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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John Goerzen: Visiting Germany: Reflections on Schloss Charlottenburg
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10375-visiting-germany-reflections-on-schloss-charlottenburg
June 5, 2022, 1:47 AM
200 years ago, my ancestors migrated from Prussia to Ukraine. They left for many reasons, many of which boiled down to their strong pacifism in the midst of a highly militarized country.
Last week, my wife, the boys, and I walked through the favorite palace of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the king of Prussia who was responsible for forcing my ancestors out – Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin.
Photos can’t possibly convey the enormity and the riches of this place, even after being attacked during mu...
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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, 7:00 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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Russ Allbery: Review: The Seeress of Kell
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-345-37759-1.html
June 1, 2022, 4:53 AM
Review: The Seeress of Kell, by David Eddings

Series:
The Malloreon #5


Publisher:
Del Rey


Copyright:
May 1991


Printing:
May 1992


ISBN:
0-345-37759-1


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
374

The Seeress of Kell is the conclusion of the five-book Malloreon
series and a direct sequel to Sorceress of
Darshiva. You do not want to begin the series here (or, to be honest,
at all).
We have finally finished th...
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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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Russ Allbery: Review: Maskerade
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227552-6.html
May 31, 2022, 2:47 AM
Review: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #18


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
1995


Printing:
February 2014


ISBN:
0-06-227552-6


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
360

Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you
probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny
Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect
you could pick it up as you wen...
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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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Gunnar Wolf: On to the next journey
https://gwolf.org/2022/05/on-to-the-next-journey.html
May 30, 2022, 3:46 AM
Last Wednesday my father, Kurt Bernardo Wolf Bogner, took the steps
towards his next journey, the last that would start in this life. I
cannot put words to this… so just sharing this with the world will
have to suffice. Goodbye to my teacher, my friend, the person I have
always looked up to.
Some of his friends were able to put in words more than what I can
come up with. If you can read Spanish, you can read the eulogy from
the Science Academy of
Morelos.
His last project, enjoyable by anybo...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Steles of the Sky
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-2756-2.html
May 30, 2022, 3:06 AM
Review: Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear

Series:
Eternal Sky #3


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
April 2014


ISBN:
0-7653-2756-2


Format:
Hardcover


Pages:
429

Steles of the Sky is the third book of the Eternal Sky trilogy and
a direct sequel to Shattered Pillars.
You should not start here, and ideally you should read all three books
close together. They form a single story, and Elizabeth Bear is somewhat
notoriou...
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John Goerzen: Fast, Ordered Unixy Queues over NNCP and Syncthing with Filespooler
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10368-fast-ordered-unixy-queues-over-nncp-and-syncthing-with-filespooler
May 29, 2022, 10:39 PM
It seems that lately I’ve written several shell implementations of a simple queue that enforces ordered execution of jobs that may arrive out of order. After writing this for the nth time in bash, I decided it was time to do it properly. But first, a word on the why of it all.
Why did I bother?
My needs arose primarily from handling Backups over Asynchronous Communication methods – in this case, NNCP. When backups contain incrementals that are unpacked on the destination, they must be app...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Kleptopia
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-323613-3.html
May 29, 2022, 2:11 AM
Review: Kleptopia, by Tom Burgis

Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
2020


Printing:
September 2021


ISBN:
0-06-323613-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
340

Kleptopia is a nonfiction chronicle of international financial
corruption and money laundering told via a focus on the former Soviet
republic of Kazakhstan. The primary characters are a British banker named
Nigel Wilkins (at the start of the story, the head of compliance i...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Speeding up Samba AD
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-05-28-20-14_speeding_up_samba_ad.html
May 28, 2022, 7:14 PM
One Weird Trick(TM) for speeding up a slow Samba Active Directory domain
controller is seemingly to leave and rejoin the domain. (If you don't have
another domain controller, you'll need to join one in temporarily.)
Seemingly, not only can you switch to LMDB
(which has two fsyncs instead of eight on commit—which matters a lot,
especially on non-SSDs, as the Kerberos authentication path has a blocking
write to update account statistics), but you also get to regenerate the
database, giving you t...
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kpcyrd: auth-tarball-from-git: Verifying tarballs with signed git tags
https://vulns.xyz/2022/05/auth-tarball-from-git/
May 28, 2022, 12:00 AM
I noticed there’s a common anti-pattern in some PKGBUILDs, the short scripts that are used to build Arch Linux packages. Specifically we’re looking at the part that references the source code used when building a package:
source=("git+https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git#tag=v${pkgver}?signed")
validpgpkeys=('4DAA67A9EA8B91FCC15B699C85CDAE3C164BA7B4'
'A56EF308A9F1256C25ACA3807EA8F8B94622A6A9')
sha256sums=('SKIP')
This does:
�
authentication: verify the git tag wa...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 214 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-214-released/
May 27, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 214. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support both python-argcomplete 1.x and 2.x.
[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Add external tool on GNU Guix for xb-tool.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Sergio Talens-Oliag: New Blog Config
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/new_blog_config/
May 26, 2022, 10:00 PM
As promised, on this post I’m going to explain how I’ve configured this blog
using hugo, asciidoctor and the papermod theme, how I publish it using
nginx, how I’ve integrated the remark42 comment system and how I’ve
automated its publication using gitea and json2file-go.
It is a long post, but I hope that at least parts of it can be interesting for
some, feel free to ignore it if that is not your case …​ 😉
Hugo ConfigurationTheme settingsThe site is using the PaperMod theme and as...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAPT 0.0.9: Minor Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/25#rcppapt_0.0.9
May 25, 2022, 9:50 PM
A new version of the RcppAPT package with the R interface to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like arrived on CRAN earlier today.
RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations.
This release updates the code to the Apt 2.5.0 r...
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Emmanuel Kasper: One of the strangest bug I have ever seen on Linux
http://meta.libera.cc/2022/05/one-of-strangest-bug-i-have-ever-seen.html
May 25, 2022, 8:58 PM
Networking starts when you login as root, stops when you log off !SeLinux messages can be ignored I guess, but we see clearly the devices being activated (it's a Linux bridge)If you have any explanations I am curious.
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Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes the 2022 GSOC interns
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/welcome-gsoc2022-interns.html
May 24, 2022, 11:15 AM
We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected three interns to work
under mentorship on a variety of
projects with us during the
Google Summer of Code.
Here are the list of the projects, interns, and details of the tasks to be performed.
Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian
Interns: Nkwuda Sunday Cletus and Raman Sarda
The deliverables of this project will
mostly be finished packages submitted to Debian sid, both for new
packages and updated packages. Whenever possible, we shoul...
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Arturo Borrero González: Toolforge Jobs Framework
https://ral-arturo.org/2022/05/23/wmcs-toolforge-jobs-framework.html
May 23, 2022, 7:19 PM
This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
This post continues the discussion of Toolforge updates as described in a previous post. Every non-trivial task performed in Toolforge (like
executing a script or running a bot) should be dispatched to a job scheduling backend, which ensures that the job is run in a suitable place with sufficient resources.
Jobs can be scheduled synchronously or asynchronously, continuously, or simply executed...
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Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet? - part 3
https://curlybracket.net/2022/05/23/internet-kids-pt3.html
May 22, 2022, 10:00 PM
I received some feedback on the first part of interviews about the
internet with children that I’d like to share publicly here. Thank you!
Your thoughts and experiences are important to me!
In the first interview round there was this French girl.
Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl
advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect
the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time
on their phones and people should rather spe...
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Sergio Talens-Oliag: New Blog
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/new_blog/
May 22, 2022, 10:00 PM
Welcome to my new Blog for Technical Stuff.
For a long time I was planning to start publishing technical articles again but
to do it I wanted to replace my old blog
based on ikiwiki by something more modern.
I’ve used Jekyll with GitLab
Pages to build the Intranet of
the ITI and to generate internal documentation sites on
Agile Content, but, as happened with ikiwiki,
I felt that things were kind of slow and not as easy to maintain as I would
like.
So on Kyso (the Company I work for right now) ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: On a Sunbeam
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/on-a-sunbeam.html
May 22, 2022, 5:06 AM
Review: On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden

Publisher:
Tillie Walden


Copyright:
2016-2017


Format:
Online graphic novel


Pages:
544

On a Sunbeam is a web comic that was published in installments
between Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, and then later published in dead tree
form. I read the on-line version, which is still available for free from
its web site. It was nominated for an
Eisner Award and won a ton of other awards, including the Los Ange...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: #37: Introducing r2u with 2 x 19k CRAN binaries for Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/21#037_introducing_r2u_with_38k_deb_binaries
May 21, 2022, 3:09 PM
One month ago I started work on a new side project which is now up and running, and deserving on an introductory blog post: r2u. It was announced in two earlier tweets (first, second) which contained the two (wicked) demos below also found at the documentation site.
So what is this about? It brings full and complete CRAN installability to Ubuntu LTS, both the ‘focal’ release 20.04 and the recent ‘jammy’ release 22.04. It is unique in resolving all R and CRAN packages with the system pack...
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Wouter Verhelst: Faster tar
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/play/Faster_tar/
May 20, 2022, 12:53 PM
I have a new laptop. The new one is a Dell Latitude 5521, whereas the
old one was a Dell Latitude 5590.
As both the old and the new laptops are owned by the people who pay my
paycheck, I'm supposed to copy all my data off the old laptop and then
return it to the IT department.
A simple way of doing this (and what I'd usually use) is to just rsync
the home directory (and other relevant locations) to the new machine.
However, for various reasons I didn't want to do that this time around;
for one...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Introducing metalfinder
https://veronneau.org/introducing-metalfinder.html
May 20, 2022, 4:00 AM
After going to an incredible Arch Enemy / Behemoth / Napalm Death / Unto
Others concert a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to go to more
concerts.
I like music, and I really enjoy concerts. Sadly, I often miss great
performances because no one told me about it, or my local newspaper didn't cover
the event enough in advance for me to get tickets.
Some online services lets you sync your Spotify account to notify you when a
new concert is announced, but I don't use Spotify. As a music geek, I have...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 213 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-213-released/
May 20, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 213. This version includes the following changes:
* Don't mask differences in .zip/.jar central directory extra fields.
* Don't show a binary comparison of .zip/.jar files if we have at least
one observed nested difference.
* Use assert_diff in test_zip over get_data and separate assert.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Agathe Porte: Status update, May 2022
https://deaddabe.fr/blog/2022/05/20/status-update-may-2022/
May 19, 2022, 10:00 PM
Boing, time for another status update.
Debian work
I have finally found how to make my fonts-creep2 package work on my Debian
machines. The solution was to not use the TTF file that contains the Bitmap
glyphs, but instead generate an OTB file, which is an OpenType format for
Bitmap fonts.
This means that I can close the fonts-creep ITP bug altogether and rely on
this fonts-creep2 package instead. Hopefully it will be reviewed and
uploaded soon by a certified™ Debian Developer.
This font is t...
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Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet? - part 2
https://curlybracket.net/2022/05/20/internet-kids-pt2.html
May 19, 2022, 10:00 PM
I promised a follow up to my post about interviews
about how children conceptualize the internet.
Here it is. (Maybe not the last one!)
The internet, it’s that thing that acts up all the time, right?
As said in my first post, I abandoned the idea to interview children
younger than 9 years because it seems they are not necessarily aware
that they are using the internet. But it turns out that some do have
heard about the internet. My friend Anna, who has 9 younger siblings,
tried to win some ...
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Joerg Jaspert: Rust? Munin? munin-plugin…
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/05/rust-munin-munin-plugin.html
May 19, 2022, 8:33 PM
My first Rust crate: munin-plugin
Sooo, some time ago I had to rewrite a munin plugin from
Shell to Rust, due to the shell version going crazy after some runtime
and using up a CPU all for its own. Sure, it only did that on Systems
with Oracle Database installed, so that monster seems to be bad (who
would have guessed?), but somehow I had to fixup this plugin and
wasn’t allowed to drop that wannabe-database.
A while later I wrote a plugin to graph Fibre Channel Host data, and
then Network i...
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Gunnar Wolf: I do have a full face
https://gwolf.org/2022/05/i-do-have-a-full-face.html
May 18, 2022, 2:52 PM
I have been a bearded subject since I was 18, back in 1994. Yes,
during 1999-2000, I shaved for my military service, and I briefly tried the
goatee look in 2008… Few people nowadays can imagine my face without
a forest of hair.
But sometimes, life happens. And, unlike my good friend
Bdale, I didn’t get Linus to do the
honors… But, all in all, here I am:
Turns out, I have been suffering from quite bad skin infections for a
couple of years already. Last Friday, I checked in to the hospit...
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Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Jan Nieuwenhuizen on Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2022/05/18/jan-nieuwenhuizen-on-bootrappable-builds-gnu-mes-and-gnu-guix/
May 18, 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 fourth 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 r...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Clojure Team 2022 Sprint Report
https://veronneau.org/clojure-team-2022-sprint-report.html
May 18, 2022, 4:00 AM
This is the report for the Debian Clojure Team remote sprint
that took place on May 13-14th.
Looking at my previous blog entries, this was my first Debian sprint since
July 2020! Crazy how fast time flies...
Many thanks to those who participated, namely:
Rob Browning (rlb)
Elana Hashman (ehashman)
Jérôme Charaoui (lavamind)
Leandro Doctors (allentiak)
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo)
Sadly, Utkarsh Gupta — although having planned on participating — ended up not
being able to and worked ...
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Matthew Garrett: Can we fix bearer tokens?
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59704.html
May 16, 2022, 7:48 AM
Last month I wrote about how bearer tokens are just awful, and a week later Github announced that someone had managed to exfiltrate bearer tokens from Heroku that gave them access to, well, a lot of Github repositories. This has inevitably resulted in a whole bunch of discussion about a number of things, but people seem to be largely ignoring the fundamental issue that maybe we just shouldn't have magical blobs that grant you access to basically everything even if you've copied them from a legit...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.1.1.0 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/15#rcpparmadillo_0.11.1.1.0
May 15, 2022, 9:21 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 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) 978 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 24 million time...
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Antoine Beaupré: NVMe/SSD disk failure
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-13-nvme-disk-failure/
May 13, 2022, 8:19 PM
Yesterday, my workstation (curie) was hung when I
came in the office. After a "skinny elephant", the box rebooted,
but it couldn't find the primary disk (in the BIOS). Instead, it
booted on the secondary HDD drive, still running an old Fedora 27
install which somehow survived to this day, possibly because ?BTRFS
is incomprehensible.
Somehow, I blindly accepted the Fedora prompt asking me to upgrade to
Fedora 28, not realizing that:
Fedora is now at release 36, not 28
major upgrades take about...
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Antoine Beaupré: BTRFS notes
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-13-brtfs-notes/
May 13, 2022, 8:04 PM
I'm not a fan of BTRFS. This page serves as a reminder of why,
but also a cheat sheet to figure out basic tasks in a BTRFS
environment because those are not obvious to me, even after
repeatedly having to deal with them.
Content warning: there might be mentions of ZFS.
Stability concerns
I'm worried about BTRFS stability, which has been historically
... changing. RAID-5 and RAID-6 are still marked unstable, for
example. It's kind of a lucky guess whether your current kernel will
behave properl...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/new-developers-2022-04.html
May 13, 2022, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Henry-Nicolas Tourneur (hntourne)
Nick Black (dank)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Jan Mojžíš
Philip Wyett
Thomas Ward
Fabio Fantoni
Mohammed Bilal
Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo
Congratulations!...
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Arturo Borrero González: Toolforge GridEngine Debian 10 Buster migration
https://ral-arturo.org/2022/05/13/wmcs-toolforge-grid-debian-10.html
May 13, 2022, 9:42 AM
This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
In accordance with our operating system upgrade policy, we should migrate our servers to Debian Buster.
As discussed in the previous post, one of the most important and successful services provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at
the Wikimedia Foundation is Toolforge. Toolforge is a platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications
with the ultimate goal ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 212 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-212-released/
May 13, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 212. This version includes the following changes:
* Add support for extracting vmlinuz/vmlinux Linux kernel images.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#304)
* Some Python .pyc files report as "data", so support ".pyc" as a
fallback extension.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Jonathan Dowland: Scalable Computing seminar
https://jmtd.net/log/scalable_seminar_2022/
May 12, 2022, 10:19 AM
Last week
I delivered a seminar for the research group I belong to,
Scalable Computing. This was a slightly-expanded version of the
presentation I gave at uksystems21. The most substantial change
is the addition of a fourth example to describe recent work on
optimising for a second non-functional requirement: Bandwidth.
scalable seminar 2022.pdf (PDF, 474K)...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Debian 9 soon out of (free) security support
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/05/11/debian-9-soon-out-of-free-security-support/
May 11, 2022, 1:13 PM
Organizations that are still running Debian 9 servers should be aware that the security support of the Debian LTS team will end on June 30th 2022.
If upgrading to a newer Debian release is not an option for them, then they should consider subscribing to Freexian’s Extended LTS to get security support for the packages that they are using on their servers.
It’s worth pointing out that we made some important changes to Freexian’s Extended LTS offering :
we are now willing to supp...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, April 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-april-2022.html
May 10, 2022, 9:41 PM
In April I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from March. I worked 11 hours,
and will carry over the remaining time to May.
I spent most of my 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 also rebased the
Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not
make an upload this month....
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Daniel Kahn Gillmor: 2022 Digital Rights Job Fair
https://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/2022-digital-rights-job-fair.html
May 10, 2022, 8:39 PM
I'm lucky enough to work at the intersection between information communications technology and civil rights/civil liberties.
I get to combine technical interests and social/political interests.
I've talked with many folks over the years who are interested in doing similar work.
Some come from a technical background, and some from an activist background (and some from both).
Are you one of them?
Are you someone who works as an activist or in a technical field who wants to look into different ways...
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Russell Coker: Elon and Free Speech
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/05/10/elon-free-speech/
May 10, 2022, 11:53 AM
Elon Musk has made the news for spending billions to buy a share of Twitter for the alleged purpose of providing free speech. The problem with this claim is that having any company controlling a large portion of the world’s communication is inherently bad for free speech. The same applies for Facebook, but that’s not a hot news item at the moment.
If Elon wanted to provide free speech he would want to have decentralised messaging systems so that someone who breaks rules on one platform could...
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Melissa Wen: Multiple syncobjs support for V3D(V) (Part 2)
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2022/05/10/multisync-p2
May 10, 2022, 9:00 AM
In the previous post, I described how we enable multiple syncobjs capabilities
in the V3D kernel driver. Now I will tell you what was changed on the
userspace side, where we reworked the V3DV sync mechanisms to use Vulkan
multiple wait and signal semaphores directly. This change represents greater
adherence to the Vulkan submission framework.
I was not used to Vulkan concepts and the V3DV driver. Fortunately, I counted
on the guidance of the Igalia’s Graphics team, mainly
Iago Toral (thanks...
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Melissa Wen: Multiple syncobjs support for V3D(V) (Part 1)
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2022/05/10/multisync-p1
May 10, 2022, 8:00 AM
As you may already know, we at
Igalia have been working on
several improvements to the 3D rendering drivers of Broadcom Videocore GPU,
found in Raspberry Pi 4 devices. One of our recent works focused on improving
V3D(V) drivers adherence to Vulkan submission and synchronization framework. We
had to cross various layers from the Linux Graphics stack to add support for
multiple syncobjs to V3D(V), from the Linux/DRM kernel to the Vulkan driver. We
have delivered bug fixes, a generic gate to extend...
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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in April 2022
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-april-22/
May 10, 2022, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (thirty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 40th 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 did this month but mostly non-technical, now that DC22 is around the corner. Here are the things I did:
Debian Uploads
Helped Andrius w/ FTBFS for php-text-captcha, reported via #977403.
I fixed the samed in Ubuntu a couple of...
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Robert McQueen: Evolving a strategy for 2022 and beyond
https://ramcq.net/2022/05/09/evolving-a-strategy-for-2022-and-beyond/
May 9, 2022, 2:01 PM
As a board, we have been working on several initiatives to make the Foundation a better asset for the GNOME Project. We’re working on a number of threads in parallel, so I wanted to explain the “big picture” a bit more to try and connect together things like the new ED search and the bylaw changes.
We’re all here to see free and open source software succeed and thrive, so that people can be be truly empowered with agency over their technology, rather than being passive consumers. We w...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in April 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/05/my-debian-activities-in-april-2022/
May 8, 2022, 10:01 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 186 and rejected 26 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 188.
Debian LTS
This was my ninety-fourth 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 2973-1] minidlna security update for one CVE
[DLA 2974-1] fribidi security update for three CVEs
[DLA 2988-1] tinyxml security upda...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.19 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/06#rprotobuf_0.4.19
May 6, 2022, 11:33 PM
A new release 0.4.19 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
This release contains a pull request contribution by Michael Chirico to add support for the TextFormat API, a minor maintenance fix ensuring (standard) string are referenced as std::...
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Antoine Beaupré: Wallabako 1.4.0 released
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-06-wallabako-1.4.0-released/
May 6, 2022, 4:26 PM
I don't particularly like it when people announce their personal
projects on their blog, but I'm making an exception for this one,
because it's a little special for me.
You see, I have just released Wallabako 1.4.0 (and a quick,
mostly irrelevant 1.4.1 hotfix) today. It's the first release of
that project in almost 3 years (the previous was 1.3.1, before
the pandemic).
The other reason I figured I would mention it is that I have almost
never talked about Wallabako on this blog at all, so many ...
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Holger Levsen: 20220506-i-had-an-abortion
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220506-i-had-an-abortion/
May 6, 2022, 1:42 PM
I had an abortion...
Well, it wasn't me, but when I was 18 my partner thankfully was able to take
a 'morning-after-pill' because we were seriously not ready to have
a baby. As one data point: We were both still in high school.
It's not possible to ban abortions. It's only possible to ban safe abortions.
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