Planet Debian

This month I accepted 235 and rejected 13 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 249. I also handled lots of RM bugs and almost stopped the increase in packages this month :-). Please be aware, if you don’t want your package to be removed, take care of it and keep it in good shape!

This was my hundred-fourteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3686-1] xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [DLA 3686-2] xorg-server security update for one CVE to really fix privilege escalation. Unfortunately the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [DLA 3699-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows
• [DLA 3700-1] cjson security update for one CVE to fix a segmentation violation
• [#1056934] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265; I could finally upload the package
• [#1056737] Bookworm PU-bug for minizip; I could finally upload the package
• [libde265]For the next round of CVEs of libde265 I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.
• [cjson]I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.

This month was rather calm and no unexpected things happened. The web team now automatically creates all webpages from data found in the security tracker. So I could deactivate my web-dla script again which created the webpages from the contents of the announcement mailing list.

Last but not least I also did two weeks of frontdesk duties.

This month was the sixty-fifth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [ELA-1019-1]xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [ELA-1019-2]xorg-server security update for to really fix privilege escalation. As with the DLAs above, the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [ELA 1027-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs in Stretch to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows

Last but not least I also did two weeks of frontdesk duties.

This month I uploaded a package to fix bugs:

• … cups/Bookworm to fix a bug related to color printing
• … hplip to fix a bug related to /usr-merge

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

This month I uploaded a package to fix bugs:

• … libpktriggercord to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … indi-nightscape to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … indi-ffmv to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … indi-armadillo-platypus to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … indi-orion-ssg3 to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … indi-sx to fix a /usr-merge bug

This month I uploaded new upstream version of packages, did a source upload for the transition or uploaded it to fix one or the other issue:

• … usb-modeswitch-data to fix a /usr-merge bug
• … libcontra it is sometimes a bit amazing what software phones home

I'm going to FOSDEM'24. Assuming to meet Debian and Kernel folks there, this should be a good opportunity to do PGP keysigning.

If you also go there and you're interested in keysigning: Send me your key via email to fosdem24-keysigning@kleine-koenig.org. I'll collect the keys, create a paper list for a keysigning party and send it back to you in the week before FOSDEM. The list will only be made available to other participants.

Then maybe wear a "keysigning" badge (or a crepe tape with that caption) that allows us to identify others on the list. If there are not too many who are interested, I guess that should work fine. (If this idea becomes too successful, I'd close the list after the first 100 participants.)

Review: The Faithless, by C.L. Clark

The Faithless is the second book in a political fantasy series that seems likely to be a trilogy. It is a direct sequel to The Unbroken, which you should read first. As usual, Orbit made it unnecessarily hard to get re-immersed in the world by refusing to provide memory aids for readers who read books as they come out instead of only when the series is complete, but this is not the fault of Clark or the book and you've heard me rant about this before.

The Unbroken was set in Qazāl (not-Algeria). The Faithless, as readers of the first book might guess from the title, is set in Balladaire (not-France). This is the palace intrigue book. Princess Luca is fighting for her throne against her uncle, the regent. Touraine is trying to represent her people. Whether and to what extent those interests are aligned is much of the meat of this book.

Normally I enjoy palace intrigue novels for the competence porn: watching someone navigate a complex political situation with skill and cunning, or upend the entire system by building unlikely coalitions or using unexpected routes to power. If you are similar, be warned that this is not what you're going to get. Touraine is a fish out of water with no idea how to navigate the Balladairan court, and does not magically become an expert in the course of this novel. Luca has the knowledge, but she's unsure, conflicted, and largely out-maneuvered. That means you will have to brace for some painful scenes of some of the worst people apparently getting what they want.

Despite that, I could not put this down. It was infuriating, frustrating, and a much slower burn than I prefer, but the layers of complex motivations that Clark builds up provided a different sort of payoff.

Two books in, the shape of this series is becoming clearer. This series is about empire and colonialism, but with considerably more complexity than fantasy normally brings to that topic. Power does not loosen its grasp easily, and it has numerous tools for subtle punishment after apparent upstart victories. Righteous causes rarely call banners to your side; instead, they create opportunities for other people to maneuver to their own advantage. Touraine has some amount of power now, but it's far from obvious how to use it. Her life's training tells her that exercising power will only cause trouble, and her enemies are more than happy to reinforce that message at every opportunity.

Most notable to me is Clark's bitingly honest portrayal of the supposed allies within the colonial power. It is clear that Luca is attempting to take the most ethical actions as she defines them, but it's remarkable how those efforts inevitably imply that Touraine should help Luca now in exchange for Luca's tenuous and less-defined possible future aid. This is not even a lie; it may be an accurate summary of Balladairan politics. And yet, somehow what Balladaire needs always matters more than the needs of their abused colony.

Underscoring this, Clark introduces another faction in the form of a populist movement against the Balladairan monarchy. The details of that setup in another fantasy novel would make them allies of the Qazāl. Here, as is so often the case in real life, a substantial portion of the populists are even more xenophobic and racist than the nobility. There are no easy alliances.

The trump card that Qazāl holds is magic. They have it, and (for reasons explored in The Unbroken) Balladaire needs it, although that is a position held by Luca's faction and not by her uncle. But even Luca wants to reduce that magic to a manageable technology, like any other element of the Balladairan state. She wants to understand it, harness it, and bring it under local control. Touraine, trained by Balladaire and facing Balladairan political problems, has the same tendency. The magic, at least in this book, refuses — not in the flashy, rebellious way that it would in most fantasy, but in a frustrating and incomprehensible lack of predictable or convenient rules. I think this will feel like a plot device to some readers, and that is to some extent true, but I think I see glimmers of Clark setting up a conflict of world views that will play out in the third book.

I think some people are going to bounce off this book. It's frustrating, enraging, at times melodramatic, and does not offer the cathartic payoff typically offered in fantasy novels of this type. Usually these are things I would be complaining about as well. And yet, I found it satisfyingly challenging, engrossing, and memorable. I spent a lot of the book yelling "just kill him already" at the characters, but I think one of Clark's points is that overcoming colonial relationships requires a lot more than just killing one evil man. The characters profoundly fail to execute some clever and victorious strategy. Instead, as in the first book, they muddle through, making the best choice that they can see in each moment, making lots of mistakes, and paying heavy prices. It's realistic in a way that has nothing to do with blood or violence or grittiness. (Although I did appreciate having the thin thread of Pruett's story and its highly satisfying conclusion.)

This is also a slow-burn romance, and there too I think opinions will differ. Touraine and Luca keep circling back to the same arguments and the same frustrations, and there were times that this felt repetitive. It also adds a lot of personal drama to the politics in a way that occasionally made me dubious. But here too, I think Clark is partly using the romance to illustrate the deeper political points.

Luca is often insufferable, cruel and ambitious in ways she doesn't realize, and only vaguely able to understand the Qazāl perspective; in short, she's the pragmatic centrist reformer. I am dubious that her ethics would lead her to anything other than endless compromise without Touraine to push her. To Luca's credit, she also realizes that and wants to be a better person, but struggles to have the courage to act on it. Touraine both does and does not want to manipulate her; she wants Luca's help (and more), but it's not clear Luca will give it under acceptable terms, or even understand how much she's demanding. It's that foundational conflict that turns the romance into a slow burn by pushing them apart. Apparently I have more patience for this type of on-again, off-again relationship than one based on artificial miscommunication.

The more I noticed the political subtext, the more engaging I found the romance on the surface.

I picked this up because I'd read several books about black characters written by white authors, and while there was nothing that wrong with those books, the politics felt a little too reductionist and simplified. I wanted a book that was going to force me out of comfortable political assumptions. The Faithless did exactly what I was looking for, and I am definitely here for the rest of the series. In that sense, recommended, although do not go into this book hoping for adroit court maneuvering and competence porn.

Followed by The Sovereign, which does not yet have a release date.

Content warnings: Child death, attempted cultural genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10

This year was hard from a personal and work point of view, which impacted the amount of Free Software bits I ended up doing - even when I had the time I often wasn’t in the right head space to make progress on things. However writing this annual recap up has been a useful exercise, as I achieved more than I realised. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021 + 2022.

The only Free Software related conference I made it to this year was DebConf23 in Kochi, India. Changes with projects at work meant I couldn’t justify anything work related. This year I’m planning to make it to FOSDEM, and haven’t made a decision on DebConf24 yet.

Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian.

I started the year working on retrogaming with Kodi on Debian. I got this to a much better state for bookworm, with it being possible to run the bsnes-mercury emulator under Kodi using RetroArch. There are a few other libretro backends available for RetroArch, but Kodi needs some extra controller mappings packaged up first.

Plenty of uploads were involved, though some of this was aligning all the dependencies and generally cleaning things up in iterations.

• retroarch: 1.13.0-dfsg+3, 1.14.0+dfsg-1, 1.15.0+dfsg-1, 1.16.0.3+dfgs-1
• libretro-core-info uploads: 1.14.0-1, 1.15.0-1.
• libretro-bsnes-mercury: 094+git20220807-2, 094+git20220807-3, 094+git20220807-4, 094+git20220807-5, 094+git20220807-6, 094+git20220807-7, 094+git20220807-8.
• kodi-game-libretro: 20.2.0-2, 20.2.2-1, 20.2.2-2, 20.2.4-1, 20.2.4-2
• rcheevos: 10.5.0-2, 10.6.0-1, 10.7.0-1, 10.7.1-1.

I continued to work on a few packages within the Debian Electronics Packaging Team. OpenOCD produced a new release in time for the bookworm release, so I uploaded 0.12.0-1. There were a few minor sigrok cleanups - sigrok 0.3, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-4 + libsigrok 0.5.2-4 / 0.5.2-5.

While I didn’t manage to get the work completed I did some renaming of the ESP8266 related packages - gcc-xtensa-lx106 (which saw a 13 upload pre-bookworm) has become gcc-xtensa (with 14) and binutils-xtensa-lx106 has become binutils-xtensa (with 6). Binary packages remain the same, but this is intended to allow for the generation of ESP32 compiler toolchains from the same source.

onak saw 0.6.3-1 uploaded to match the upstream release. I also uploaded libgpg-error 1.47-1 (though I can claim no credit for any of the work in preparing the package) to help move things forward on updating gnupg2 in Debian.

I NMUed tpm2-pkcs11 1.9.0-0.1 to fix some minor issues pre-bookworm release; I use this package myself to store my SSH key within my laptop TPM, so I care about it being in a decent state.

sg3-utils also saw a bit of love with 1.46-2 + 1.46-3 - I don’t work in the storage space these days, but I’m still listed as an uploaded and there was an RC bug around the library package naming that I was qualified to fix and test pre-bookworm.

Related to my retroarch work I sponsored uploads of mgba for Ryan Tandy: 0.10.0+dfsg-1, 0.10.0+dfsg-2, 0.10.1+dfsg-1, 0.10.2+dfsg-1, mgba 0.10.1+dfsg-1+deb12u1.

As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team, both from project members and those external to the project.

I continue to keep an eye on Debian New Members, even though I’m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. Mostly my involvement is via Front Desk activities, helping out with queries to the team alias, and contributing to internal discussions as well as our panel at DebConf23.

Finally the 3 month rotation for Debian Keyring continues to operate smoothly. I dealt with 2023.03.24, 2023.06.26, 2023.06.29, 2023.09.10, 2023.09.24 + 2023.12.24.

I had a few minor patches accepted to the kernel this year. A pair of safexcel cleanups (improved error logging for firmware load fail and cleanup on load failure) came out of upgrading the kernel running on my RB5009.

The rest were related to my work on repurposing my C.H.I.P.. The AXP209 driver needed extended to support GPIO3 (with associated DT schema update). That allowed Bluetooth to be enabled. Adding the AXP209 internal temperature ADC as an iio-hwmon node means it can be tracked using the normal sensor monitoring framework. And finally I added the pinmux settings for mmc2, which I use to support an external microSD slot on my C.H.I.P.

2023 saw another minor release of onak, 0.6.3, which resulted in a corresponding Debian upload (0.6.3-1). It has a couple of bug fixes (including a particularly annoying, if minor, one around systemd socket activation that felt very satisfying to get to the bottom of), but I still lack the time to do any of the major changes I would like to.

I wrote listadmin3 to allow easy manipulation of moderation queues for Mailman3. It’s basic, but it’s drastically improved my timeliness on dealing with held messages.

This year only involved a single upstream related submission; a fix for tpm_tis interrupts with the Lenovo P620 that then got dropped when the change that caused the issue was reverted.

That wraps up 2023. I’ve got no particular goals for this year; looking around my desk I’ve a few ARM based devices I’d like to get running a mainline kernel. I need to play about a bit more with the retroarch bits (if I really had time I’d do the migration for Kodi to PCRE2, as that’s currently causing testing migration issues), perhaps getting some more controller mappings packaged. But no promises.

CW for body size change mentions

I needed a corset, badly.

Years ago I had a chance to have my measurements taken by a former professional corset maker and then a lesson in how to draft an underbust corset, and that lead to me learning how nice wearing a well-fitted corset feels.

Later I tried to extend that pattern up for a midbust corset, with success.

And then my body changed suddenly, and I was no longer able to wear either of those, and after a while I started missing them.

Since my body was still changing (if no longer drastically so), and I didn’t want to use expensive materials for something that had a risk of not fitting after too little time, I decided to start by making myself a summer lightweight corset in aida cloth and plastic boning (for which I had already bought materials). It fitted, but not as well as the first two ones, and I’ve worn it quite a bit.

I still wanted back the feeling of wearing a comfy, heavy contraption of coutil and steel, however.

After a lot of procrastination I redrafted a new pattern, scrapped everything, tried again, had my measurements taken by a dressmaker [#dressmaker], put them in the draft, cut a first mock-up in cheap cotton, fixed the position of a seam, did a second mock-up in denim [#jeans] from an old pair of jeans, and then cut into the cheap herringbone coutil I was planning to use.

And that’s when I went to see which one of the busks in my stash would work, and realized that I had used a wrong vertical measurement and the front of the corset was way too long for a midbust corset.

Luckily I also had a few longer busks, I basted one to the denim mock up and tried to wear it for a few hours, to see if it was too long to be comfortable. It was just a bit, on the bottom, which could be easily fixed with the Power Tools1.

Except, the more I looked at it the more doing this felt wrong: what I needed most was a midbust corset, not an overbust one, which is what this was starting to be.

I could have trimmed it down, but I knew that I also wanted this corset to be a wearable mockup for the pattern, to refine it and have it available for more corsets. And I still had more than half of the cheap coutil I was using, so I decided to redo the pattern and cut new panels.

And this is where the “or two” comes in: I’m not going to waste the overbust panels: I had been wanting to learn some techniques to make corsets with a fashion fabric layer, rather than just a single layer of coutil, and this looks like an excellent opportunity for that, together with a piece of purple silk that I know I have in the stash. This will happen later, however, first I’m giving priority to the underbust.

Anyway, a second set of panels was cut, all the seam lines marked with tailor tacks, and I started sewing by inserting the busk.

And then realized that the pre-made boning channel tape I had was too narrow for the 10 mm spiral steel I had plenty of. And that the 25 mm twill tape was also too narrow for a double boning channel. On the other hand, the 18 mm twill tape I had used for the waist tape was good for a single channel, so I decided to put a single bone on each seam, and then add another piece of boning in the middle of each panel.

Since I’m making external channels, making them in self fabric would have probably looked better, but I no longer had enough fabric, because of the cutting mishap, and anyway this is going to be a strictly underwear only corset, so it’s not a big deal.

Once the boning channel situation was taken care of, everything else proceeded quite smoothly and I was able to finish the corset during the Christmas break, enlisting again my SO to take care of the flat steel boning while I cut the spiral steels myself with wire cutters.

I could have been a bit more precise with the binding, as it doesn’t align precisely at the front edge, but then again, it’s underwear, nobody other than me and everybody who reads this post is going to see it and I was in a hurry to see it finished. I will be more careful with the next one.

I also think that I haven’t been careful enough when pressing the seams and applying the tape, and I’ve lost about a cm of width per part, so I’m using a lacing gap that is a bit wider than I planned for, but that may change as the corset gets worn, and is still within tolerance.

Also, on the morning after I had finished the corset I woke up and realized that I had forgotten to add garter tabs at the bottom edge. I don’t know whether I will ever use them, but I wanted the option, so maybe I’ll try to add them later on, especially if I can do it without undoing the binding.

The next step would have been flossing, which I proceeded to postpone until I’ve worn the corset for a while: not because there is any reason for it, but because I still don’t know how I want to do it :)

What was left was finishing and uploading the pattern and instructions, that are now on my sewing pattern website as #FreeSoftWear, and finally I could post this on the blog.

1. i.e. by asking my SO to cut and sand it, because I’m lazy and I hate doing that part :D↩︎

After just a tiny1 delay I’ve finally added support for tags to this blog.

In the next few days I may go back and add / change tags to the older posts, or I may not, I’ll decide.

Also, I still need to render a tag cloud somewhere; maybe it will happen soon, maybe it will take another year. :D

I hope I’ve also succesfully worked around the bug in Friendica where the src for images got deleted instead of properly converted.

1. less than one year!↩︎