I were doing when I embarked on this adventure, but in hindsight I don't regret any of it. See you around, as I don't plan to be anywhere far away from Debian anytime soon. Cheers.
PS the day-to-day activity logs for March and April 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 3,4

27 March 2013

Paul Tagliamonte: Debian as part of the GNOME OPW

As some may have seen, zack put out a note about the GNOME OPW. The GNOME OPW program, as some of you may know, is the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Debian has been considering participating this year, and I think it s something we should focus on this year. So, please, if you have ideas, please feel free to send along ideas on that thread it d be amazing to get this going (in conjunction with) GSoC this year. Also, if you have any GSoC ideas, please do also add those! GNOME OPW allows for things that are non-technical, so feel free to post non-technical things too (publicity team, www team, I m looking at you!)

Francesca Ciceri: bits.debian.org: challenge accepted

official blog for the Debian project? challenge accepted Ladies and gentlemen, I'm so excited to present you the official blog of the Debian Project. The idea is to make it the voice of the project, in addition to the official press releases and DPN, our bi-weekly newsletter.
I'm really excited about it not only because it will help us to communicate better with our users in letting them know what is going on, but also because it's something we long waited (and planned) for. And it was surely a collective effort: many thanks to Ana Guerrero, who not only is one of the main editors, but also the engine behind the idea and the realization of it; Stefano Zacchiroli, who during his three terms as DPL gave lots of support to this idea; and the Debian System Administrators Team who put all in place (and found the perfect name for it).

16 March 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for February 2013 and a half

Dear project members, here's another report of DPL activities, this time for a period longer than usual (February + 1st week of March), so that the next one will be at the very end of the current DPL term. Highlights Appointments DPL helpers Two more DPL helpers IRC meetings have happened, minutes and logs of both are available. Assets Events Past At the beginning of February, I've attended FOSDEM 2013, together with many other Debian people. I didn't have any specific talk this year, but it's been a chance to talk F2F about several ongoing issues (see logs), and help mediating in some conflicts. I've also accepted the invitation to participate in the GNOME Advisory Board meeting, together with Laurent Bigonville of our GNOME team. No report of that has been prepared as of yet (sorry about that), but we have both reported "live" to the rest of the team on IRC. Future Miscellaneous A couple of months ago I've mentioned that I had filed an application, as Debian representative, to participate in a working table to define software procurement rules for the Italian public administration. Good news: my application has been accepted, together with those of other well-known FOSS communities and organizations (e.g. KDE, FSFE). I'll keep you posted of how it goes. Let's go back to elect a new DPL and release Wheezy now,
Cheers.
PS the day-to-day activity logs for February and March 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 2,3

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