Planet Debian
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Antoine Beaupré: PSA: Europe changes time forward soon, North America next, for the last time?
This is a copy of an email I sent at work . I'm not sure I should be making noise about this here, feedback welcome. This is your bi-yearly reminder that time is changing soon! October 25th in Europe, November 1st in North America. Less people in Canada are changing this year, with BC, Alberta, Manitoba and Northwest Territories getting rid of DST. What's…
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 5: Nested if/goto
Here's a pattern that sometimes comes up: if (x == 3) { if (y == 4) { ... } else { goto label_5; } } else { label_5: ... } We don't like gotos, and here, it's pretty obvious what was meant, namely: if (x == 3 && y == 4) { ... } else { label_5: ... } And now you can usually delete label_5 because nothing points to it. Often, m2c can do this by itself, but as…
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2026
Debian LTS/ELTS This was my hundred-forty-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: [ DLA 4804-1 ] libsmpp34 security update to fix one CVE in Bookworm related to an out of bound read. [ #1149107 ] trixie-pu of libsmpp34 has been created and…
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: myman 0.10.0 on CRAN: Three new waves of posts!
A new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe . The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers nineteen hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This…
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 4: range comparison
Today, we're looking at a rewrite that rarely differs for matching, but can mean quite a lot for understanding the code. Say that you have a signed variable and the compiler has suddenly decided to make an unsigned comparison: if ((u32) (x - 4) < 2) { What's happening is that it uses a controlled overflow to do two signed comparisons using one unsigned…
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Kentaro Hayashi: Testing Japanese IMEs on virtual desktops with virt-japanese-desktop
Japanese input method editors (IMEs) such as Mozc are essential for typing Japanese (yes, skk, anthy and more, but it's out-of-scope in this article). Testing them is a surprisingly fiddly job: an IME behaves differently depending on the desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Budgie), the input framework (ibus, fcitx5, uim), and the Wayland or X11 session…
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Bits from Debian: Looking for artwork for the next Debian release: Forky
Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme which is visible on the installer, the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper. It's a very important part of a Debian release as it is usually the first thing new users see when installing or booting the system for the first time. Not only that, but also the first thing…
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 3: do-while-while
Today's decompilation pattern is a variation on yesterday's loop pattern, because loops are important and tend to induce a lot of transformations by the compiler. So assume you have code like this (perhaps after converting a goto): if (var_s0 > var_s1) { // Perhaps some other initialization stuff here do { ... } while (var_s0 > var_s1); } Assuming there are…
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Russell Coker: A Power Case for a FOSS Phone
The Problem I want to use a FOSS phone running Debian as my daily driver and not use a non-free OS on my phone. GrapheneOS [1] is a FOSS rebuild of Android, it’s a great project and I commend them for what they are doing. But I want a system where I have access to all the bits and where I can ssh in to it and manage it in the same way as all other Linux…
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Russell Coker: Kdeconnect DBUS
I’ve tested the DBUS interfaces for Kdeconnect (the system for connecting a KDE desktop to a phone or another computer). Unlike most DBUS interfaces it has a significant tree of interfaces so the busctl command to get the tree is important. Here’s the useful things I discovered: # list basic interfaces for kdeconnect qdbus6 org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon…
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns part 2: do-while
Continuing our journey on decompilation patterns, here's another common one: Let's say m2c outputs code like this: loop_151: ... if (var_s0 > var_s1) goto loop_151; then the natural change is: do { ... } while (var_s0 > var_s1); Fewer gotos are nearly always good, and this is a much more likely pattern than the original one. m2c often manages to convert…
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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activities in September 2026
Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world. Debian Whilst I didn’t have much time, here are still a few things that I worked on: Sponsored ubuntu-dev-tools/0.214 for Florent ‘Skia’ Jacquet, which updates seeded-in-ubuntu to use the new per-series indexer ( LP: #2160240 ). Assisted a few folks in getting their patches…
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Vincent Bernat: Hacking the Go compiler to efficiently map IPv4 to IPv6
netip.Addr features an Unmap() method returning the unwrapped IPv4 contained in an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address : from ::ffff:203.0.113.10 or ::ffff:cb00:710a , it returns 203.0.113.10 . 1 There is no Map() or To6() method for the reverse direction. Such a method is trivial to implement, but Go maintainers have rejected it on the grounds that users should write…
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Vincent Bernat: Hacking the Go compiler to efficiently map IPv4 to IPv6
netip.Addr features an Unmap() method returning the unwrapped IPv4 contained in an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address : from ::ffff:203.0.113.10 or ::ffff:cb00:710a , it returns 203.0.113.10 . 1 There is no Map() or To6() method for the reverse direction. Such a method is trivial to implement, but Go maintainers have rejected it on the grounds that users should write…
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns part 1: Anti-CSE
There's a lot of¹ interest in decompilation these days; taking some old piece of software (usually a game) and try to reconstruct C that does the same thing. (This is often for modding purposes, but also often for understanding, or just as a personal challenge.) An often sought-after property is matching ; that the decompiled C produces 100% the same bytes…
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Vincent Bernat: Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and nginx
A friend wants to proofread your work-in-progress blog post, but its preview only runs on localhost:8080 . Several tools can help. Some run as a commercial service, like ngrok or Cloudflare Quick Tunnels . Some are self-hostable but require a specific client, like frp or localtunnel . Some only require a plain SSH client but rely on a specific SSH server…
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2026
Debian packages: firmware-nonfree : Bugs : closed #1148284: firmware-amd-graphics: AMD AV1 hardware decoding produces severe video artifacts with firmware 20260810-1 Merge requests: opened and merged !154: Update to 20260916; fix some license information Uploads : uploaded version 20260810-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports uploaded version 20260916-1 to…
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Junichi Uekawa: Tokyo has been raining for many days but finally there's some sunny days.
Tokyo has been raining for many days but finally there's some sunny days.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastAD 0.0.6 on CRAN: Agentic Fix
A week ago, release 0.0.5 of the RcppFastAD package went to CRAN , and we noted that it provided a stop-gap measure against a gnarly segfault with g++-16 under heavier optimization / inlining. We are happy to now announce that a new and fixed version 0.0.6 of RcppFastAD is now on CRAN , and has been built for r2u as well as at r-universe . RcppFastAD wraps…
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: myman 0.1.0 on CRAN: New (fabulous !!) Package
Thrilled to share that our new package myman reached CRAN a few days ago. The package offers sixteen hundred ninety four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This package wrapse these up in the style of packages like fortunes or gaussfacts . A sample usage illustration…
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Ludovic Rousseau: macOS Golden Gate and smart cards status
I will compare this version of macOS with the previous one, Tahoe, which I presented in macOS Tahoe and smart cards status . CCID $ grep -A 1 CFBundleShortVersionString /usr/libexec/SmartCardServices/drivers/ifd-ccid.bundle/Contents/Info.plist CFBundleShortVersionString 1.5.1 There has been no change since the release of macOS Sonoma in 2023. The version of…
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Gunnar Wolf: The Origins of GPU Computing
This post is an unpublished review for The Origins of GPU Computing This article appears in the “Communications of the ACM” magazine as part of a series devoting to showcasing relevant examples of technologies where federal funding of academic research have resulted in widely impacting, clearly identifiable technological advances that have visibly improved…
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Maytham Alsudany: There's more to CSS for underlining
I read Ruben Schade's notes on underlining and wanted to add more, as adding a border-bottom and leaving at that seemed incomplete to me. Modern Of course, you could just use the modern choice. Here, I've shortened what Schade uses into one line of CSS (because I can). As noted, this is a fairly new feature so not every browser supports this . [This…
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Maytham Alsudany: Briefly looking at DNS and nameservers under the hood
I've always known that the browser uses the Domain Name Resolution (DNS) system to convert domain names like aezign.com.au into raw IP addresses, but have never actually understood how it works, outside of making sure my network config uses 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 instead of the crappy one the ISP provides. In this article, I set out to understand what…
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Maytham Alsudany: A Brief Explanation of DNS and Nameservers
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental piece of technology behind the modern internet. Thanks to its introduction in 1983, you're able to enter domain names like aezign.com.au instead of raw IP addresses in your browser's address bar and when sending emails. This article explains what it is, how it works, and how you can inspect your own website's…
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 332 released
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 332 . This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] * Do not Build-Depend on GNU Guix. Thanks to Vagrant and Holger for the reports. (Closes: #1149132) [ Guillaume Girol ] * Update more tests to support new versions of Radare. (Closes…
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Otto Kekäläinen: Using multiple git remotes for true distributed version control
One of the primary design principles for Linus Torvalds when creating Git is that it should be a distributed system, capable of working with multiple remotes. However, most people seem to use Git with just one remote, typically having GitHub or GitLab as the only origin . Version control systems before Git relied on a centralized model. For example in…
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Dima Kogan: Lunar terminator paradox
There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox: The moon is illuminated by the sun After sunset, the sun is below, so we would expect the illuminated portion of the moon to…
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: #060: Using bubblewrap for R sandboxing
Welcome to post 60 in the R 4 series. bubblewrap is a great tool and very suitable for using with an agent harness. It is a very compelling—and lightweight—alternative to using a full-blown docker container as it offers low-level unprivileged sandboxing on Linux hosts. In a nutshell, bubblewrap can ‘turn everything off’ (see unshare-all below) and allow…
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Aquila Macedo Costa: Testing library transitions before they reach unstable
A library transition can affect many packages in Debian. I added a way for Salsa CI to rebuild the ones that depend on the changing library, so maintainers can test the transition before it reaches unstable. The need for this became clear during a proposed Poppler transition. Poppler is a library for rendering PDFs. The reverse-dependency job I had added to…