Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, August-September 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-august-september-2022.html
October 11, 2022, 2:33 PM
I have continued to work for Freexian on Debian LTS. In August I
carried over 21 hours from July, and worked 13 hours. In September
I was assigned an additional 17 hours, and worked 16 hours. I will
carry over 9 hours into October.
In August, Debian 10 "buster" entered LTS status. I spent some time
on the backport of Linux 5.10 for buster. While this previously
existed in buster-backports, further changes were required to add it
as an alternative kernel version in buster-sec...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: Skipping releases when upgrading Debian systems
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/13087.html
October 10, 2022, 3:48 PM
Debian does not officially support upgrading from earlier than the previous stable release: you’re not supposed to “skip” releases. Instead, you’re supposed to upgrade to each intervening major release in turn.
However, skipping intervening releases does, in fact, often work quite well. Apparently, this is surprising to many people, even Debian insiders. I was encouraged to write about it some more.
My personal experience
I have three conventionally-managed personal server systems (by wh...
--------------------
Joachim Breitner: rec-def: Minesweeper case study
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/796-rec-def__Minesweeper_case_study
October 10, 2022, 8:22 AM
I’m on the train back from MuniHac, where I gave a talk about the rec-def library that I have excessively blogged about recently (here, here, here and here). I got quite flattering comments about that talk, so if you want to see if they were sincere, I suggest you watch the recording of “Getting recursive definitions off their bottoms” (but it’s not necessary for the following).
After the talk, Franz Thoma approached me and told me a story of how we was once implementing the game Mineswe...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Focus writing with (despite) LaTeX
https://jmtd.net/log/latex_writing/
October 9, 2022, 7:54 PM
LaTeX — the age-old typesetting system — makes me angry. Not because it's bad.
To clarify, not because there's something better. But because there should
be.
When writing a document using LaTeX, if you are prone to procrastination
it can be very difficult to focus on the task at hand, because there are so
many yaks to shave. Here's a few points of advice.
format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input
to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to b...
--------------------
Emmanuel Kasper: Markdown CMS or Wiki for smallish website
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/markdown-cms-or-wiki-for-smallish-website/
October 9, 2022, 11:20 AM
Following my markdown craze, I am slowly starting to move my Dokuwiki based homesite to Grav, a flat file Markdown CMS.
PHP will be always be PHP, but the documentation and usage seem sound (all config is either via an admin panel or editing YAML files) and it has professional support.
I intend to use this Debian based Dockerfile and Podman to deploy Grav.
Pandoc the talented document converter, hat support for Dokuwiki syntax, Markdown and PHP Markdown extra, so I expected limited hurdles whe...
--------------------
Sergio Talens-Oliag: Shared networking for Virtual Machines and Containers
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/shared_networking_for_vms_and_containers/
October 9, 2022, 9:45 AM
This entry explains how I have configured a linux bridge, dnsmasq and
iptables to be able to run and communicate different virtualization systems
and containers on laptops running Debian GNU/Linux.
I’ve used different variations of this setup for a long time with
VirtualBox and KVM for
the Virtual Machines and Linux-VServer,
OpenVZ, LXC and lately
Docker or Podman for the
Containers.
Required packagesI’m running Debian Sid with systemd and network-manager to configure the
WiFi and Ethernet i...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Tie::ShadowHash 2.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-10/001.html
October 8, 2022, 4:09 PM
Tie::ShadowHash is a small Perl module that allows one to stack an
in-memory modifiable hash on top of a read-only hash obtained from
anywhere you can get a hash in Perl (including a tied hash), functioning
much like an overlay file system with the same benefits.
This release just (hopefully) fixes a few test suite failures, and is
probably not worth announcing except that it bugs me to not announce each
software release.
You can get the latest version from CPAN or the
Tie::ShadowHash dist...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Trivial benchmarks of toy languages
https://blog.steve.fi/trivial_benchmarks_of_toy_languages.html
October 8, 2022, 11:15 AM
Over the past few months (years?) I've posted on my blog about the various toy interpreters I've written.
I've used a couple of scripting languages/engines in my professional career, but in public I think I've implemented
BASIC
https://github.com/skx/gobasic
evalfilter
https://github.com/skx/evalfilter
(Basically the same as the bytecode VM of Monkey).
FORTH
https://github.com/skx/foth
Lisp
https://github.com/skx/yal
Monkey
https://github.com/skx/monkey
TCL
https://github.com...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-09/
October 7, 2022, 9:25 PM
Welcome to the September 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
David A. Wheeler reported to us that the ...
--------------------
Edward Betts: Fish shell now has underscore as a number separator (my feature request)
https://edwardbetts.com/blog/fish-shell-underscore-number-separator
October 7, 2022, 1:05 PM
In November 2021 I filed a feature request for the fish shell to add underscore as a thousand separator in
numbers. My feature request has been implemented and is available
in fish 3.5.0, released 16 June 2022.
The fish shell supports mathematical operations using the math command.
edward@x1c9 ~> math 2_000 + 22
2022
edward@x1c9 ~>
The underscore can be used as a thousand separator, but there are other uses for a number separator. Here's a list taken
from a post by Mathias Bynens abou...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 224 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-224-released/
October 7, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 224. This version includes the following changes:
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Fix rlib test failure with LLVM 15. Thanks to Gianfranco Costamagna
(locutusofborg) for the patch.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rblpapi 0.3.14: Updates and Extensions
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/10/06#rblpapi_0.3.14
October 6, 2022, 10:46 PM
Version 0.3.14 of the Rblpapi package arrived on CRAN earlier today. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).
This is the fourteenth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. It comprises a nice PR from Robert Harlow extending support to B-PIPE authentication (for those who have it) along with a few fixes made since the last release in Janu...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61535.html
October 6, 2022, 8:31 AM
Fast laptops are expensive, cheap laptops are slow. But even a fast laptop is slower than a decent workstation, and if your developers want a local build environment they're probably going to want a decent workstation. They'll want a fast (and expensive) laptop as well, though, because they're not going to carry their workstation home with them and obviously you expect them to be able to work from home. And in two or three years they'll probably want a new laptop and a new workstation, and that'...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: git worktrees
https://jmtd.net/log/worktrees/
October 6, 2022, 7:04 AM
I work on OpenJDK backports:
taking a patch that was committed to a current version of JDK, and adapting it
to an older one. There are four main OpenJDK versions that I am concerned with:
the current version ("jdk"), 8, 11 and 17. These are all maintained in separate
Git(Hub) repositories.
It's very useful to have access to the other JDKs when working on any
particular version. For example, to backport a patch from the latest version to
17, where the delta is not too big, a lot of the time you ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RVowpalWabbit 0.0.17: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/10/05#rvowpalwabbit_0.0.17
October 5, 2022, 10:13 PM
Almost to the week one year since the last maintenance release, we can announce another maintenance release, now at version 0.0.17, of the RVowpalWabbit package. The CRAN maintainers kindly and politly pointed out that I was (cough, cough) apparently the last maintainer who had packages that set StagedInstall: no. Guilty as charged.
RVowpalWabbit is one the two packages; the other one will hopefully follow ‘shortly’. And while I long suspected linking aspects to drive this (this is an old pa...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: rewrite rule representation
https://jmtd.net/log/phd/representation/
October 4, 2022, 8:29 PM
I've begun writing up my phd and, not for the first time, I'm pondering
issues of how best to represent things. Specifically, rewrite rules.
Here's one way of representing an example rewrite rule:
streamFilter g . streamFilter f = streamFilter (g . f)
This is a fairly succinct representation. It's sort-of Haskell, but not
quite. It's an equation. The left-hand side is a pattern: it's intended
to describe not one expression but a family of expressions that match.
The lower case individual let...
--------------------
Abhijith PA: Laptop refreshment
https://abhijithpa.me/2022/Laptop-refresh/
October 4, 2022, 9:53 AM
(Sorry if you have read this already, due to a tag mistake, my draft
copy got published)
I recently bought a refurbished thinkpad x260. If you have read my
post of my <a href=”<!DOCTYPE html>





Laptop refreshment



















































Abhijith PA


Hello, I'm Abhijith. A Fr...
--------------------
Dima Kogan: mrcal 2.2 released
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2022/10/04_mrcal-22-released.html
October 4, 2022, 8:05 AM
Today I released mrcal 2.2 (the release notes are available here). This release
contains lots of medium-important internal improvements, and is a result of
Heavy dogfooding. I use these tools a lot every day, and many things are
nicer, easier and work better in 2.2 than in 2.1
Not-yet-completed cool new functionality. Some of the required internal
improvements for the big new features are being released here.
The biggest single new feature in this release is the interactive graphical too...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Dragon Never Sleeps
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-59780-099-6.html
October 4, 2022, 3:01 AM
Review: The Dragon Never Sleeps, by Glen Cook

Publisher:
Night Shade Books


Copyright:
1988


Printing:
2008


ISBN:
1-59780-099-6


Format:
MOBI


Pages:
449

Canon Space is run, in a way, by the noble mercantile houses, who spread
their cities, colonies, and mines through the mysterious Web that allows
faster-than-light interstellar travel. The true rulers of Canon Space,
though, are the Guardships: enormous, undefe...
--------------------
Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.6.0rc1
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4286
October 3, 2022, 10:26 PM
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
Get it on github.
These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki.
What’s new since 0.5.10?
Full rewrite of git-cinnabar in Rust.
Push performance is between twice and 10 times faster than 0.5.x, depending on scenarios.
Based on git 2.38.0.
git cinnabar fetch now accepts a --tags flag to fetch tags.
git cinnabar bundle...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Death Certificate, Legal Heir, Succession Certificate, and Indian Beaureacracy.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/10/04/death-certificate-legal-heir-succession-certificate-and-indian-beaureacracy/
October 3, 2022, 9:00 PM
Death Certificate
After waiting for almost two, two, and a half months, I finally got mum’s death certificate last week. A part of me was saddened as it felt like I was nailing her or putting nails to the coffin or whatever it is, (even though I’m an Agarwal) I just felt sad and awful. I was told just get a death certificate and your problems will be over. Some people wanted me to give some amount under the table or something which I didn’t want to party of and because of that perhaps i...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities September 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/10/03/floss-activities/
October 3, 2022, 12:47 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
halibut:
add documentation generator metadata
mpv-mpris:
fix tests
duck:
obsolete site indicators
devscripts:
fix example,
add experimental pseudo-excuses
dpkg-repack:
show dpkg-deb cmd
Debian QA services:
add
experimental pseudo-excuses,
improve excuses page
Debian usertags:
fixed ports, lintian usertags
Debian package uploads:
mpv-mpris backport
Debian wiki pages:
ArchitectureSpecificsMe...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/10/my-debian-activities-in-september-2022/
October 3, 2022, 12:01 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 226 and rejected 33 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 232.
All in all I addressed about 60 RM-bugs and either simply removed the package or added a moreinfo tag. In total I spent 5 hours for this task.
Anyway, I have to repeat my comment from last month: please have a look at the removal page and check whether the created dak command is really what you wanted. It would also help if you check the reverse dependencies and write a commen...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Jingo
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-228020-1.html
October 3, 2022, 3:27 AM
Review: Jingo, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #21


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
1997


Printing:
May 2014


ISBN:
0-06-228020-1


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
455

This is the 21st Discworld novel and relies on the previous Watch novels
for characterization and cast development. I would not start here.
In the middle of the Circle Sea, the body of water between Ankh-Morpork
and the desert empire ...
--------------------
Marco d'Itri: Debian bookworm on a Lenovo T14s Gen3 AMD
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_463
October 3, 2022, 1:12 AM
I recently upgraded my laptop to a Lenovo T14s Gen3 AMD and I am happy to report that it works just fine with Debian/unstable using a 5.19 kernel.
The only issue is that some firmware files are still missing and I had to install them manually.
Updates are needed for the firmware-amd-graphics package (#1019847) for the Radeon 680M GPU (AMD Rembrandt) and for the firmware-atheros package (#1021157) for the Qualcomm NFA725A Wi-Fi card (which is actually reported as a NFA765).
s2idle (AKA "modern...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.0.1 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/10/02#rcpparmadillo_0.11.4.0.1
October 2, 2022, 4:08 PM
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) 1023 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.4 mi...
--------------------
Steve McIntyre: Firmware vote result - the people have spoken!
https://blog.einval.com/2022/10/02#firmware-vote-result
October 2, 2022, 2:15 PM
It's time for another update on Debian's firmware GR. I wrote about
the
problem back
in April and about the vote
itself a
few days back.
Voting closed last night and we have
a result!
This is unofficial so far - the official result will
follow shortly when the Project Secretary sends a signed mail to
confirm it. But that's normally just a formality at this point.
A Result!
The headline result is: Choice 5 / Proposal E
won: Change
SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer. I'm
happy...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: I've sent a kernel patch.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Oct-1.html.en#2022-Oct-1-22:07:57
October 1, 2022, 1:07 PM
I've sent a kernel patch. It's been 4 years since my last upstream kernel patch it seems.
Time flies.
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: vim-css-color
https://jmtd.net/log/vim_plugins/vim-css-color/
September 30, 2022, 7:48 PM
Last year I wrote about a subset of the vim plugins I was using,
specifically those created by master craftsman Tim
Pope. Off and on since then I've reviewed
the other plugins I use and tried a few others, so I thought I'd
write about them.
automatic colour name colouring
vim-css-color is a simple plugin that
recognised colour names specified in CSS-style: e.g. 'red', '#ff0000',
'#rgb(255,0,0)' etc., and colours them accordingly. True to its name,
once installed it's active when editin...
--------------------
Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in September 2022
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-sept-22/
September 30, 2022, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (thirty-sixth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 45th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
There’s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:
Debian Uploads
rails (2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-2) - Add patch to allow Symbols in YAML columns, fixes #1018934.
rails (2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-3) - Add patch to remove a...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 223 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-223-released/
September 30, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 223. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* The cbfstools utility is now provided in Debian via the coreboot-utils
Debian package, so we can enable that functionality within Debian.
(Closes: #1020630)
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Also include coreboot-utils in Build-Depends and Test-Depends so it is
available for the tests.
[ Jelle van der Waa ]
* Add support for file 5.43.
You find out...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Detecting manual (and optimizing large) package installs in Puppet
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-09-29-optimizing-puppet-bootstrap/
September 29, 2022, 7:05 PM
Well this is a mouthful.
I recently worked on a neat hack called puppet-package-check. It
is designed to warn about manually installed packages, to make sure
"everything is in Puppet". But it turns out it can (probably?)
dramatically decrease the bootstrap time of Puppet bootstrap when it
needs to install a large number of packages.
Detecting manual packages
On a cleanly filed workstation, it looks like this:
root@emma:/home/anarcat/bin# ./puppet-package-check -v
listing puppet packages...
l...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links September 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/09/29/links-september-2022/
September 29, 2022, 12:55 PM
Tony Kern wrote an insightful document about the crash of a B-52 at Fairchild air base in 1994 as a case study of failed leadership [1].
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful medium article “We Should Not Endure a King” describing the case for anti-trust laws [2]. We need them badly.
Insightful Guardian article about the way reasonable responses to the bad situations people are in are diagnosed as mental health problems [3]. Providing better mental healthcare is good, but the government should a...
--------------------
Jelmer Vernooij: Northcape 4000
https://www.jelmer.uk/northcape4000.html
September 28, 2022, 10:00 PM
This summer, I signed up to participate in the Northcape 4000
<https://www.northcape4000.com/>, an annual 4000km bike ride between Rovereto
(in northern Italy) and the northernmost point of Europe, the North cape.
The Northcape event has been held for several years, and while it always ends
on the North Cape, the route there varies. Last years’ route went through the
Baltics, but this years’ was perhaps as direct as possible - taking us through
Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, th...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: Hippotat (IP over HTTP) - first advertised release
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/12934.html
September 28, 2022, 8:12 PM
I have released version 1.0.0 of Hippotat, my IP-over-HTTP system. To quote the README:
You’re in a cafe or a hotel, trying to use the provided wifi. But it’s not working. You discover that port 80 and port 443 are open, but the wifi forbids all other traffic.
Never mind, start up your hippotat client. Now you have connectivity. Your VPN and SSH and so on run over Hippotat. The result is not very efficient, but it does work.
Story
In early 2017 I was in a mountaintop cafeteria, hoping to...
--------------------
Vincent Fourmond: Version 3.1 of QSoas is out
https://vince-debian.blogspot.com/2022/09/version-31-of-qsoas-is-out.html
September 28, 2022, 1:29 PM
The new version of QSoas has just been released ! It brings in a host of new features, as the releases before, but maybe the most important change is the following...
Binary images now freely available !
Starting from now, all the binary images for the new versions of QSoas will freely available from the download page. You can download the precompiled versions of QSoas for MacOS or windows. So now, you have no reason anymore not to try !
My aim with making the binaries freely available is also ...
--------------------
François Marier: Upgrading from chan_sip to res_pjsip in Asterisk 18
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/upgrading-from-chan_sip-to-res_pjsip-asterisk-18/
September 27, 2022, 11:30 PM
After upgrading to Ubuntu Jammy and
Asterisk 18.10, I saw the following messages in
my logs:
WARNING[360166]: loader.c:2487 in load_modules: Module 'chan_sip' has been loaded but was deprecated in Asterisk version 17 and will be removed in Asterisk version 21.
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35468 in deprecation_notice: chan_sip has no official maintainer and is deprecated. Migration to
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35469 in deprecation_notice: chan_pjsip is recommended. See guides at the Asterisk ...
--------------------
Steve McIntyre: Firmware again - updates, how I'm voting and why!
https://blog.einval.com/2022/09/27#firmware-vote
September 27, 2022, 5:46 PM
Updates
Back in April I wrote about
issues
with how we handle firmware in Debian, and I also spoke about it at
DebConf
in July. Since then, we've started the General Resolution process -
this led to a lot of discussion on the
the debian-vote
mailing list and we're now into the second week of
the voting
phase.
The discussion has caught the interest of a few news sites along
the way:
Debian to vote on
its firmware path in Linux Weekly News
Debian
Begins A General Resolution To Decide W...
--------------------
Jelmer Vernooij: Northcape 4000
https://www.jelmer.uk/northcape4000.html
September 26, 2022, 10:00 PM
This summer, I signed up to participate in the Northcape 4000
<https://www.northcape4000.com/>, an annual 4000km bike ride between Rovereto
(in northern Italy) and the northernmost point of Europe, the North cape.
The Northcape event has been held for several years, and while it always ends
on the North Cape, the route there varies. Last years’ route went through the
Baltics, but this years’ was perhaps as direct as possible - taking us through
Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, th...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/09/new-developers-2022-08.html
September 26, 2022, 2:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Sakirnth Nagarasa (sakirnth)
Philip Rinn (rinni)
Arnaud Rebillout (arnaudr)
Marcos Talau (talau)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Xiao Sheng Wen
Andrea Pappacoda
Robin Jarry
Ben Westover
Michel Alexandre Salim
Congratulations!...
--------------------
Sergio Talens-Oliag: Kubernetes Static Content Server
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/k8s_static_content_server/
September 25, 2022, 10:12 PM
This post describes how I’ve put together a simple static content server for
kubernetes clusters using a Pod with a persistent volume and multiple
containers: an sftp server to manage contents, a web server to publish them
with optional access control and another one to run scripts which need access
to the volume filesystem.
The sftp server runs using
MySecureShell, the web
server is nginx and the script runner uses the
webhook tool to publish endpoints to call
them (the calls will come from o...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Rama II, Arthur C. Clarke, Aliens
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/25/rama-ii-arthur-c-clarke-aliens/
September 25, 2022, 9:07 AM
Rama II
This would be more of a short post about the current book I am reading. Now people who have seen Arrival would probably be more at home. People who have also seen Avatar would also be familiar to the theme or concept I am sharing about. Now before I go into detail, it seems that Arthur C. Clarke wanted to use a powerful god or mythological character for the name and that is somehow the RAMA series started.
Now the first book in the series explores an extraterrestrial spaceship that...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: Please vote in favour of the Debian Social Contract change
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/12581.html
September 24, 2022, 7:08 PM
tl;dr: Please vote in favour of the Debian Social Contract change, by ranking all of its options above None of the Above. Rank the SC change options above corresponding options that do not change the Social Contract.
Vote to change the SC even if you think the change is not necessary for Debian to prominently/officially provide an installer with-nonfree-firmware.
Why vote for SC change even if I think it’s not needed?
I’m addressing myself primarily to the reader who agrees with me that Debi...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Lisp macros are magical
https://blog.steve.fi/lisp_macros_are_magical.html
September 23, 2022, 7:00 PM
In my previous post I introduced yet another Lisp interpreter. When it was posted there was no support for macros.
Since I've recently returned from a visit to the UK, and caught COVID-19 while I was there, I figured I'd see if my brain was fried by adding macro support.
I know lisp macros are awesome, it's one of those things that everybody is told. Repeatedly. I've used macros in my emacs programming off and on for a good few years, but despite that I'd not really given them too much th...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: 6237415
https://gwolf.org/2022/09/6237415.html
September 23, 2022, 4:03 PM
Years ago, it was customary that some of us stated publicly the way we
think in time of Debian General Resolutions (GRs). And even if we
didn’t, vote lists were open (except when voting for people,
i.e. when electing a DPL), so if interested we could understand what
our different peers thought.
This is the first vote, though, where a Debian vote is protected under
voting secrecy. I think
it is sad we chose that path, as I liken a GR vote more with a voting
process within a general assembly of...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 222 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-222-released/
September 23, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 222. This version includes the following changes:
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Use pep517 and pip to load the requirements. (Closes: #1020091)
* Remove old Breaks/Replaces in debian/control that have been obsoleted since
bullseye
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Nine Inch Nails, Cornwall, June
https://jmtd.net/log/nin_cornwall/
September 22, 2022, 10:09 AM
In June I travelled to see Nine Inch Nails perform two nights at the Eden
Project in Cornwall. It'd been eight
years since I last saw them live and when they announced
the Eden shows, I thought it might be the only chance I'd get to see them for a
long time. I committed, and sods law, a week or so later they announced a
handful of single-night UK club shows. On the other hand, on previous tours
where they'd typically book two club nights in each city, I've attended one
night and always felt I sh...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Privilege separation of GSS-API credentials for Apache
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/09/20/privilege-separation-of-gss-api-credentials-for-apache/
September 20, 2022, 6:40 AM
To protect web resources with Kerberos you may use Apache HTTPD with mod_auth_gssapi — however, all web scripts (e.g., PHP) run under Apache will have access to the Kerberos long-term symmetric secret credential (keytab). If someone can get it, they can impersonate your server, which is bad.
The gssproxy project makes it possible to introduce privilege separation to reduce the attack surface. There is a tutorial for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, AlmaLinux, etc), but I wanted to get...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Handling WebAuthn over remote SSH connections
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61232.html
September 20, 2022, 2:17 AM
Being able to SSH into remote machines and do work there is great. Using hardware security tokens for 2FA is also great. But trying to use them both at the same time doesn't work super well, because if you hit a WebAuthn request on the remote machine it doesn't matter how much you mash your token - it's not going to work.But could it?The SSH agent protocol abstracts key management out of SSH itself and into a separate process. When you run "ssh-add .ssh/id_rsa", that key is being loaded into the...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Looking at Wayland terminal emulators
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-09-19-wayland-terminal-emulators/
September 19, 2022, 4:41 PM
Back in 2018, I made a two part series about terminal emulators
that was actually pretty painful to write. So I'm not going to retry
this here, not at all. Especially since I'm not submitting this to the
excellent LWN editors so I can get away with not being very good
at writing. Phew.
Still, it seems my future self will thank me for collecting my
thoughts on the terminal emulators I have found out about since I
wrote that article. Back then, Wayland was not quite at the level
where it is now, ...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Bring Your Own Disaster
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61089.html
September 19, 2022, 7:12 AM
After my last post, someone suggested that having employers be able to restrict keys to machines they control is a bad thing. So here's why I think Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scenarios are bad not only for employers, but also for users.There's obvious mutual appeal to having developers use their own hardware rather than rely on employer-provided hardware. The user gets to use hardware they're familiar with, and which matches their ergonomic desires. The employer gets to save on the money requi...
--------------------
Axel Beckert: wApua 0.06.4 released
http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Web/Browsers/wApua%200.06.4%20released.html
September 19, 2022, 12:55 AM
I today released version 0.06.4
of my WAP WML browser wApua and also uploaded that release to Debian Unstable.
It’s a bugfix release and the first upstream release since 2017.
It fixes the recognition of WAP WML pages with more recent DTD
location URLs ending in .dtd instead of .xml
(and some other small difference). No idea when these URLs changed,
but I assume they have been changed to look more like the URLs of
other DTDs. The old URLs of the DTD still work, but more recent WAP
pages ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Effective altruism and the control trap
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-09/001.html
September 17, 2022, 8:49 PM
William MacAskill has been on a book tour for What We Owe to the
Future, which has put effective altruism back in the news. That plus the
decision by GiveWell to
remove GiveDirectly from their top charity list got me thinking about
charity again. I think effective altruism, by embracing long-termism, is
falling into an ethical trap, and I'm going to start heavily discounting
their recommendations for donations.
Background
Some background first for people who have no idea what I'm talking a...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Books and Indian Tourism
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/18/books-and-indian-tourism/
September 17, 2022, 7:32 PM
Fiction
A few days ago somebody asked me and I think it is an often requested to perhaps all fiction readers as to why we like fiction? First of all, reading in itself is told as food for the soul. Because, whenever you write or read anything you don’t just read it, you also visualize it. And that visualization is and would be far greater than any attempt in cinema as there are no budget constraints and it takes no more than a minute to visualize a scenario if the writer is any good. You ju...
--------------------
James Valleroy: How I avoid sysadmin work
https://jvalleroy.me/wordpress/?p=46
September 17, 2022, 2:55 PM
The server running this blog is a RockPro64 sitting in my living room. Besides WordPress (the blogging software), I run various other services on it:
Bepasty for sharing files,Ikiwiki for taking notes,Quassel for staying connected to IRC chat servers,Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks,Shaarli for sharing bookmarks, andTiny Tiny RSS for reading other people’s blogs.
Most of these are for my personal use, and a few of them have pages for public viewing (linked at the top of t...
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: FRnOG #36: Akvorado
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-frnog36-akvorado
September 16, 2022, 3:35 PM
Here are the slides I presented for FRnOG #36 in September 2022.
They are about Akvorado, a tool to collect network flows and
visualize them. It was developped by Free. I didn’t get time to
publish a blog post yet, but it should happen soon!
Slides in PDF format
The presentation, in French, was recorded. I have added English
subtitles....
--------------------
Joachim Breitner: rec-def: Dominators case study
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/795-rec-def__Dominators_case_study
September 15, 2022, 8:27 AM
More ICFP-inspired experiments using the rec-def library: In Norman Ramsey’s very nice talk about his Functional Pearl “Beyond Relooper: Recursive Translation of Unstructured Control Flow to Structured Control Flow”, he had the following slide showing the equation for the dominators of a node in a graph:
Norman Ramsey shows a formula
He said “it’s ICFP and I wanted to say the dominance relation has a beautiful set of equations … you can read all these algorithms how to compute thi...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: git signatures with SSH certificates
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60916.html
September 15, 2022, 1:34 AM
Last night I complained that git's SSH signature format didn't support using SSH certificates rather than raw keys, and was swiftly corrected, once again highlighting that the best way to make something happen is to complain about it on the internet in order to trigger the universe to retcon it into existence to make you look like a fool. But anyway. Let's talk about making this work!git's SSH signing support is actually just it shelling out to ssh-keygen with a specific set of options, so let's...
--------------------
Joachim Breitner: rec-def: Program analysis case study
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/794-rec-def__Program_analysis_case_study
September 14, 2022, 9:53 PM
At this week’s International Conference on Functional Programming I showed my rec-def Haskell library to a few people. As this crowd appreciates writing compilers, and example from the realm of program analysis is quite compelling.
To Throw or not to throw
Here is our little toy language to analyze: It has variables, lambdas and applications, non-recursive (lazy) let bindings and, so that we have something to analyze, a way to throw and to catch exceptions:
type Var = String
data Exp
= Var ...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Storing Local Secrets
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/09/14/storing-local-secrets/
September 14, 2022, 1:01 AM
In the operation of a normal Linux system there are many secrets stored on behalf of a user. Wifi passwords, passwords from web sites, etc. Ideally you want them to be quickly and conveniently accessible to the rightful user but also be as difficult as possible for hostile parties to access.
The solution in GNOME and KDE is to have a wallet that is encrypted to store such passwords, the idea is that if a hostile party gets access to a PC that doesn’t use full disk encryption then the secrets w...
--------------------