Junichi Uekawa: debcargo rust repository and some observations.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Jan-4.html.en#2023-Jan-4-15:28:59
January 4, 2023, 6:28 AM
debcargo rust repository and some observations.
It's been about a week since I first started looking at Debian rust packages and adding some packages in preparation for crosvm.
Some things that don't work quite well right now yet.
My local branches disappeared. I don't have access and everything is through a merge request, presumably that is not a generally supported workflow and the team members are using branches to manage pending works.
./release.sh is optimized for updates and f...
--------------------
Anton Gladky: Boost 1.81 in Debian Testing
https://gladk.de/posts/202301_boost_181/
January 4, 2023, 4:16 AM
The latest version of Boost, version 1.81, is now available in Debian Testing.
As contributors to Boost, we highly encourage you to consider building your package
against Boost 1.81 in order to facilitate a smooth transition. Installing the -dev
Boost packages from the experimental repository is simple, as shown in the following
command:
sudo apt install libboost-dev -t experimental
If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement, please do not
hesitate to file bugs or prepare m...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Released staticsite 2.x
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/ssite/release-staticsite-2-x
January 4, 2023, 12:30 AM
In theory I wanted to announce the release of
staticsite 2.0, but then I found
bugs that prevented me from writing this post, so I'm also releasing 2.1 2.2
:grin:
staticsite is the static site generator that I ended up writing after giving
other generators a try.
I did a big round of cleanup of the code, which among other things allowed me
to implement incremental builds.
It turned out that staticsite is fast enough that incremental builds are not
really needed, however, a bug in caching rendere...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities December 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/01/04/floss-activities/
January 3, 2023, 11:02 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
devscripts:
allow rmadison to query archived releases, unofficial ports
debiman:
update prerequisites
reportbug:
drop cruft,
add tags based on subject
debbugs:
fix usertag validation
Debian DDPO:
better syntax error messages
Debian madison:
allow querying
archived releases,
unofficial ports
Debian ftp-master website:
typos
Debian mirrors list:
fix debian.co.il
Debian mirror status:
fix
cra...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Things I learnt in December 2022
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/debian/til-2022-12
January 3, 2023, 9:00 PM
Python: typing.overload
typing.overload
makes it easier to type functions with behaviour that depends on input types.
Functions marked with @overload are ignored by Python and only used by the
type checker:
@overload
def process(response: None) -> None:
...
@overload
def process(response: int) -> tuple[int, str]:
...
@overload
def process(response: bytes) -> str:
...
def process(response):
# <actual implementation>
Python's multiprocessing and deadlocks
Python's ...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Tex Shinobi first impressions
https://jmtd.net/log/tex_shinobi/
January 3, 2023, 3:22 PM
Happy New Year!
Older IBM Ultranav keyboard
For the last 13 years I've been using standalone versions of the Lenovo
(formerly IBM) Thinkpad keyboard design — with integrated trackpoint — as my
main computer input devices.
My latest ("ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II") was starting to fail so I decided
to look into alternatives for a replacement. The sticking point was I really like
the trackpoint as a mouse replacement, and very few other manufacturers offer that.
I've thus far mana...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/01/03/note-10-1-2014/
January 3, 2023, 2:37 AM
In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition tablet (wikipedia page [1]) with 32G of RAM. It’s display is 2560×1600 resolution which still compares well to the latest tablets. The Galaxy Tab S8 [2] is the latest high-end tablet series from Samsung and the 11 inch tablet in that series also has a 2560×1600 giving it a slightly lower DPI! The latest series also has 12.4″ and 14.6″ tablets with resolutions of 2800×1752 and 2960×1848 respectively. Obviously if you want a 14...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Refueling the blog
https://gwolf.org/2023/01/refueling-the-blog.html
January 2, 2023, 6:48 PM
So, it’s this weird time of year where we make a balance and share
with the world some ideas about the future. And… yes, it’s time to
take care of this blog, as its activity has dropped once
again. So… maybe it’d be nice to start this post by checking how
much have I blogged over the years:
2004: 27
2005: 92
2006: 65
2007: 83
2008: 64
2009: 62
2010: 48
2011: 25
2012: 27
2013: 29
2014: 37
2015: 18
2016: 19
2017: 20
2018: 19
2019: 19
2020: 14
2021:...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, December 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-december-2022.html
January 2, 2023, 5:33 PM
In December I was assigned 15 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 9 hours from November. I worked
all of those hours.
I merged the latest bullseye point release into the linux-5.10
package, uploaded that, and issued
DLA-3244-1.
I also updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable and
and stable-rt versions, uploaded it, and issued
DLA-3245-1....
--------------------
Emmanuel Kasper: Ensuring someone is listening before telling a joke
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2023/01/02/ensuring-someone-is-listening-before-telling-a-joke/
January 2, 2023, 3:42 PM
Alice (speaking to Bob): Bob, I have a good joke to tell, can I call you at 12:00 ?
Bob (turns head towards Alice): OK, fine for me, but can we make it at 13:00 ?
Alice (nodding): Works for me.
At 13:00, Alice starts telling a joke.
Did you recognize the three way TCP handshake ?
Protagonists:
Alice: Client
Bob: Server
Dialog:
I have a good joke to tell: TCP segment with SYN flag
12:00: initial sequence number
OK: TCP segment with SYN and ACK flag
13:00: acknowledgment number (initial sequ...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2022
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/01/a-year-in-free-software.html
January 1, 2023, 7:34 PM
There is a move to Bring Back Blogging and having recently sorted out my own FreshRSS install I am completely in favour of such a thing. RSS feeds with complete posts, for preference, not just a teaser intro sentence/paragraph.
It’s also a reminder to me that I should blog more, and what better way to start 2023 than with my traditional recap of my Free Software activities in 2022. For previous years see 2019, 2020 + 2021
Conferences
I attended DebConf22 in Prizen, Kosova this year, and fin...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: 2022 Book Reading in Review
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-01/001.html
January 1, 2023, 5:20 PM
In 2022, much to my surprise, I finished and reviewed 51 books, a
substantial increase over last year and once again the best year for
reading since 2012. (I read 60 books that year, so it's a hard mark to
equal.) Reading throughout the year was a bit uneven; I avoided the
summer slump this year, but still slowed down in early spring and
September. As always, the tail end of the year was prime reading time.
The best book of the year was the third and concluding book of Naomi
Novik's Scholo...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: Challenges in getting a Debian package.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Jan-1.html.en#2023-Jan-1-15:27:23
January 1, 2023, 6:27 AM
Challenges in getting a Debian package.
Debian Rust packaging team has a great collection of scripts for maintaining Debian Rust packages, but that depended on schroot and other tools that I haven't used usually.
Getting that working first was a challenging.
I had to get out of my podman container running sid inside user namespace, because schroot didn't work due to not being able to create devices files. That was okay, and I went back to my old chroot script which was doing something s...
--------------------
C.J. Adams-Collier: State of the racks, 20221231
https://wp.colliertech.org/cj/?p=1838
January 1, 2023, 5:31 AM
Hi friends!
I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been caught up in work. But between working, I’ve put together some new equipment in a couple of new racks. I bought an audio dampened 15U rack a couple of years ago or so, and into it I’ve placed the RAID array and an HP desktop form-factor ML110 server to drive the disks. The disk array controller is a two-port Broadcom / LSI SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3. I’ve been thinking about getting the four-port variant, since I like t...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: 2023 started.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Jan-1.html.en#2023-Jan-1-09:23:39
January 1, 2023, 12:23 AM
2023 started. I'm still stuck at home due to COVID-19 and therefore I have more than usual time on hacking on Debian stuff.
I've learnt schroot does most of what I have been doing with my home grown tools.
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Favourite films of 2022
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-films-of-2022
December 31, 2022, 5:04 PM
In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' fiction I enjoyed reading in 2022.
But in the very last of my roundup posts—and in relatively less detail—I'll be quickly sketching out the favourite movies that were new to me in 2022:
§
La Ronde (1950)
An all-knowing narrator (Adolf Wohlbrück) guides us through a series of vignettes in 1900s Vienna — a soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening, and later he h...
--------------------
Guido Günther: Phosh 2022 in retrospect
https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/Phosh_2022_in_retrospect.html
December 31, 2022, 3:55 PM
I wanted to look back at what changed in phosh in 2022 and figured I
could share it with you. I'll be focusing on things very close to the
mobile shell, for a broader overview see Evangelos upcoming FOSDEM
talk.
Some numbers
We're usually aiming for a phosh release at the end of each month. In
2022 We did 10 releases like that, 7 major releases (bumping the
middle version number) and three betas. We skipped the April and
November releases. We also did one bug fix relesae out of line
(bumping t...
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Non-fiction
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-books-of-2022-non-fiction
December 30, 2022, 8:20 PM
In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I'll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction.
Books that just missed the cut here include Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998) on the role of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) (a personal memoir on relating to how technology is increasingly fragmenting ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Last 2022 haul
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-12/003.html
December 30, 2022, 5:19 AM
It's been a while since I posted a haul, and I've been reading primarily
recent purchases, so I've already read and reviewed a bunch of these.
Ilona Andrews — Sweep of the Heart (sff)
Becky Chambers — A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (sff)
Lauren Groff — Matrix (mainstream)
Tendai Huchu — The Library of the Dead (sff)
N.K. Jemisin — The World We Make (sff)
Courtney Milan — The Governess Affair (romance)
Tamsyn Muir — Nona the Ninth (sff)
Naomi Novik — The Golden Enclaves (sff)
Rebec...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Preseeding Trisquel Virtual Machines Using “netinst” Images
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/30/preseeding-trisquel-virtual-machines-using-netinst-images/
December 30, 2022, 12:24 AM
I’m migrating some self-hosted virtual machines to Trisquel, and noticed that Trisquel does not offer cloud-images similar to the Debian Cloud and Ubuntu Cloud images. Thus my earlier approach based on virt-install --cloud-init and cloud-localds does not work with Trisquel. While I hope that Trisquel will eventually publish cloud-compatible images, I wanted to document an alternative approach for Trisquel based on preseeding. This is how I used to install Debian and Ubuntu in the old days, ...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 230 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-230-released/
December 30, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 230. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compatibility with file(1) version 5.43; thanks, Christoph Biedl.
[ Jelle van der Waa ]
* Support Berkeley DB version 6.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Memoir/biography
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-books-of-2022-memoir-and-biography
December 29, 2022, 4:23 PM
In my two most recent posts, I listed the fiction and classic fiction I enjoyed the most in 2022.
I'll leave my roundup of general non-fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite memoirs and biographies, in no particular order.
Books that just missed the cut here include Roisin Kiberd's The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet (2019), Steve Richards' The Prime Ministers (2019) which reflects on UK leadership from Harold Wilson to Boris Johnson, Robert Graves ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Sweep of the Heart
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-64197-239-4.html
December 29, 2022, 2:59 AM
Review: Sweep of the Heart, by Ilona Andrews

Series:
Innkeeper Chronicles #6


Publisher:
NYLA Publishing


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-64197-239-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
440

Sweep of the Heart is the sixth book of the sci-fi urban fantasy,
kitchen-sink-worldbuilding Innkeeper series by husband and wife writing
pair Ilona Andrews, assuming one counts the novella
Sweep with Me as a full entry (which I
do). It's a dire...
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Classics
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-books-of-2022-classics
December 28, 2022, 9:28 PM
As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics.
Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it ...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: dark mode
https://jmtd.net/log/dark_mode/
December 28, 2022, 7:45 AM
A few weeks ago I added a “dark mode” to this site. I’d been planning to do it
for a while but hadn’t the time to look into how it worked. In the end it was
simpler than I thought: the the hard part was choosing colours I liked.
I now think I prefer the dark theme; I might make it the default.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the crux of the
technical side was to define
“alternate stylesheets”, something I was playing around with 20 years ago. If
your browser supports it (Fi...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links December 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/28/links-december-2022/
December 28, 2022, 7:28 AM
Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with the UK monarchy [1], conveniently before the queen died.
The blog post “To The Next Mass Shooter, A Modest Proposal” is a well written suggestion to potential mass murderers [2].
The New Yorker has an interesting and amusing article about the former CIA employee who released the “Vault 7” collection of CIA attack software [3]. This exposes the ridiculously poor hiring practices of the CIA which involved far less background ...
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Fiction
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-books-of-2022-fiction
December 27, 2022, 9:15 PM
This post marks the beginning my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I read and watched in 2022 that I plan to publish over the next few days.
Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in the last year. I didn't get through as many books as I did in 2021, though, but that's partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels — in particular, a fair number of those books that American writer Henry James once refe...
--------------------
Ian Wienand: Redirecting webfinger requests with Apache
https://www.technovelty.org/web/redirecting-webfinger-requests-with-apache.html
December 27, 2022, 8:51 PM
If you have a personal domain, it is nice if you can redirect
webfinger requests so you
can be easily found via your email. This is hardly a new idea, but
the growth of Mastodon recently
has made this more prominent.
I wanted to redirect webfinger endpoints to a Mastondon host I am
using, but only my email and only standard Apache rewrites. Below,
replace xxx@yyy.com with your email and zzz.social with the
account to be redirected to. There are a couple of tricks in being
able to inspect the...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: A summary of the year.
https://blog.steve.fi/a_summary_of_the_year_.html
December 27, 2022, 5:15 PM
This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case.
Being more selfish here are the things I remember, in brief unless there are comments/questions:
I learned more Finnish.
Lots of things with our child.
I helped teach him to swim.
He learned to tell the time with an analog clock/watch.
I took him to a circus for the first (only) time ever.
He cut his hair for the first time in six years.
He spent his a birthday with my parents, in the UK - His languages skills w...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: The ultimate single-page app
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-12-27-00-07_the_ultimate_single_page_app.html
December 26, 2022, 11:07 PM
I run a chess analysis site as a hobby.
It's not a big thing (usually ~1k simultaneous viewers when it's broadcasting,
peak at ~27k during the London WCC), and the surface functionality
is also pretty basic: It's a single-page app picking up a JSON (updated via long-poll)
from a backend containing a chess position and computer analysis,
and then presents it to the viewer.
I won't go into detail for why this isn't as simple as it seems,
but there's one thing I've always prided myself in: Making ...
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: Managing infrastructure with Terraform, CDKTF, and NixOS
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-cdktf-nixos
December 26, 2022, 3:18 PM
A few years ago, I downsized my personal infrastructure. Until 2018, there were
a dozen containers running on a single Hetzner server.1 I migrated
my emails to Fastmail and my DNS zones to Gandi. It left me with only my
blog to self-host. As of today, my low-scale infrastructure is composed of 4
virtual machines running NixOS on Hetzner Cloud and Vultr, a handful
of DNS zones on Gandi and Route 53, and a couple of Cloudfront
distributions. It is managed by CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), while Ni...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: podlators 5.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-12/002.html
December 25, 2022, 5:56 PM
podlators is the Perl distribution providing Pod::Man and Pod::Text, along
with related modules and supporting scripts.
The primary change in this release is the addition of configurable
guesswork for Pod::Text, paralleling Pod::Man. I had forgotten that
Pod::Text also had complex heuristics for whether to quote C<> text that
have the same Perl-specific properties as Pod::Man. This is now
configurable via a guesswork option, the same as in Pod::Man, although the
only type of guesswork...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 10.3
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-12/001.html
December 25, 2022, 5:17 PM
This is a minor feature and bug fix release of my collection of utilities
and tests intended for copying into other packages I maintain.
The new feature is an additional Perl test using Test::Kwalitee to check a
few more things about the Perl packaging, and a MANIFEST.SKIP file
that is suitable for copying as-is into most Perl packages.
On the bug fix side, the portable/getnameinfo test now skips some tests
rather than failing on systems that are strange enough that someone has
put 0.0.0.0...
--------------------
David Bremner: Why won't crusty old host recognize my shiny new terminal emulator?
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/sendterminfo/
December 25, 2022, 4:30 PM
Spiffy new terminal emulators seem to come with their own terminfo
definitions. Venerable hosts that I ssh into tend not to know about
those. kitty comes with a thing to transfer that definition, but it
breaks if the remote host is running tcsh (don't ask). Similary the
one liner for alacritty on the arch wiki seems to assume the remote
shell is bash. Forthwith, a dumb shell script that works to send the
terminfo of the current terminal emulator to the remote host.
EDIT: Jakub Wilk worked out t...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: OpenPGP key on FST-01SZ
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/24/openpgp-key-on-fst-01sz/
December 24, 2022, 1:36 PM
I use GnuPG to compute cryptographic signatures for my emails, git commits/tags, and software release artifacts (tarballs). Part of GnuPG is gpg-agent which talks to OpenSSH, which I login to remote servers and to clone git repositories. I dislike storing cryptographic keys on general-purpose machines, and have used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since around 2006 when I got a FSFE Fellowship Card. GnuPG via gpg-agent handles this well, and the private key never leaves the hardware. The ZeitCon...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html
December 24, 2022, 7:00 AM
Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with
IP cameras following the ONVIF
specification. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for
a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
the libonvif package
entered Debian Sid last night.
The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
c...
--------------------
Scarlett Gately Moore: Debian uploads, Core22 KDE snap content pack and more!
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/debian-uploads-core22-kde-snap-content-pack-and-more/
December 23, 2022, 6:55 PM
I have been quite busy! I have been working on several projects so my cover image is a lovely sunset where I live.
Debian:
I have updated and uploaded several packages and working on more.
Umbrello
Squashfuse with the help of Scott Moser ( Thanks! )
libappimage
plasma-bigscreen WIP
KDE Snaps:
I have reworked the CI to now do Core22 snaps! They will publish to the beta channel until we get them tested. First snap completed is the ever important KDE Frameworks / QT conte...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: 2022 music discovery: Underworld
https://jmtd.net/log/2022_discovery_underworld/
December 23, 2022, 2:39 PM
One of my main musical 'discoveries' in 2022 was British electronic band
Underworld.
I’m super late to the party. Underworld’s commercial high point was the mid
nineties. And I was certainly aware of them then: the use of
“Born Slippy .NUXX in 1996’s Trainspotting soundtrack was ubiquitous, but it
didn’t grab me.
In more recent years my colleague and friend Andrew Dinn (with whom I enjoyed
many pre-pandemic conversations about music) enthusiastically advocated for
Underworld ...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: 2022 — A Musical Retrospective
https://veronneau.org/2022-a-musical-retrospective.html
December 23, 2022, 5:00 AM
With the end of the year approaching fast, I thought putting my year in
retrospective via music would be a fun thing to do.
Albums
In 2022, I added 51 new albums to my collection — nearly one a week! I listed
them below in the order in which I acquired them.
I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at
libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers
pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital
copies weren't ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDE 0.1.7 on CRAN: Several Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/20#rcppde_0.1.7
December 21, 2022, 12:27 AM
The first fresh release of our RcppDE package in over four years (!!) is now on CRAN.
RcppDE is a “port” of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential evolution optimization, from plain C to C++. By using RcppArmadillo the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. Our other main contribution is to leverage some of the excellence we get for free from using Rcpp, in particular the ability to optimise user-supplied compiled objective functions which can ma...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: Rust for the Polyglot Programmer, December 2022 edition
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/13884.html
December 20, 2022, 1:47 AM
I have reviewed, updated and revised my short book about the Rust programming language, Rust for the Polyglot Programmer.
It now covers some language improvements from the past year (noting which versions of Rust they’re available in), and has been updated for changes in the Rust library ecosystem.
With (further) assistance from Mark Wooding, there is also a new table of recommendations for numerical conversion.
Recap about Rust for the Polyglot Programmer
There are many introductory materials...
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Recent improvements to Tryton's Debian Packaging (by Mathias Behrle and Raphaël Hertzog)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/tryton-funded-projects/
December 20, 2022, 12:00 AM
Foreword
Freexian has been using Tryton for a few years
to handle its invoicing and accounting. We have thus also been using
the Debian packages maintained by Mathias
Behrle and
we have been funding some of his work because maintaining an ERP with more
than 50 source packages was too much for him to handle alone on his free
time.
When Mathias discovered our Project
Funding
initiative, it was quite natural for him to consider applying to be able
to bring some much needed improvements to Tryton’...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 229 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-229-released/
December 20, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 229. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Skip test_html.py::test_diff if html2text is not installed.
(Closes: #1026034)
[ Holger Levsen ]
* Bump standards version to 4.6.2, no changes needed.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Second impressions of Guix 1.4
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/19/second-impressions-of-guix-1-4/
December 19, 2022, 9:38 PM
While my first impression of Guix 1.4rc2 on NV41PZ was only days ago, the final Guix 1.4 release has happened. I thought I should give it a second try, although being at my summer house with no wired ethernet I realized this may be overly optimistic. However I am happy to say that a guided graphical installation on my new laptop went smooth without any problem. Practicing OS installations has a tendency to make problems disappear.
My WiFi issues last time was probably due to a user interfac...
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Ian Jackson: Rust needs #[throws]
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/13657.html
December 18, 2022, 11:27 PM
tl;dr:
Ok-wrapping as needed in today’s Rust is a significant distraction, because there are multiple ways to do it. They are all slightly awkward in different ways, so are least-bad in different situations. You must choose a way for every fallible function, and sometimes change a function from one pattern to another.
Rust really needs #[throws] as a first-class language feature. Code using #[throws] is simpler and clearer.
Please try out withoutboats’s fehler. I think you will like it.
Cont...
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Bastian Venthur: The State of Python Packaging in 2022
https://venthur.de/2022-12-18-python-packaging.html
December 18, 2022, 6:15 PM
Every year or so, I revisit the current best practices for Python packaging.
This was my summary for 2021 – here’s the update for 2022.
PyPA
PyPA is still the place to go for information, best practices and tutorials
for packaging Python projects. My only criticism from last year, namely that
PyPA was heavily biased towards their own tooling (e.g. pipenv), has been
addressed: the tool recommendations section lists now several tools
for the same purpose with their own ones not necessarily bei...
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Russell Coker: Wall Facers
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/18/wall-facers/
December 18, 2022, 11:13 AM
I’m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I’ve only just started it so this post can’t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it).
In the second book there are people called “Wall Facers” who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to ...
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Matthew Garrett: Off Twitter for a bit
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63632.html
December 18, 2022, 3:25 AM
Turns out that linking to several days old public data in order to demonstrate that Elon's jet was broadcasting its tail number in the clear is apparently "posting private information" so for anyone looking for me there I'm actually here comments...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2022 (by Anton Gladky)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2022-11/
December 18, 2022, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
Ben Hutchings
did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
Chris Lamb
did 18.0h (...
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Charles Plessy: Bad words in Debian.
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/grosmot/
December 16, 2022, 1:00 PM
A discussion on the debian-project mailing list caught my attention to an
Italian word meaning something like “would you be so kind to please go
somewhere else?”, but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used
http://codesearch.debian.net to study its usage more in detail.
I found it in:
the source code of XEmacs;
a list of bad words to filter conversations in BZflag;
the random sentence generator PolyGen;
the source code of the board game Tagua;
a database of offensive fortunes for ...
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Simon Josefsson: Guix 1.4 on NV41PZ
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/16/guix-1-4-on-nv41pz/
December 16, 2022, 11:09 AM
On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either fol...
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Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: David A. Wheeler on supply chain security
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2022/12/15/supporter-spotlight-davidawheeler-supply-chain-security/
December 15, 2022, 12:00 PM
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 sixth 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...
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Russell Coker: Pixel 6A
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/15/pixel-6a/
December 15, 2022, 11:17 AM
I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It’s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that’s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don’t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option.
The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was adve...
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Abhijith PA: Running PostmarketOS on my phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2022/Running-postmarketos-on-my-phone/
December 15, 2022, 9:53 AM
Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for
some time now.
It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about
this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem
5 kept charing on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion
about
PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.
My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started
setting up porting pmOS to this device....
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.3 on CRAN: Adding File Logger
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/14#spdl_0.0.3
December 15, 2022, 12:00 AM
A second update to the still-new package spdl is now om CRAN, and in Debian. The key focus of spdl is a offering the same interface from both R and C++ for logging by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package.
This release add support for a simple filesetup() initialiser to direct logging output to a file. For now the console logger and the file logger are exclusive, if there is interest we could borrow a page from upstream and combine them.
The short NEWS entry follows.
Changes in spld versi...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.11 on CRAN: Small Enhancement
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/13#rcppspdlog_0.0.11
December 13, 2022, 11:53 PM
Version 0.0.11 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and in Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich.
This release adds support for a basic file logger as a alternative to the console logger. This can be helpful with code which suppresses or hides console output – as for example unit test code does. We also expose the formatting helper function ...
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Matthew Garrett: Trying to remove the need to trust cloud providers
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63261.html
December 13, 2022, 9:19 PM
First up: what I'm covering here is probably not relevant for most people. That's ok! Different situations have different threat models, and if what I'm talking about here doesn't feel like you have to worry about it, that's great! Your life is easier as a result. But I have worked in situations where we had to care about some of the scenarios I'm going to describe here, and the technologies I'm going to talk about here solve a bunch of these problems.So. You run a typical VM in the cloud. Who h...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.31 on CRAN: snprintf Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/12#digest_0.6.31
December 12, 2022, 10:29 PM
Release 0.6.31 of the digest package arrived at CRAN this weekend, and is being uploaded to Debian as well.
digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, and blake3 algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a mature and widely-used as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various o...
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Jonathan McDowell: Setting up FreshRSS in a subdirectory
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/12/setting-up-freshrss-subdirectory.html
December 12, 2022, 7:30 PM
Ever since the demise of Google Reader I have been looking for a suitable replacement RSS reader. In the past I used to use Liferea but that was when I used a single desktop machine; these days I want to be able to read on my phone and multiple machines. I moved to Feedly and it’s been mostly ok, but I’m hitting the limit of feeds available in the free tier, and $72/year is a bit more than I can justify to myself. Especially when I have machines already available to me where I could self hos...
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Matthew Garrett: Quick update on Pluton and Linux
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63219.html
December 12, 2022, 12:12 PM
I've been ridiculously burned out for a while now but I'm taking the month off to recover and that's giving me an opportunity to catch up on a lot of stuff. This has included me actually writing some code to work with the Pluton in my Thinkpad Z13. I've learned some more stuff in the process, but based on everything I know I'd still say that in its current form Pluton isn't a threat to free software.So, first up: by default on the Z13, Pluton is disabled. It's not obviously exposed to the OS at ...
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