Dima Kogan: vnlog 1.33 released
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2022/06/28_vnlog-133-released.html
June 28, 2022, 4:47 PM
This is a minor release to the vnlog toolkit that adds a few convenience options
to the vnl-filter tool. The new options are
vnl-filter -l
Prints out the existing columns, and exits. I've been low-level wanting this for
years, but never acutely-enough to actually write it. Today I finally did it.
vnl-filter --sub-abs
Defines an absolute-value abs() function in the default awk mode. I've been
low-level wanting this for years as well. Previously I'd use --perl just to
get abs(), or I'd...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: WadC 3.1
https://jmtd.net/log/wadc_3.1/
June 28, 2022, 2:18 PM
Example map with tuneables on the right
WadC — the procedural programming environment for generating Doom
maps — version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done
a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said
this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC.
The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning
concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC
might want to load up an example progra...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Tie::ShadowHash 2.00
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-06/001.html
June 27, 2022, 10:51 PM
This is a small Perl module that combines multiple key/value sources of
data into a "shadow hash" that acts as if all of the underlying data
sources have been merged. Any modifications made to the shadow hash are
stored in an overlay and reflected in further accesses to the shadow hash,
but the underlying data sources are read-only and are not changed.
It had been 12 years since the last release of this small module, so it
was overdue for some modernization and cleanup. I also removed the n...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Light from Uncommon Stars
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-78907-9.html
June 27, 2022, 3:11 AM
Review: Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2021


ISBN:
1-250-78907-9


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
371

Katrina Nguyen is an young abused transgender woman. As the story opens,
she's preparing to run away from home. Her escape bag is packed with
meds, clothes, her papers, and her violin. The note she is leaving for
her parents says that she's going to San Francisco, a plausible lie. Her
actual dest...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Feet of Clay
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227551-8.html
June 26, 2022, 3:56 AM
Review: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #19


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
October 1996


Printing:
February 2014


ISBN:
0-06-227551-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
392

Feet of Clay is the 19th Discworld novel, the third Watch novel,
and probably not the best place to start. You could read only
Guards! Guards! and
Men at Arms before this one, though, if
you wanted.
This story open...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: Deleting an app won't bring back Roe v Wade
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/dont-panic-organize/
June 25, 2022, 10:27 PM
In some ways it feels like 2016 all over again.
I’m seeing panic-stricken calls for everyone to delete their period apps, close
their Facebook accounts, de-Google their cell phones and, generally speaking,
turn their entire online lives upside down to avoid the techno-surveillance
dragnet unleashed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
I’m sympathetic and generally agree that many of us should do most of those
things on any given day. But, there is a serious problem with this cycle of
repressio...
--------------------
Ryan Kavanagh: Routable network addresses with OpenIKED and systemd-networkd
https://rak.ac/blog/2022-06-25-routable-network-addresses-openiked-systemd-networkd/
June 25, 2022, 11:41 AM
I’ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN.
One of its features is that it can dynamically assign addresses on the internal network to clients, and clients can assign these addresses and routes to interfaces.
However, these interfaces must exist before iked can start.
Some months ago I switched my Debian laptop’s configuration from the traditional ifupdown to systemd-networkd.
It took me some time to figure out how to have systemd-networkd create dummy interfaces on which...
--------------------
Kees Cook: finding binary differences
https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2022/06/24/finding-binary-differences/
June 24, 2022, 8:11 PM
As part of the continuing work to replace 1-element arrays in the Linux kernel, it’s very handy to show that a source change has had no executable code difference. For example, if you started with this:
struct foo {
unsigned long flags;
u32 length;
u32 data[1];
};
void foo_init(int count)
{ struct foo *instance;
size_t bytes = sizeof(*instance) + sizeof(u32) * (count - 1);
...
instance = kmalloc(bytes, GFP_KERNEL);
...
};
And you changed only the struct defini...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid project
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2022/06/24/supporter-spotlight-hans-christoph-steiner-f-droid-project/
June 24, 2022, 10:00 AM
The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do.
This is the fifth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as a rec...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: A Dead Djinn in Cairo
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/dead-djinn-cairo.html
June 24, 2022, 4:11 AM
Review: A Dead Djinn in Cairo, by P. Djèlí Clark

Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
May 2016


ASIN:
B01DJ0NALI


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
47

Fatma el-Sha'arawi is a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of
Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities in an alternate 1912
Egypt. In Fatma's world, the mystic al-Jahiz broke through to the realm
of the djinn in the late 1800s, giving Egypt access to magic and the
super...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/06/23/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-may-2022/
June 23, 2022, 12:15 PM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
Two [1, 2] projects are in the pipeline now. Tryton project is in a final phase. Gradle projects is fighting with technical difficulties.
In May, we put aside 2233 EUR to fund Debian projects.
We’re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In May, 14...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 217 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-217-released/
June 23, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 217. This version includes the following changes:
* Update test fixtures for GNU readelf 2.38 (now in Debian unstable).
* Be more specific about the minimum required version of readelf (ie.
binutils) as it appears that this "patch" level version change resulted in
a change of output, not the "minor" version. (Closes: #1013348)
* Don't leak the (likely-temporary) pathname when comparing PDF documents.
You ...
--------------------
John Goerzen: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10396-i-finally-found-a-solid-debian-tablet-the-surface-go-2
June 22, 2022, 11:46 PM
I have been looking for a good tablet for Debian for… well, years. I want thin, light, portable, excellent battery life, and a servicable keyboard.
For a while, I tried a Lenovo Chromebook Duet. It meets the hardware requirements, well sort of. The problem is with performance and the OS. I can run Debian inside the ChromeOS Linux environment. That works, actually pretty well. But it is slow. Terribly, terribly, terribly slow. Emacs takes minutes to launch. apt-gets also do. It has ba...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - June 2022
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-june-2022.html
June 21, 2022, 5:15 PM
As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We
met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists' hacklab) to work on Debian
(and other stuff!), chat and socialise.
Although there were fewer people than at our last meeting1, we still did
a lot of work!
I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Clojure packages2, LeLutin worked
on podman and packaged libinfluxdb-http-perl and anarcat worked on
internetarchive, trocla and moneta. Olivier also came by and worked on
debugging h...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Writing a simple TCL interpreter in golang
https://blog.steve.fi/writing_a_simple_tcl_interpreter_in_golang.html
June 21, 2022, 9:45 AM
Recently I was reading Antirez's piece TCL the Misunderstood again, which is a nice defense of the utility and value of the TCL language.
TCL is one of those scripting languages which used to be used a hell of a lot in the past, for scripting routers, creating GUIs, and more. These days it quietly lives on, but doesn't get much love. That said it's a remarkably simple language to learn, and experiment with.
Using TCL always reminds me of FORTH, in the sense that the syntax consists of "words...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Lessons of Social Media from BBSs
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10393-lessons-of-social-media-from-bbss
June 21, 2022, 1:52 AM
In the recent article The Internet Origin Story You Know Is Wrong, I was somewhat surprised to see the argument that BBSs are a part of the Internet origin story that is often omitted. Surprised because I was there for BBSs, and even ran one, and didn’t really consider them part of the Internet story myself. I even recently enjoyed a great BBS documentary and still didn’t think of the connection on this way.
But I think the argument is a compelling one.
In truth, the histories of Arpanet a...
--------------------
Niels Thykier: wrap-and-sort with experimental support for comments in devscripts/2.22.2
https://nthykier.wordpress.com/2022/06/20/wrap-and-sort-with-experimental-support-for-comments-in-devscripts-2-22-2/
June 20, 2022, 8:00 PM
In the devscripts package currently in Debian testing (2.22.2), wrap-and-sort has opt-in support for preserving comments in deb822 control files such as debian/control and debian/tests/control. Currently, this is an opt-in feature to provide some exposure without breaking anything.
To use the feature, add --experimental-rts-parser to the command line. A concrete example being (adjust to your relevant style):
wrap-and-sort --experimental-rts-parser -tabk
Please provide relevant feedbac...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Pipe Issue Likely a Kernel Bug
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10390-pipe-issue-likely-a-kernel-bug
June 20, 2022, 4:31 PM
Saturday, I wrote in Pipes, deadlocks, and strace annoyingly fixing them about an issue where a certain pipeline seems to have a deadlock. I described tracing it into kernel code. Indeed, it appears to be kernel bug 212295, which has had a patch for over a year that has never been merged.
After continuing to dig into the issue, I eventually reported it as a bug in ZFS. One of the ZFS people connected this to an older issue my searching hadn’t uncovered.
rincebrain summarized:
I believe, if ...
--------------------
Iustin Pop: Experiment: A week of running
https://k1024.org/posts/2022/2022-06-20-a-week-of-running/
June 20, 2022, 1:17 PM
My sports friends know that I wasn’t able to really run in many, many
years, due to a recurring injury that was not fully diagnosed and
which, after many sessions with the doctor, ended up with OK-ish state
for day-to-day life but also with these words: “Maybe, running is just
not for you?”
The year 2012 was my “running year”. I went to a number of races,
wrote blog posts, then slowly started running only rarely, then a few
years later I was really only running once in a while, and cou...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: My free software activity of late (2022)
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html
June 20, 2022, 12:30 PM
I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software
and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been
involved in the last year and a half.
First, lets mention the book
releases I managed to
publish. The Cory Doctorow book "Hvordan knuse
overvåkningskapitalismen" argue that it is not the magic machine
learning of the big technology companies that causes the surveillance
capitalism to thrive, it is the lack of trust busting to enforce
existing anti-monopoly laws...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: A very liberal spam assassin rule
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/liberal-spam-rule/
June 20, 2022, 12:27 PM
I just sent myself a test message via Powerbase (a
hosted CiviCRM project for community organizers) and it
didn’t arrive. Wait, nope, there it is in my junk folder with a spam score of
6!
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=6.093 tagged_above=-999 required=5
tests=[BAYES_00=-1.9, DKIM_SIGNED=0.1, DKIM_VALID=-0.1,
DKIM_VALID_AU=-0.1, DKIM_VALID_EF=-0.1, DMARC_MISSING=0.1,
HTML_MESSAGE=0.001, KAM_WEBINAR=3.5, KAM_WEBINAR2=3.5,
NO_DNS_FOR_FROM=0.001, SPF_HELO_NONE=0.001, ST_KGM_DEALS_SUB_11=1.1,
T_SCC...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: #38: Faster Feedback Systems
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/06/19#038_faster_feedback_systems
June 19, 2022, 3:46 PM
Engineers build systems. Good engineers always stress and focus efficiency of these systems.
Two recent examples of engineering thinking follow. One was in a video / podcast interview with Martin Thompson (who is a noted high-performance code expert) I came across recently. The overall focus of the hour-long interview is on ‘managing software complexity’. Around minute twenty-two, the conversation turns to feedback loops and systems, and a strong preference for simple and fast systems for mo...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Pipes, deadlocks, and strace annoyingly fixing them
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10388-pipes-deadlocks-and-strace-annoyingly-fixing-them
June 19, 2022, 3:46 AM
This is a complex tale I will attempt to make simple(ish). I’ve (re)learned more than I cared to about the details of pipes, signals, and certain system calls – and the solution is still elusive.
For some time now, I have been using NNCP to back up my files. These backups are sent to my backup system, which effectively does this to process them (each ZFS send is piped to a shell script that winds up running this):
gpg -q -d | zstdcat -T0 | zfs receive -u -o readonly=on "$STORE/$DEST"
This...
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: blag is now available in Debian
https://venthur.de/2022-06-18-blag-in-debian.html
June 18, 2022, 4:00 PM
Last year, I wrote my own blog-aware static site generator in
Python. I called it “blag” – named after the blag of the
webcomic xkcd. Now I finally got around packaging- and uploading blag to
Debian. It passed the NEW queue and is now part of the distribution. That
means if you’re using Debian, you can install it via:
sudo aptitude install blag
Ubuntu will probably follow soon. For every other system, blag is also
available on PyPI:
pip install blag
To get started, you can
mkdir blog...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Matrix notes
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-06-17-matrix-notes/
June 17, 2022, 3:34 PM
I have some concerns about Matrix (the protocol, not the movie that
came out recently, although I do have concerns about that as
well). I've been watching the project for a long time, and it seems
more a promising alternative to many protocols like IRC, XMPP, and
Signal.
This review may sound a bit negative, because it focuses on those
concerns. I am the operator of an IRC network and people keep asking
me to bridge it with Matrix. I have myself considered just giving up
on IRC and converting t...
--------------------
Dima Kogan: Ricoh GR IIIx 802.11 reverse engineering
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2022/06/16_ricoh-gr-iiix-80211-reverse-engineering.html
June 16, 2022, 10:04 PM
I just got a fancy new camera: Ricoh GR IIIx. It's pretty great, and I strongly
recommend it to anyone that wants a truly pocketable camera with fantastic image
quality and full manual controls. One annoyance is the connectivity. It does
have both Bluetooth and 802.11, but the only official method of using them is
some dinky closed phone app. This is silly. I just did some reverse-engineering,
and I now have a functional shell script to download the last few images via
802.11. This is more conve...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.2.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/06/15#rcpparmadillo_0.11.2.0.0
June 16, 2022, 12:11 AM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 991 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 25 million t...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: AsioHeaders 1.22.1-1 on CRAN
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/06/15#asioheaders_1.22.1-1
June 15, 2022, 11:45 PM
An updated version of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN yesterday (in one of those pleasant fully-automated uploads and transitions). Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost – but requires linking when used as part of Boost. This standalone version of Asio is a header-only C++ library which can be used without linking (just like our BH package with parts of Boost).
This release brings a new upstream version, follo...
--------------------
Edward Betts: Find link needs a rewrite, the visual editor broke it
https://edwardbetts.com/blog/find-link-needs-a-rewrite
June 15, 2022, 10:22 PM
Find link is a tool that I wrote for adding links between articles in Wikipedia. Given an article title, find link will find other articles that include the entered article title but no link to the article. There is the option to edit the found articles and add the missing link.
For example, you might want to find missing links to the gig economy article.

I originally wrote the tool in 2008 when the MediaWiki software didn't have a rich-text editor. Wikipedia articles were edited by writ...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Really Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10385-really-enjoyed-jason-scotts-bbs-documentary
June 14, 2022, 12:13 AM
Like many young programmers of my age, before I could use the Internet, there were BBSs. I eventually ran one, though in my small town there were few callers.
Some time back, I downloaded a copy of Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary. You might know Jason Scott from textfiles.com and his work at the Internet Archive.
The documentary was released in 2005 and spans 8 episodes on 3 DVDs. I’d watched parts of it before, but recently watched the whole series.
It’s really well done, and it’s no...
--------------------
Edward Betts: Fixing spelling in GitHub repos using codespell
https://edwardbetts.com/blog/fixing-spelling-in-github-repos-using-codespell
June 13, 2022, 9:04 PM
Codespell is a spell checker specifically designed for finding misspellings in source code.
I've been using it to correct spelling mistakes in GitHub repos sine 2016.
Most spell checkers use a list of valid words and highlighting any word in a document that is not in the word list. This method doesn't work for source code because code contains abbreviations and words joined together without spaces, a spell checker will generate too many false positives.
Codespell uses a different approach, inste...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, May 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-may-2022.html
June 13, 2022, 6:30 PM
In May I was assigned 11 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 13 hours from April. I worked 8 hours,
and will carry over the remaining time to June.
I spent some time triaging security issues for Linux, working out
which of them were fixed upstream and which actually applied to the
versions provided in Debian 9 "stretch". I rebased the Linux 4.9
(linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not make an
upload this month. I started backporti...
--------------------
Iustin Pop: Somewhat committing to a new sport
https://k1024.org/posts/2022/2022-06-12-new-sport/
June 12, 2022, 9:00 PM
Quite a few years ago - 4, to be precise, so in 2018 - I did a couple
of SUP trainings, organised by a colleague. That was enjoyable, but
not really matching with me (asymmetric paddling, ugh!), so I also did
learn some kayaking, which I really love, but that’s way higher
overhead - no sea around in Switzerland, and lakes are generally too
small. So I basically postponed any more water sports 😞, until
sometime in the future when I’ll finally decide what I want to do (and
in what setup).
I...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Shattered Sphere
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-8125-3016-0.html
June 12, 2022, 3:48 AM
Review: The Shattered Sphere, by Roger MacBride Allen

Series:
Hunted Earth #2


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
July 1994


Printing:
September 1995


ISBN:
0-8125-3016-0


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
491

The Shattered Sphere is a direct sequel to
The Ring of Charon and spoils everything
about the plot of the first book. You don't want to start here. Also be
aware that essentially everything you can read abo...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: What's in sid?
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Jun-11.html.en#2022-Jun-11-14:27:28
June 11, 2022, 5:27 AM
What's in sid?
I wanted to check what version of libc was used in current Debian sid.
I am lazy and I used podman to check.
However I noticed that apt update is very slow for me, 20kB/s. Wondering if something is wrong.
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Updating a rooted Pixel 3a
https://veronneau.org/updating-a-rooted-pixel-3a.html
June 11, 2022, 4:00 AM
A short while after getting a Pixel 3a, I decided to root it, mostly to
have more control over the charging procedure. In order to preserve battery
life, I like my phone to stop charging at around 75% of full battery capacity
and to shut down automatically at around 12%. Some Android ROMs have extra
settings to manage this, but LineageOS unfortunately does not.
Android already comes with a fairly complex mechanism to handle the charge
cycle, but it is mostly controlled by the kernel and cannot b...
--------------------
Iustin Pop: Still alive, 2022 version
https://k1024.org/posts/2022/2022-06-10-still-alive/
June 10, 2022, 9:22 PM
Still alive, despite the blog being silent for more than a year.
Nothing bad happened, but there was always something more important
(or interesting) to do than write a post. And I did say many, many
times - “Oh, I should write a post about this thing I just did or
learned about”, but I never followed up.
And I was close to forgetting entirely about blogging (ahem, it’s a
bit much calling it “blogging”), until someone I follow posted
something along the lines “I have this half-writte...
--------------------
Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt 6 in Debian bullseye
https://perezmeyer.com.ar/blog/2022/06/10/qt6-in-debian-bullseye/
June 10, 2022, 4:45 PM
As announced some time ago on Debian Backport’s mailing list I will be backporting Qt 6 to Debian 11 “Bullseye”. This comprises the (so far) 29 source packages that compose Qt 6 and libassimp.
The Qt Company wanted to let us Debian users also enjoy Qt 6 on Bullseye, so they contacted me (and by extension my employer ICS) to bring this forward. As said in the mail I sent to the backports list I’m making the commitment to maintain the packages myself, but I’m really happy the Qt Company ...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Know your tools - simple backup with rsync
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-06-09-know-rsync.html
June 10, 2022, 11:40 AM
Posted on June 9, 2022


Tags: debian, free software

I’ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore.
However you can do much of rsnapshot with rsync alone nowadays.
The --link-dest option (manpage) solves the part of creating hardlinks to a previous backup (found here). So my backup program becomes this shell script in ~/backups/backup.sh:
#!/bin/sh
...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Missing memegen
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-05-01-missing-memegen.html
June 10, 2022, 11:40 AM
Posted on May 1, 2022


Tags: debian, free software, life

Back at $COMPANY we had an internal meme-site. I had some reputation in my team for creating good memes. When I watched Episode 3 of Season 2 from Yes Premier Minister yesterday, I really missed a place to post memes.
This is the full scene. Please watch it or even the full episode before scrolling down to the GIFs. I had a good laugh for some time.
With Debian, I could just download the episode from somewhere on the...
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Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-03-12-lsp-java-coming-to-debian.html
June 10, 2022, 11:40 AM
Posted on March 12, 2022


Tags: debian

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features.
I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debia...
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Thomas Koch: Waiting for a STATE folder in the XDG basedir spec
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-18-state-folder-in-xdg-basedir.html
June 10, 2022, 11:40 AM
Posted on February 18, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

The XDG Basedirectory specification proposes default homedir folders for the categories DATA (~/.local/share), CONFIG (~/.config) and CACHE (~/.cache). One category however is missing: STATE. This category has been requested several times but nothing happened.
Examples for state data are:
history files of shells, repls, anything that uses libreadline
logfiles
state of application windows on exit
recently opened files...
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Thomas Koch: shared infrastructure coop
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-05-shared-infrastructure-coop.html
June 10, 2022, 11:40 AM
Posted on February 5, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

I’m working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn’t do programming. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time. Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci,...
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Sam Hartman: Flailing to Replace Jack with Pipewire for DJ Audio
https://hartmans.dreamwidth.org/99762.html
June 10, 2022, 12:14 AM
I could definitely use some suggestions here, both in terms of things to try or effective places to ask questions about Pipewire audio. The docs are improving, but are still in early stages. Pipewire promises to combine the functionality of PulseAudio and Jack. That would be great for me. I use Jack for my DJ work, and it’s somewhat complicated and fragile. However, so far my attempts to replace Jack have been unsuccessful, and I might need to even use PulseAudio instead of Pipewire to get the...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 216 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-216-released/
June 10, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 216. This version includes the following changes:
* Print profile output if we were called with --profile and we receive a
TERM signal.
* Emit a warning if/when we are handling a TERM signal.
* Clarify in the code in what situations the main "finally" block gets
called, especially in relation to handling TERM signals.
* Clarify and tidy some unconditional control flow in diffoscope.profiling.
You find out...
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Enrico Zini: Updating cbqt for bullseye
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/qt5/updating-cbqt-for-bullseye
June 9, 2022, 10:15 AM
Back in 2017 I did work to setup a cross-building toolchain for QT Creator,
that takes advantage of Debian's packaging for all the dependency ecosystem.
It ended with cbqt
which is a little script that sets up a chroot to hold
cross-build-dependencies, to avoid conflicting with packages in the host
system, and sets up a qmake alternative to make use of them.
Today I'm dusting off that work, to ensure it works on Debian bullseye.
Resetting QT Creator
To make things reproducible, I wanted to reset...
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Jonathan Dowland: Fight Club OST
https://jmtd.net/log/Fight_Club_OST/
June 9, 2022, 9:40 AM
I often listen to soundtracks when I'm concentrating. The Fight Club
soundtrack, by the Dust Brothers, is not one I turn to very often. I
do love the way it was packaged for vinyl. The cover design references
IKEA, but the clever thing is it has a mailer-style pull-cord to open
it up. You can't open the packaging using it without literally tearing
the package in half. There is a secret, alternative way to get in with
less damage, but if you try it the packaging has a surprise for you.
This Imag...
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Laura Arjona Reina: Moving to a faster but smaller disk, encrypted setup
https://larjona.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/moving-to-a-faster-but-smaller-disk-encrypted-setup/
June 8, 2022, 12:05 PM
My work computer runs Debian 11 bullseye (the current stable release) in a mechanical 500GB disk, and I was provided with a new SDD disk but its size was 480 GB. So I had to shrink my partitions before copying the data to the new disk. It turned out to be a bit difficult because my main partition was encrypted.
I write here how I did, maybe there are other simpler ways but I couldn’t find them.
References:
https://linux-blog.anracom.com/2018/11/09/shrinking-an-encrypted-partition-with...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-05/
June 6, 2022, 12:23 PM
Welcome to the May 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Repfix paper
Zhilei Ren, Shiwei Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Xiaochen Li, Zhide Zhou and He Jiang have published an academic paper titled Automated Patching for Unreproducible Builds:
[..] fixing unreproducible build issues...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in May 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/06/my-debian-activities-in-may-2022/
June 6, 2022, 10:51 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 288 and rejected 45 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 290.
Debian LTS
This was my ninety-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:
[DLA 3029-1] cups security update for one embargoed CVE
[DLA 3028-1] atftp security update for one CVE
[DLA 3030-1] zipios++ security upd...
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Junichi Uekawa: June came.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Jun-4.html.en#2022-Jun-4-17:42:06
June 4, 2022, 8:42 AM
June came. I am still playing with rust these days. Learning more things every day.
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Petter Reinholdtsen: LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html
June 3, 2022, 7:10 PM
Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
LinuxCNC system, I
proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
translators. The original system consisted of independently written
documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
know how much was left to translated. By using
the po4a system to generate POT and PO
files from the English documentation, this can be improve...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/06/03/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-april-2022/
June 3, 2022, 4:42 PM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
Two projects are currently in the pipeline: Gradle enterprise and Tryton update. Progress is quite slow on the Gradle one, there are technical difficulties. The tryton one was stalled because the developer had not enough time but seems to progress smoothly in the last weeks.
In April, we put aside 2635 EUR to fund Debian projects.
We’re looking forward to receive more project...
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François Marier: Using Gandi DNS for Let's Encrypt certbot verification
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/using-gandi-dns-lets-encrypt-certbot-verification/
June 3, 2022, 4:45 AM
I had some problems getting the Gandi certbot
plugin to work in Debian bullseye
since the documentation appears to be outdated.
When running certbot renew --dry-run, I saw the following error message:
Plugin legacy name certbot-plugin-gandi:dns may be removed in a future version. Please use dns instead.
Thanks to an issue in another DNS
plugin, I was
able to easily update my configuration to the new naming convention.
Setup
Get an API key from Gandi and
then put it in /etc/letsencrypt/gandi...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 215 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-215-released/
June 3, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 215. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Bug fixes:
- Also catch IndexError (in addition to ValueError) when parsing .pyc
files. (Closes: #1012258)
- Strip "sticky" etc. from "x.deb: sticky Debian binary package […]".
Thanks to David Prévot for the report. (Closes: #1011635)
- Correctly package diffoscope's scripts/ directory, fixing the extraction
of vmlinuz kerne...
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Daniel Lange: Get Youtube Channel ID from username
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/175-Get-Youtube-Channel-ID-from-username.html
June 1, 2022, 4:45 PM
Youtube has a really nice RSS feature that is extremely well hidden.
If you postfix a Channel ID to
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id goes here>
you get a really nice Atom 1.0 (~RSS) feed for your feedreader.
Unfortunately the Channel ID is hard to find while you are navigating Youtube with usernames in the URL.
E.g. https://www.youtube.com/c/TED is TED's channel, full of interesting and worth-to-watch content (and some assorted horse toppings, of course).
But ...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/06/01/floss-activities/
May 31, 2022, 11:46 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
libpst:
fix
file handle leak,
missing printf conversion
gensim:
cleanup
MANIFEST,
cython language_level,
obsolete references
duck:
indicator phrases
(1
2),
typos
Debian release website:
link archive criteria
Debian puppet:
typo
Debian BTS usertags:
moved default-java18 to debian-java,
moved riscv64 to debian-riscv
Debian website:
use contact page in footer
Debian wiki pages:
Accessibility/...
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Russell Coker: Links May 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/05/31/links-may-2022/
May 31, 2022, 12:26 PM
dontkillmyapp.com is a web site about Android phone vendors who make their phones kill your apps when you don’t want them to [1]. One of the many reasons why Pine and Purism offer the promise of better phones.
This blog post about the Librem 5 camera is interesting [2]. Currently the Librem 5 camera isn’t very usable for me as I just want to point and shoot, but it apparently works well for experts. Taking RAW photos is a good feature that I’d like to have in all my camera phones.
The Russ...
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Daniel Lange: Work-around for randomly dropping WiFi connections on ChromeOS
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/174-Work-around-for-randomly-dropping-WiFi-connections-on-ChromeOS.html
May 30, 2022, 7:25 PM
The company got me a Chromebook for times when I want to ignore email and not get dragged into code reviews but still be available on IRC and chat. Nifty devices at great price points. I really like them.
These things are meant to be very consumer-style end-user devices. You log in with your Google account and everything works. Until it doesn't.
Just setting it up caused the first issue:
I was always thrown back to a black screen and then another login-screen despite having successfully log...
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Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes its new Outreachy interns
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/welcome-outreachy-interns-2022.html
May 30, 2022, 10:00 AM
Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that
Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy May 2022 - August 2022 round.
Israel Galadima and Michael Ikwuegbu
will work on
Improve yarn package manager integration with Debian,
mentored by Akshay S Dinesh and Pirate Praveen.
Congratulations and welcome to Israel Galadima and Michael Ikwuegbu!
From the official website: Outreachy provides
three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepres...
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