My free software activities, february 2016

  1. blog
  1. Debian Long Term Support (LTS)
    1. Frontdesk duties
    2. Uploads and reviews
    3. Issues with VMs again
  2. Other free software work
    1. Darktable 2.0
    2. Markdown mode hacks
    3. More emacs hacking
    4. IRC packages updates
    5. Miscellaneous bug reports

Debian Long Term Support (LTS)

This is my third month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month was my first month working on the frontdesk duty and did a good bunch of triage. I also performed one upload and reviewed a few security issues.

Frontdesk duties

I spent some time trying to get familiar with the frontdesk duty. I still need to document a bit of what I learned, which did involve asking around for parts of the process. The following issues were triaged:

Uploads and reviews

I only ended up doing one upload, of the chrony package (CVE-2016-1567), thanks to the maintainer which provided the patch.

I tried my best trying to sort through the issues with tiff (CVE-2015-8668 and CVE-2015-7554), which didn't have obvious fixes available. OpenSUSE seem to have patches, but it is really hard to find them through their issue trackers, which were timing out on me. Hopefully someone else can pick that one up.

I also tried and failed to reproduce the cpio issue (CVE-2016-2037), which, at the time, didn't have a patch for a fix. This ended up being solved and Santiago took up the upload.

I finally spent some time trying to untangle the mess that is libraw, or more precisely, all the packages that embed dcraw code instead of linking against libraw. Now I really feel even more strongly for the Debian policy section 4.13 which states that Debian packages should not ship with copies of other packages code. It made it really hard to figure out which packages were vulnerable, especially because it was hard to figure out which versions of libraw/dcraw were actually vulnerable to the bug, but also just plain figure out which packages were copying code from libraw. I wish I had found out about secure-testing/data/embedded-code-copies earlier... Still, it was interesting to get familiar with codesearch.debian.net to try to find copies of the vulnerable code, which was not working so well. Kudos to darktable 2.0 for getting rid of their embedded copy of libraw, by the way - it made it completely not vulnerable to the issue, the versions in stretch and sid not having the code at all and older versions having non-vulnerable copies of the code.

Issues with VMs again

I still had problems running a squeeze VM - not wanting to use virtualbox because of the overhead, I got lost for a bit trying to use libvirt and KVM. A bunch of issues crept up: using virt-manager would just fail on startup with an error saying interface mtu value is improper, which is a very unhelpful error message (what is a proper value??) - and, for the record, the MTU on eth0 and wlan0 is the fairly standard 1500, while lo is at 65536 bytes, nothing unusual there as far as I know.

Then the next problem was actually running a VM - I still somewhat expected to be able to boot off a chroot, something I should definitely forget about it seems like (boot loader missing? not sure). I ended up calling virt-install with the live ISO image I was previously using:

virt-install --virt-type kvm --name squeeze-amd64 --memory 512 --cdrom ~/iso/Debian/cdimage.debian.org_mirror_cdimage_archive_6.0.10_live_amd64_iso_hybrid_debian_live_6.0.10_amd64_gnome_desktop.iso --disk size=4 --os-variant debiansqueeze

At least now I have an installed squeeze VM, something I didn't get to do in Virtualbox (mostly because I didn't want to wait through the install, because it was so slow).

Finally, I still have trouble getting a commandline console on the VM: somehow, running virtsh console squeeze-amd64 doesn't give me a login terminal, and worse, it actually freezes the terminal that I can actually get on virt-viewer squeeze-amd64, which definitely sounds like a bug.

I documented a bit more of that setup in the Debian wiki KVM page so hopefully this will be useful for others.

Other free software work

I continued my work on improving timetracking with ledger in my ledger-timetracking git repository, which now got a place on the new plaintextaccounting.org website, which acts as a portal for ledger-like software projects and documentation.

Darktable 2.0

I had the pleasure of trying the new Darktable 2.0 release, which only recently entered Debian. I built a backport for jessie, which works beautifully: much faster thumbnail rendering, no dropping of history when switching views... The new features are great, but I also appreciate how they are being very conservative in their approach.

Darktable is great software: I may have trouble approaching the results other are having with lightroom and snapseed, but those are proprietary software that I can't use anyways. I also suspect that I just don't have enough of a clue of what I'm doing to get the results I need in Darktable. Maybe with hand-holding, one day, I will surpass the results I get with the JPEGs from my Canon camera. Until then, I turned off RAW exports in my camera to try and control the explosion of disk use I saw since I got that camera:

41M     2004
363M    2005
937M    2006
2,2G    2007
894M    2008
800M    2009
1,8G    2010
1,4G    2011
9,8G    2012
31G     2013
26G     2014
9,8G    2015

The drop in 2015 is mostly due to me taking less pictures in the last year, for some reason...

Markdown mode hacks

I ended up writing some elisp for the markdown mode. It seems I am always writing links like [text](link) which seems more natural at first, but then the formatting looks messier, as paragraph wrapping is all off because of the long URLs. So I always ended up converting those links, which was a painful series of keystrokes.

So I made a macro, and while I'm a it, why not rewrite it as a lisp function. Twice.

Then I was told by the markdown-mode.el developers that they had already fixed that (in the 2.1 version, not in Debian jessie) and that the C-c C-a r key binding actually recognized existing links and conveniently converted them.

I documented my adventures in bug #94, but it seems I wrote this code for nothing else than re-learning Emacs lisp, which was actually quite fun.

More emacs hacking

Another thing I always wasted time doing by and is "rename file and buffer". Often, you visit a file but it's named wrong. My most common case is a .txt file that i rename to .mdwn.

I would then have to do:

M-x rename-file <ret> newfile
M-x rename-buffer <ret> newfile
C-x C-s <ret> newfile

Really annoying.

Turns out that set-visited-file-name actually does most of the job, but doesn't actually rename the file, which is really silly. So I wrote this small function instead:

(defun rename-file-and-buffer (newfname)
  "combine rename-file and rename-buffer

set-visited-file-name does most of the job, but unfortunately
doesn't actually rename the file. rename-file does that, but
doesn't rename the buffer. rename-buffer only renames the buffer,
which is pretty pointless.

only operates on current buffer because set-visited-file-name
also does so and we don't bother doing excursions around.
"
  (interactive "GRename file and bufer: ")
  (let ((oldfname (buffer-file-name)))
    (set-visited-file-name newfname nil t)
    (rename-file oldfname newfname)
    )
  )

Not bound to any key, really trivial, but doing this without that function is really non-trivial, especially since set-visited-file-name needs special arguments to not mark the file as modified.

IRC packages updates

I updated the Sopel IRC bot package to the latest release, 6.3.0. They have finally switched to Requests, but apart from that, no change was necessary. I am glad to finally see SNI support working everywhere in the bot!

I also update the Charydbis IRC server package to the latest 3.5.0 stable release. This release is great news, as I was able to remove 5 of the 7 patches I was dragging along the Debian package. The previous Charybdis stable release was over 3 years old, as 3.4.2 was released in (December) 2012!

I spend a good chunk of time making the package reproducible. I filed a bug upstream and eventually made a patch to make it possible to hardcode a build timestamp, which seems to have been the only detectable change in the reproducible build infrastructure. Charybdis had been FTBS for a while in sid now, and the upload should fix that as well. Unfortunately, Charybdis still doesn't build with hardening flags - but hopefully a future update of the package should fix that. It is probably because CFLAGS are not passed around properly.

There's really interesting stuff going on in the IRC world. Even though IRC is one of the oldest protocols still in operation (1988, even before the Web, but after SMTP and the even more venerable FTP), it is still being actively developed, with a working group drafting multiple extensions to the IRCv3 protocol defined in RFC 1459.

For example, IRCv3.3 includes a Strict Transport Security extension, which tries to ensure users use encrypted channels as much as possible, through warnings and STARTTLS support. Charybdis goes even further by proposing a reversal of the +S ("secure channel" flag) where all channels are secure by default, and you need to deliberately mark a channel as insecure with the +U flag if you actually want to allow users on an clear-text connection to join the channel. A transition mechanism is also proposed.

Miscellaneous bug reports

En vrac...

I fell face-first in this amazing game that is endless-sky. I made a small pull request on the documentation, a bug report and a feature request.

I forwarded a bug report, originally filed against monkeysign, to the pyqrencode maintainers.

I filed a usability bug against tails-installer, which just entered Debian, mostly usability issues.

I discovered the fim image viewer, which re-entered Debian recently. It seemed perfect to adjust my photos-import workflow, so I added it to my script, to be able to review photos prior to importing them into Darktable and git-annex.

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comment 1

Interesting to hear what real prograqmmers actually do for change. Sounds just like it ought to, never to sure where things are going to end up. Keep up the good work. James

Comment by krjames —
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