Feeds

It (was) that time of year again - last weekend we hosted a bunch of nice people at our place in Cambridge for the annual Debian UK OMGWTFBBQ!

Lots of friends, lots of good food and drink. Of course lots of geeky discussions about Debian, networking, random computer languages and... screws? And of course some card games to keep us laughing into each night!

Many thanks to a number of awesome friendly people for again sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend. It's hungry/thirsty work celebrating like this!

• Codethink
• Mythic Beasts

The DropTimes presents a detailed FAQ explaining the transition from 'Drupal' to 'Drupal CMS.' Discover the reasons behind this branding decision, its impact on the Drupal ecosystem, and what it means for developers and users alike.

DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occassion when one happens.

This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me.

I wasn’t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks Nilesh for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Koreas’s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many thing easy. Most stuff were documentated on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels.

We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrappers I have ever seen. The city has good mix modern and ancient culture. We explored various plaes in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing.

A Street in Seoul

Next, we to headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is “Busan is Good”.) South Korea has good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the times. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels.

PKNU Entrance

The venue was for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from front desk, we got our dormitery rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different ie:

• Rooms had heated floors. It seems to snow in Busan.
• Each area was had card based access. There was a seperate card for laundry too.
• Rooms had announcement systems right inside the room, though we couldn’t decipher any announcement as all of them were in Korean.
• Each room was provided with a dedicated access point and own SSID inside the room.

View from Dorm Room

Settling in was easy and we started meeting familiar folks after almost an year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf.

Like everytime, first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, voluneteers checkin, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls . After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out.

From Talk Director's chair

DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetration folks well, of which I’m one. I got to try different food items which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn’t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian resturarent to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn’t particularyly craving desi food but wasn’t able to get something according to my taste so went there.

As usual Bits from DPL talk was packed

For daytrip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful).

The beautiful sea
View from Ulsan Bridge Observatory

Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they’ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was massive update to last year where we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn’t what is required but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage but it’s always fun have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;)

Various mascots in attendence
Video and Network stats. Screengrab from closing ceremony

Now lets talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general:

• Convience stores were everywhere, one could see same brand stores less than kilometer apart. We had even had two of them (GS25(s)), a road cross away too. These places were well stocked with almost everything even alcohol.
• There were wide footpaths and pedestrian friendly policies.
• Public transport and intra modal transfer is convient and easy to figure. Each metro station connects to multiple nearby buildings through underground walkways and one never had to go out in the sun (in hot and humid weather). Also Seoul and Busan metro networks were massive. Same T money card worked for buses (almost hop on, tap and hop off at your destination), metros and even cabs.
• South Korea pays special attention to maintaining their historical and cultural buildings. These venues had informational brochures in Korea, English, Japanese and Chinese.
• We got constant stream of “Public safety alerts” on our phones. Some phones even read them aloud for heatwaves and rains warnings, all in Korean.
• Trash was segrated at source everywhere.
• Public, high speed WIFI was omni-present in malls, public transport, airport etc. In metro, each coach had access points from all three telecom providers (SK Telecom, KT and LG U+) which also had almost similar voice and data plans.
• Police personals were quite helpful despite the language issue.
• Not many folks here are comfortable in English but one can always make use of various mobile translation apps.
• Cards are accepted everywhere and there’re too many of these cards ;)
• Food situation was bit difficult for me as a vegetration. We always have vegan/veg food in DebConf but outside, this whole concept doesn’t seem to exist here.
• I couldn’t find any public speedtest servers inside Korea. All my fast.com/speedtest.net servers were located either Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and even in United States. On the very last day, I got a speedtest servers in Seoul, inside SK Telecom.

Grand Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul
Starfield Library, Seoul

If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it’s better to attend DebCamp as well because that’s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organisational work/stress so was better and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost almost all Debian team needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to team and they would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull of this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality.

DebConf23 Group Photo. Click to enlarge.
Credits - Aigars Mahinovs

This whole experience expanded my world view. There’s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France.

The first Kdenlive Café of the year will be on Tuesday, September 3rd at 7PM UTC (9PM CET).

Come chat with the team!

Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-ebr

The post Kdenlive Café appeared first on Kdenlive.

San Miguel de La Palma Tech Lovers, the meetup group As you probably know, I am the organiser of the meetup group San Miguel de La Palma Tech Lovers, a attempt to bring together the local tech community, remote workers located in the island and digital nomads visiting it. These two last groups are coordinated … Continue reading La Palma Tech Summer 2024 meetup: summary

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-35.

Telegram is neither “secure” nor “encrypted”

Tags: tech, telegram, security, privacy

Here a good reminder that the PR of Telegram is highly misleading. It’s not very secure, they don’t really care about your privacy.

https://rys.io/en/171.html

How Telegram’s Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr

Tags: tech, telegram, law

Yes, such an arrest is concerning. Now, lots of people are voicing the wrong concerns… this article actually does a good job explaining it.

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

Tags: tech, foss, values, licensing, fundraising

I’m not sure the “bubble” comparison properly applies. Still there are indeed signs of the Open Source movement getting in troubles. It’ll be all the more important to stick to the Free Software values.

https://tarakiyee.com/is-the-open-source-bubble-about-to-burst/

Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

Tags: tech, foss, licensing

It’s about time… I wish they would have gone for the AGPL + proprietary double license scheme instead of their odd licenses the last time.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, language

Interesting to see Typescript and Rust picking up pace slowly. Otherwise Python, Java, Javascript and C++ are still the big four overall. For jobs, C# and SQL are good to have in your tool belt.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024

What RSS Needs

Tags: tech, rss

Very good list of the challenges ahead for RSS as a popular protocol. It’d be great to see some of it being tackled.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/08/25/feeds

OpenSSH Backdoors

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, linux

Interesting comparison between old attempts at backdooring OpenSSH and the latest xz attempt. There are lessons to be learned from this. It makes a good case for starting to sandbox everything.

https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

Tags: tech, security, airline

Woops, this was clearly a very bad security issue allowing to completely bypass airport security screening in the US.

https://ian.sh/tsa

SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL

Tags: tech, databases, sql

Looks like an interesting way to improve SQL. This feels like a nice extension, it’s much better than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-them-pipe-syntax-in-sql/

Python’s Preprocessor

Tags: tech, programming, python, metaprogramming

Interesting to see how far you can go preprocessing Python.

https://pydong.org/posts/PythonsPreprocessor/

Don’t use complex expressions in if conditions | Volodymyr Gubarkov

Tags: tech, programming, maintenance

Definitely a good advice, I see very complex expressions in if (or while BTW) conditions way too often. They tend to accumulate over time.

https://maximullaris.com/if_condition.html

Why Playwright is less flaky than Selenium

Tags: tech, web, frontend, tests, performance, reliability

Interesting reason which would explain the Selenium flakiness. It’s just harder to write tests with race conditions using Playwright.

https://justin.searls.co/links/2024-08-29-why-playwright-is-less-flaky-than-selenium/

Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

Tags: tech, monitoring, reliability, debugging

How to avoid drowning in errors when getting serious about monitoring. Finding class of errors and treating them one by one will definitely help.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/08/15/putting-a-meaningful-dent-in-your-error-backlog/

There can’t be only one

Tags: tech, design, databases

A weird detour via baseball obscure rules to justify why we should pay attention to the “Highlander problem”. This should be kept in mind especially for designing databases.

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2024/aug/27/highlander-problem/

Building with purpose

Tags: tech, business, architecture

Definitely something architects should do more. Understanding the business needs should be the input to the technical decisions. Otherwise you might just happily build the wrong thing.

https://cremich.cloud/building-with-purpose

Bye for now!

Qt/.NET is a proposed toolkit for interoperability between C++ and .NET, including a Qt-based custom native host for managed assemblies, as well as a native-to-managed adapter module that provides higher-level interoperability services such as object life-cycle management, instance method invocation and event notification.

57th issue of Andrei Neagoie's must-read monthly Python Newsletter

Review: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher: Tor Copyright: 2023 ISBN: 1-250-24410-2 Format: Kindle Pages: 116

Thornhedge is a fantasy novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name that Ursula Vernon uses for her adult writing. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for best novella. No matter how much my brain wants to misspell the title, it is a story about a hedge, not a Neolithic earthwork.

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

There is a princess asleep in a tower, surrounded by a wall of thorns. Toadling's job is to keep anyone from foolishly breaking in. At first, it was a constant struggle and all that she could manage, but with time, the flood of princes slowed to a trickle. A road was built and abandoned. People fled. There was a plague. With any luck, the tower was finally forgotten.

Then a knight shows up. Not a very rich knight, nor a very successful knight. Just a polite and very persistent knight who wants to get into the tower that Toadling does not want him to get into.

As you might have guessed, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. As you may have also guessed from the author, or from the cover text that says "not all curses should be broken," this version is a bit different. How and why it departs from the original is a surprise that slowly unfolds over the course of the story, in parallel to a delicate, cautious, and delightfully kind-hearted conversation between the knight and the fairy.

If you have read a T. Kingfisher story before, particularly one of her fractured fairy tales, you know what to expect. Toadling is one of her typical well-meaning, earnest, slightly awkward protagonists who is just trying to do the right thing in a confusing world full of problems and dangers. She's constantly overwhelmed and yet she keeps going, because what else is there to do. Like a lot of Kingfisher's writing, it's a story about quiet courage from someone who doesn't consider herself courageous. One of the twists this time is that the knight is a character from a similar vein: doggedly unwilling to leave any problem alone, but equally determined to try to be kind. The two of them together make for a story with a gentle and rather melancholy tone.

We do, eventually, learn the whole backstory of the tower, the wall of thorns, and Toadling. There is a god, a rather memorable one, who is frustratingly cryptic in the way that gods are. There are monsters who are more loving than most humans. There are humans who turn out to be surprisingly decent when it matters. And, like most of Kingfisher's writing, there is a constant awareness of how complicated the world is, how full it is of people who are just trying to get through each day, and how heavy of burdens people can shoulder when they don't see another way.

This story pulled me right in. It is not horror, although there are a few odd bits like there always are in Kingfisher stories. Your largest risk as a reader is that it might make you cry if stories about earnest people doing their best in overwhelming situations hit you that way. My primary complaint is that there was nowhere near enough ending for me. After everything I learned about the characters, I wanted to spend some time with them outside of the bounds of the story. Kingfisher points the reader in a direction and then leaves the rest to your imagination, and I can see why she chose that story construction, but I wanted more catharsis than I got.

That complaint aside, this is quintessential T. Kingfisher, and I am unsurprised that it won a Hugo. If you've read any of her other fractured fairy tales, or the 2023 Hugo winner for best novel, you know the sort of stories she tells, and you probably know whether you will like this. I am one of the people who like this.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Warning: If you're not into meat, you might want to skip the rest of this...

This year, I turned 50. Wow. Lots of friends and family turned up to help me celebrate, with a BBQ (of course!). I was very grateful for a lovely set of gifts from those awesome people, and I have a number of driving experiences to book in the next year or so. I'm going to have so much fun driving silly cars on and off road!

However, the most surprising gift was something totally different - a full-day course of hands-on pork butchery. I was utterly bemused - I've never considered doing anything like this at all, and I'd certainly never talked to friends about like it either. I was shocked, but in a good way!

So, two weekends back Jo and I went over to Empire Farm in Somerset. We stayed nearby so we could be ready on-site early on Sunday morning, and then we joined three other people doing the course. Jo was there to observe, i.e. to watch and take (lots of!) pictures.

I can genuinely say that this was the most fun surprise gift I've ever received! David Coldman, the master butcher working with us, has been in the industry for many years. He was an excellent teacher, showing us everything we needed to know and being very patient with us when we needed it. It was great to hear his philosophy too - he only uses the very best locally-sourced meat and focuses on quality over quantity. He showed us all the different cuts of pork that a butcher will make, and we were encouraged to take everything home - no waste here!

At the beginning of the day, we each started with half a pig. Over the next several hours, we steadily worked our way through a series of cuts with knife and saw, making the remaining pig smaller and smaller as we went.

We finished the day with three sets of meat. First, a stack of vacuum-packed joints, chops and steaks ready for cooking and eating at home. Second: a box of off-cuts that we minced and made into sausages at the end of the day. Finally: a bag of skin and bones. Our friend's dog got some of the bones, and Jo turned a lot of the skin into crackling that we shared with friends at the OMGWTFBBQ the next weekend.

This was an amazing day. Massive thanks to my good friend Chris Walker for suggesting this gift. As I told David on the day: this was the most fun surprise gift I've ever received. Good hands-on teaching in a new craft is an incredible thing to experience, and I can't recommend this course highly enough.

Starshot ignites Drupal Forge Darren Oh Thu, 08/29/2024 - 20:31

In this episode, we pulled out a new tool. We spent the session using Kamal, a tool to deploy web apps directly to servers. Kamal offers a complete tool set to get apps running on bare metal or cloud machines. We played with the tool to see how far we go to get an app deployed to a new server.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 277. This version includes the following changes:

[ Sergei Trofimovich ] * Don't crash when attempting to hashing symlinks with targets that point to a directory.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

PyCharm 2024.2.1 is here! This release’s key features include initial support for Python 3.13, improvements to the Data View tool window, and enhanced code assistance for Django.

Don’t forget to visit our What’s New page to get all the new updates. Download the latest version from our website, or update your current version through our free Toolbox App.

Download PyCharm 2024.2.1 PyCharm 2024.2.1 key features Data View PRO

PyCharm now provides two color-scheme options for the table heatmaps in the Data View tool window: the Diverging and Sequential color schemes.

The Diverging color scheme emphasizes variation relative to a norm. It consists of two contrasting colors that deviate from a central value in two opposite directions.

The Sequential color scheme consists of a single color or a range of closely related colors that vary in intensity.

You can apply the heatmap color schemes to the whole table or to each column separately, or you can use coloring only for Boolean values.

Python 3.13

PyCharm now recognizes TypeIs syntax, providing proper type inference and code completion for user-defined narrowed functions. As part of Python 3.13 support, the IDE is now also aware of ReadOnly keys in TypedDict and warns you if something is assigned to a ReadOnly member.

Read more Django: Completion for ModelAdmin fields, and more PRO

Get intelligent code completion, refactoring, and navigation for the fields in ModelAdmin classes. Other productivity enhancements include a warning about newly created apps that have not been added to the INSTALLED_APPS declaration, and the ability to insert an app’s tag into the manage.py console automatically when migrations are made from the Django Structure tool window.

Read our release notes for the full breakdown and more details on all of the features in 2024.2.1. If you encounter any problems, please report them in our issue tracker so we can address them promptly. 

Connect with us on X (formerly Twitter) to share your thoughts on PyCharm 2024.2.1. We’re looking forward to hearing them!

Dries Buytaert announced recently that the product name for the result of the Drupal Starshot Initiative will be Drupal CMS. Exciting! Activities on features for Drupal CMS are divided into tracks - a set of deliverables focused to provide valuable solutions for different parts of the product strategy.

Let’s see what’s cooking in the Drupal CMS kitchen as since the announcement of the track leads, quite some work has been done. We are happy to share a brief overview to highlight the progress made!

The Events Track has been busy with transferring the Events recipe to the Drupal CMS and now we’ve got the beginnings of an event system. As with all the Drupal CMS components, the ultimate plan is for each one to be available as its own project, but at the same time all be developed within the same repo. 

The Data Privacy / Compliance Track is busy developing a survey for the international audience. We are looking forward to sharing it with the community very soon.

The Trial Experience Track in coordination with the Drupal Association has devised a solution to leverage GitLab Pages. After checking in with the rest of the Drupal CMS team, it was decided the trial codebase would be added to the monolithic repository. You can find more details at the dedicated blog post by Matt Glaman.

The Starshot Demo Design System initiative is supporting the Experience Builder demo next month by providing Drupal-branded components within a design system theme. The team has made excellent progress and needs more help in the next two weeks to test components within Experience Builder. Learn how to get involved!

The SEO Track managed to add Basic SEO recipe to Drupal CMS. This recipe will be applied by default, is idempotent (can be applied multiple times), and sets the simple best practices configuration we feel every site needs. The team is continuing to work to define an advanced SEO recipe that we will propose to be optional that has more tools for optimizing for search engines.

The Advanced Search Track has drafted a proposal for the track. It is being reviewed by the leadership team and the idea is to provide a recipe for at least two different approaches and collect community feedback. We expect this to happen in September so stay tuned!

The Media Management Track is undertaking discovery to gather common practices and new insights that will lead to a proposal for the features and recipes for media in early versions of Drupal CMS. The track will also propose how improvements and innovations could look for media beyond the launch of Drupal CMS. Tony Barker has created a survey as part of the discovery and welcomes the community to provide their thoughts and feelings on media in Drupal using this form.

We are observing the progress each track team is making with excitement and will keep you up to date on upcoming developments!

This week was all about catching up on notifications and open PRs from last week, and creating a mega amount of new PRs.

Libtoolers!

The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.5.2, a beta release.

This beta release was not planned, but additional testing of a recent bugfix
was requested for distros to have the chance to test it with mass-rebuilds.

The details of this bugfix can be found here:
    https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=71489
The commit for this bugfix can be found here:
    https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/libtool.git/commit/?id=0e1b33332429cd578367bd0ad420c065d5caf0ac

I hope to release the stable in a couple of weeks if testing goes well!

GNU Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a
consistent, portable interface. GNU Libtool ships with GNU libltdl, which
hides the complexity of loading dynamic runtime libraries (modules)
behind a consistent, portable interface.

There have been 9 commits by 4 people in the 35 days since 2.5.1.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Bruno Haible (1)
  Ileana Dumitrescu (6)
  Sergey Poznyakoff (1)
  Tobias Stoeckmann (1)

Ileana
 [on behalf of the libtool maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU libtool home page:
    https://gnu.org/s/libtool/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=libtool.git;a=shortlog;h=v2.5.2
or run this command from a git-cloned libtool directory:
  git shortlog v2.5.1..v2.5.2

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz   (1.9MB)
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.2.tar.xz   (1.0MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz.sig
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.2.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  e3384dc0099855942f76ef8a97be94edab6f56de  libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz
  KSdftFsjbW/3IKQz+c1fYeovUsw6ouX4m6V3Jr2lR5M=  libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz
  71b7333e80b76510f5dbd14db54d311d577bb716  libtool-2.5.2.tar.xz
  e2C09MNk6HhRMNNKmP8Hv6mmFywgxdtwirScaRPkgmM=  libtool-2.5.2.tar.xz

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with cksum -a sha256 --check
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096 2021-09-23 [SC]
        FA26 CA78 4BE1 8892 7F22  B99F 6570 EA01 146F 7354
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumi95@protonmail.com>
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumitrescu95@gmail.com>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key ileanadumi95@protonmail.com

  gpg --recv-keys 6570EA01146F7354

  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=libtool&download=1' | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify libtool-2.5.2.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72e
  Automake 1.17
  Gnulib v1.0-563-gd3efdd55f3

NEWS

• Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.2 (2024-08-29) [beta]

** Bug fixes:

  - Use shared objects built in source tree instead of the installed
    versions for more reliable testing.

  - Fix test in bug_62343.at for confirmed Cygwin/Mingw32 where the
    incorrect architecture version of a compiler was generating
    object files that could not be linked with a library file.

  - Fix typos found with codespell.

** Changes in supported systems or compilers:

  - Add support for 32-bit mode on FreeBSD/powerpc64.


Enjoy!

In an insightful interview with Elma John, Iztok Smolic, CEO and Managing Director of Agiledrop, reveals how his journey from freelance designer to tech leader has shaped his unique approach to company culture. Discover how Iztok's emphasis on tranquility, respect, and continuous learning has helped Agiledrop thrive in a fast-paced industry while maintaining strong ties to the Drupal community.

PORTLAND, Ore., 29 August 2024—The Drupal Association is pleased to announce Dropsolid as a partner for the Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program. This initiative aims to support Drupal 7 users by carefully selecting providers that deliver extended security support services beyond the 5 January 2025 end-of-life (EOL) date.

The Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program allows organizations that cannot migrate from Drupal 7 to newer versions by the EOL date to continue using a version of Drupal 7 that is secure and compliant. This program complements the Association’s Drupal 7 Certified Migration Providers Program, which helps organizations find the right partner to transition their sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11.

Dropsolid’s Drupal 7 extended support offers Drupal 7 support beyond 5 January 2024, with Enterprise Drupal specialists with a reputation in the community, access to enterprise Drupal 7 developers to continue development, and much more.

“We’re excited that Dropsolid has stepped up and committed to our Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Program,” commented Tim Doyle, CEO of the Drupal Association.  “Dropsolid has been a tremendous supporter of Drupal and the Drupal Community, and we’re grateful that they’re including bona fide Drupal 7 support among their offerings.” 

As organizations prepare for the transition from Drupal 7, Dropsolid will provide the necessary support to keep their sites secure and operational.

Dominique De Cooman, co-founder and co-CEO of Dropsolid, proudly added: “We are thrilled to qualify for the Drupal 7 Extended Security Support program. Even more so since we're the only European company selected (even though we have offices in US and EU). As an organization of makers contributing towards security of Drupal and Mautic, we want to continue contributing to Drupal as much as possible. It's part of our mission to give Drupal 7 the End of Life it deserves. Beyond EOL support, Dropsolid will continue to deliver robust D7 support at both the code and platform levels. We’re here to back you—past, present, and future.”

More information on Drupal 7 Extended Support from Dropsolid.

About the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization that fosters and supports the Drupal software project, the community, and its growth. Our mission is to drive innovation and adoption of Drupal as a high-impact digital public good, hand-in-hand with our open source community. Through various initiatives, events, and programs, the Drupal Association helps ensure the ongoing development and success of the Drupal project.

About Dropsolid

Driven by an open culture and with a passion for open source, Dropsolid shares their knowledge, code, and talent with their clients. Dropsolid designs, builds, hosts, evolves, and creates websites & DXP with results. Equipped with a CMS, marketing automation, personalization, and even AI. Starting from a strong digital strategy with one goal in mind: the best digital experiences for your organization and your customers and stakeholders.

Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general Linux systems was very welcome. These days we care a bit less about tiered storage, since any cost benefit in using anything else than nvme tends to quickly evaporate compared to time you eventually lose on it.

In 2015, it was announced that bcache would grow into its own filesystem. This was particularly exciting and it caused quite a buzz in the Linux community, because it brought along with it more features that compare with ZFS (and also btrfs), including built-in compression, built-in encryption, check-summing and RAID implementations.

Unlike ZFS, it didn’t have a dkms module, so if you wanted to test bcachefs back then, you’d have to pull the entire upstream bcachefs kernel source tree and compile it. Not ideal, but for a promise of a new, shiny, full-featured filesystem, it was worth it.

In 2019, it seemed that the time has come for bcachefs to be merged into Linux, so I thought that it’s about time we have the userspace tools (bcachefs-tools) packaged in Debian. Even if the Debian kernel wouldn’t have it yet by the time the bullseye (Debian 11) release happened, it might still have been useful for a future backported kernel or users who roll their own.

By total coincidence, the first git snapshot that I got into Debian (version 0.1+git20190829.aa2a42b) was committed exactly 5 years ago today.

It was quite easy to package it, since it was written in C and shipped with a makefile that just worked, and it made it past NEW into unstable in 19 January 2020, just as I was about to head off to FOSDEM as the pandemic started, but that’s of course a whole other story.

Fast-forwarding towards the end of 2023, version 1.2 shipped with some utilities written in Rust, this caused a little delay, since I wasn’t at all familiar with Rust packaging yet, so I shipped an update that didn’t yet include those utilities, and saw this as an opportunity to learn more about how the Rust eco-system worked and Rust in Debian.

So, back in April the Rust dependencies for bcachefs-tools in Debian didn’t at all match the build requirements. I got some help from the Rust team who says that the common practice is to relax the dependencies of Rust software so that it builds in Debian. So errno, which needed the exact version 0.2, was relaxed so that it could build with version 0.4 in Debian, udev 0.7 was relaxed for 0.8 in Debian, memoffset from 0.8.5 to 0.6.5, paste from 1.0.11 to 1.08 and bindgen from 0.69.9 to 0.66.

I found this a bit disturbing, but it seems that some Rust people have lots of confidence that if something builds, it will run fine. And at least it did build, and the resulting binaries did work, although I’m personally still not very comfortable or confident about this approach (perhaps that might change as I learn more about Rust).

With that in mind, at this point you may wonder how any distribution could sanely package this. The problem is that they can’t. Fedora and other distributions with stable releases take a similar approach to what we’ve done in Debian, while distributions with much more relaxed policies (like Arch) include all the dependencies as they are vendored upstream.

As it stands now, bcachefs-tools is impossible to maintain in Debian stable. While my primary concerns when packaging, are for Debian unstable and the next stable release, I also keep in mind people who have to support these packages long after I stopped caring about them (like Freexian who does LTS support for Debian or Canonical who has long-term Ubuntu support, and probably other organisations that I’ve never even heard of yet). And of course, if bcachfs-tools don’t have any usable stable releases, it doesn’t have any LTS releases either, so anyone who needs to support bcachefs-tools long-term has to carry the support burden on their own, and if they bundle it’s dependencies, then those as well.

I’ll admit that I don’t have any solution for fixing this. I suppose if I were upstream I might look into the possibility of at least supporting a larger range of recent dependencies (usually easy enough if you don’t hop onto the newest features right away) so that distributions with stable releases only need to concern themselves with providing some minimum recent versions, but even if that could work, the upstream author is 100% against any solution other than vendoring all its dependencies with the utility and insisting that it must only be built using these bundled dependencies. I’ve made 6 uploads for this package so far this year, but still I constantly get complaints that it’s out of date and that it’s ancient. If a piece of software is considered so old that it’s useless by the time it’s been published for two or three months, then there’s no way it can survive even a usual stable release cycle, nevermind any kind of long-term support.

With this in mind (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit), I decided to remove bcachefs-tools from Debian completely. Although after discussing this with another DD, I was convinced to orphan it instead, which I have now done. I made an upload to experimental so that it’s still available if someone wants to work on it (without having to go through NEW again), it’s been removed from unstable so that it doesn’t migrate to testing, and the ancient (especially by bcachefs-tools standards) versions that are in stable and oldstable will be removed too, since they are very likely to cause damage with any recent kernel versions that support bcachefs.

And so, my adventure with bcachefs-tools comes to an end. I’d advise that if you consider using bcachefs for any kind of production use in the near future, you first consider how supportable it is long-term, and whether there’s really anyone at all that is succeeding in providing stable support for it.