Debian packages with /outdated/ packaging style

(This is just a copy of this debian-devel@ email)

Following my blog post yesterday with graphs about Debian packaging evolution, I prepared lists of packages for each kind of outdatedness. Of course not all practices highlighted below are deprecated, and there are good reasons to continue to do some of them. But still, given that they all represent a clear minority of packages, I thought that it would be useful to list the related packages. (I honestly didn’t know if some of my packages would show up in the lists!)

The lists are available at https://people.debian.org/~lucas/qa-20151226/

I also pushed them to alioth, so you can either do:
ssh people.debian.org 'grep -A 10 YOURNAME ~lucas/public_html/qa-20151226/*ddlist'
or:
ssh alioth.debian.org 'grep -A 10 YOURNAME ~lucas/qa-20151226/*ddlist'

the meaning of the lists is:

  • qa-comaint_but_no_vcs.txt (275 packages): Based on the content of Maintainer/Uploaders, the package is co-maintained, but there are no Vcs-* fields.
  • qa-format_10.txt (3153 packages): The package is still using format 1.0.
  • qa-helper_classic_debhelper.txt (3647 packages): The package is still using “classic” debhelper (no dh, no CDBS).
  • qa-helper_not_debhelper.txt (144 packages): The package is not using debhelper (nor dh, nor CDBS).
  • qa-patch_dpatch.txt (170 packages): The package is using dpatch.
  • qa-patch_modified-files-outside-debian.txt (1156 packages): The package has modified files outside the debian/ directory (not tracked using patches).
  • qa-patch_more_than_one.txt (201 packages): The package uses more than one “patch system”. In most cases, it means that the package uses a patch system, but also has files modified directly outside of debian/.
  • qa-patch_other.txt (51 packages): The package has patches, but using an unidentified/unknown patch system.
  • qa-patch_quilt.txt (445 packages): The package uses quilt (with 1.0 format, not 3.0 format).
  • qa-patch_simple-patchsys.txt (129 packages): The package uses simple-patchsys.
  • qa-vcs_but_not_git_or_svn.txt (290 packages): The package is maintained using a VCS, which is not either Git or SVN.
  • qa-vcs_more_than_one_declared_vcs.txt (1 package): The package declares more than one VCS.

If you don’t understand why your package is listed, you can have a look at allpackages-20151226.yaml that provides more details. If you still don’t understand, just ask me.

Excluding duplicates, a total of 5469 packages are listed. The dd-list output for the merged list is also available (which isn’t very useful, except to know if you are listed).

Debian is still changing

Here is an update to the usual graphs generated from snapshot.d.o. See my previous blog post for the background info.

In all graphs, it’s easy to see the effect of the Jessie freeze (and the previous freezes since 2005, too).

Team maintenance

comaint-2015

 

It’s interesting to see that, while the number of team-maintained packages increases, the number of packages that aren’t co-maintained is very stable.

Maintenance using a VCS

vcs-2015

Git is the clear winner now, with the migration rate increasing recently.

Packaging helpers

helpers-2015

As usual, the number of packages using CDBS is quite stable. The number of packages using traditional debhelper might soon be lower than those using CDBS.

Patch systems and packaging formats

formats-patches-2015

 

3.0 is the clear winner, even if we still have 3000+ packages using 1.0, and ~1000 of those modifying files directly. The other patch systems have basically disappeared.

So, all those graphs are kind-of boring now. Any good ideas of additional things to track, that be can identified reliably by looking at source packages?

For those interested, below are links to the graphs with percentages of packages.

comaint-percent-2015    formats-patches-percent-2015    vcs-percent-2015    helpers-percent-2015

DebConf’15

I attended DebConf’15 last week. After being on semi-vacation from Debian for the last few months, recovering after the end of my second DPL term, it was great to be active again, talk to many people, and go back to doing technical work. Unfortunately, I caught the debbug quite early in the week, so I was not able to make it as intense as I wanted, but it was great nevertheless.

I still managed to do quite a lot:

  • I rewrote a core part of UDD, which will make it easier to monitor data importer scripts and reduce the cron-spam
  • with DSA members, I worked on finding a suitable workaround for the storage performance issues that have been plaguing UDD for the last few months. fsyncs() will now longer hang for 15 minutes, yay!
  • I added a DUCK importer to UDD, and added that information to the Debian Maintainer Dashboard
  • I worked a bit on cleaning up the status of my packages, including digging into a strange texlive issue (that showed up in developers-reference), that is now fixed in unstable
  • I worked a bit on improving git-buildpackage documentation (more to come in that area)
  • Last but not least, I played Mao for the first time in years, and it was a lot of fun. (even if my brain is still slowly recovering)

DC15 was a great DebConf, probably one of the two bests I’ve attended so far. I’m now looking forward to DC16 in Cape Town!

systemd: Type=simple and avoiding forking considered harmful?

(This came up in a discussion on debian-user-french@l.d.o)

When converting from sysvinit scripts to systemd init files, the default practice seems to be to start services without forking, and to use Type=simple in the service description.

What Type=simple does is, well, simple. from systemd.service(5):

If set to simple (the default value if neither Type= nor BusName= are specified), it is expected that the process configured with ExecStart= is the main process of the service. In this mode, if the process offers functionality to other processes on the system, its communication channels should be installed before the daemon is started up (e.g. sockets set up by systemd, via socket activation), as systemd will immediately proceed starting follow-up units.

In other words, systemd just runs the command described in ExecStart=, and it’s done: it considers the service is started.

Unfortunately, this causes a regression compared to the sysvinit behaviour, as described in #778913: if there’s a configuration error, the process will start and exit almost immediately. But from systemd’s point-of-view, the service will have been started successfully, and the error only shows in the logs:

root@debian:~# systemctl start ssh
root@debian:~# echo $?
0
root@debian:~# systemctl status ssh
● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
 Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled)
 Active: failed (Result: start-limit) since mer. 2015-05-13 09:32:16 CEST; 7s ago
 Process: 2522 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -D $SSHD_OPTS (code=exited, status=255)
 Main PID: 2522 (code=exited, status=255)
mai 13 09:32:16 debian systemd[1]: ssh.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=255/n/a
mai 13 09:32:16 debian systemd[1]: Unit ssh.service entered failed state.
mai 13 09:32:16 debian systemd[1]: ssh.service start request repeated too quickly, refusing to start.
mai 13 09:32:16 debian systemd[1]: Failed to start OpenBSD Secure Shell server.
mai 13 09:32:16 debian systemd[1]: Unit ssh.service entered failed state.

With sysvinit, this error is detected before the fork(), so it shows during startup:

root@debian:~# service ssh start
 [....] Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd/etc/ssh/sshd_config: line 4: Bad configuration option: blah
 /etc/ssh/sshd_config: terminating, 1 bad configuration options
 failed!
 root@debian:~#

It’s not trivial to fix that. The implicit behaviour of sysvinit is that fork() sort-of signals the end of service initialization. The systemd way to do that would be to use Type=notify, and have the service signals that it’s ready using systemd-notify(1) or sd_notify(3) (or to use socket activation, but that’s another story). However that requires changes to the service. Returning to the sysvinit behaviour by using Type=forking would help, but is not really a solution: but what if some of the initialization happens *after* the fork? This is actually the case for sshd, where the socket is bound after the fork (see strace -f -e trace=process,network /usr/sbin/sshd), so if another process is listening on port 22 and preventing sshd to successfully start, it would not be detected.

I wonder if systemd shouldn’t do more to detect problems during services initialization, as the transition to proper notification using sd_notify will likely take some time. A possibility would be to wait 100 or 200ms after the start to ensure that the service doesn’t exit almost immediately. But that’s not really a solution for several obvious reasons. A more hackish, but still less dirty solution could be to poll the state of processes inside the cgroup, and assume that the service is started only when all processes are sleeping. Still, that wouldn’t be entirely satisfying…

Several improvements to UDD’s Bug Search and Maintainer Dashboard

Several improvements have been made to UDD’s Bug Search and Maintainer Dashboard recently.

On the Maintainer Dashboard side, the main new feature is a QA checks table that provides an overview of results from lintian, reproducible builds, piuparts, and ci.debian.net. Check the dashboard for the Ruby team for an example. Also, thanks to Daniel Pocock, the TODO items can now be exported as iCalendar tasks.

Bugs Search now has much better JSON and YAML outputs. It’s probably a good start if you want to do some data-mining on bugs. Packages can now be selected using the same form as the Maintainer Dashboard’s one, which makes it easy to build your own personal bug list, and will suppress the need for some of the team-specific listings.

Many bugs have been fixed too. More generally, thanks to the work of Christophe Siraut, the code is much better now, with a clean separation of the data analysis logic and the rendering sides that will make future improvements easier.

As the reminder, it’s quite easy to hack on UDD (even if you are not a DD). Please report bugs, including about additional features you would like to see!

Some email organization tips and tricks

I’d like to share a few tips that were useful to strengthen my personal email organization. Most of what follows is probably not very new nor special, but hey, let’s document it anyway.

Many people have an inbox folder that just grow over time. It’s actually similar to a twitter or RSS feed (except they probably agree that they are supposed to read more of their email “feed”). When I send an email to them, it sometimes happen that they don’t notice it, if the email arrives at a bad time. Of course, as long as they don’t receive too many emails, and there aren’t too many people relying on them, it might just work. But from time to time, it’s super-painful for those interacting with them, when they miss an email and they need to be pinged again. So let’s try not to be like them. :-)

Tip #1: do Inbox Zero (or your own variant of it)

Inbox Zero is an email management methodology inspired from David Allen’s Getting Things Done book. It’s best described in this video. The idea is to turn one’s Inbox into an area that is only temporary storage, where every email will get processed at some point. Processing can mean deleting an email, archiving it, doing the action described in the email (and replying to it), etc. Put differently, it basically means implementing the Getting Things Done workflow on one’s email.

Tip #1.1: archive everything

One of the time-consuming decisions in the original GTD workflow is to decide whether something should be eliminated (deleted) or stored for reference. Given that disk space is quite cheap, it’s much easier to never decide about that, and just archive everything (by duplicating the email to an archive folder when it is received). To retrieve archived emails when needed, I then use notmuch within mutt to easily search through recent (< 2 year) archives. I use archivemail to archive older email in compressed mboxes from time to time, and grepmail to search through those mboxes when needed.

I don’t archive most Debian mailing lists though, as they are easy to fetch from master.d.o with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -vP master.debian.org:~debian/*/*$1/*$1.${2:-$(date +%Y%m)}* .

Then I can fetch a specific list archive with getlist devel 201502, or a set of archives with e.g. getlist devel 2014, or the current month with e.g. getlist devel. Note that to use grepmail on XZ-compressed archives, you need libmail-mbox-messageparser-perl version 1.5002-3 (only in unstable — I was using a locally-patched version for ages, but finally made a patch last week, which Gregor kindly uploaded).

Tip #1.2: split your inbox

(Yes, this one looks obvious but I’m always surprised at how many people don’t do that.)

Like me, you probably receive various kinds of emails:

  • emails about your day job
  • emails about Debian
  • personal emails
  • mailing lists about your day job
  • mailing lists about Debian
  • etc.

Splitting those into separate folders has several advantages:

  • I can adjust my ‘default action’ based on the folder I am in (e.g. delete after reading for most mailing lists, as it’s archived already)
  • I can adjust my level of focus depending on the folder (I might not want to pay a lot of attention to each and every email from a mailing list I am only remotely interested in; while I should definitely pay attention to each email in my ‘DPL’ folder)
  • When busy, I can skip the less important folders for a few days, and still be responsive to emails sent in my more important folders

I’ve seen some people splitting their inbox into too many folders. There’s not much point in having a per-sender folder organization (unless there’s really a recurring flow of emails from a specific person), as it increases the risk of missing an email.

I use procmail to organize my email into folders. I know that there are several more modern alternatives, but I haven’t looked at them since procmail does the job for me.

Resulting organization

I use one folder for my day-job email, one for my DPL email, one for all other email directed or Cced to me. Then, I have a few folders for automated notifications of stuff. My Debian mailing list folders are auto-managed by procmail’s $MATCH:

:0:
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <.*@lists\.debian\.org>
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]*
 .ml.debian.$MATCH/

Some other mailing lists are in they separate folders, and there’s a catch-all folder for the remaining ones. Ah, and since I use feed2imap, I have folders for the RSS/Atom feeds I follow.

I have two different commands to start mutt. One only shows a restricted number of (important) folders. The other one shows the full list of (non-empty) folders. This is a good trick to avoid spending time reading email when I am supposed to do something more important. :)

As for many people probably, my own organization is loosely based on GTD and Inbox Zero. It sometimes happen that some emails stay in my Inbox for several days or weeks, but I very rarely have more than 20 or 30 emails in one of my main inbox folders. I also do reviews of the whole content of my main inbox folders once or twice a week, to ensure that I did not miss an email that could be acted on quickly.

A last trick is that I have a special folder replies, where procmail copies emails that are replies to a mail I sent, but which do not Cc me. That’s useful to work-around Debian’s “no Cc on reply to mailing list posts” policy.

I receive email using offlineimap (over SSH to my mail server), and send it using nullmailer (through a SSH tunnel). The main advantage of offlineimap over using IMAP directly in mutt is that using IMAP to a remote server feels much more sluggish. Another advantage is that I only need SSH access to get my full email setup to work.

Tip #2: tracking sent emails

Two recurring needs I had was:

  • Get an overview of emails I sent to help me write the day-to-day DPL log
  • Easily see which emails got an answer, or did not (which might mean that they need a ping)

I developed a short script to address that. It scans the content of my ‘Sent’ maildir and my archive maildirs, and, for each email address I use, displays (see example output in README) the list of emails sent with this address (one email per line). It also detects if an email was replied to (“R” column after the date), and abbreviates common parts in email addresses (debian-project@lists.debian.org becomes d-project@l.d.o). It also generates a temporary maildir with symlinks to all emails, so that I can just open the maildir if needed.

Jessie frozen, can we release before FOSDEM?

Jessie was frozen on November 5th, as planned. At the time of the freeze, 310 RC bugs remained to be fixed.

This is quite an achievement from the project as a whole, and the Release Team specifically. First, we froze on the date announced more than a year ago, and the freeze seems to have been well respected by all maintainers.

Second, with 310 RC bugs at the time of the freeze, we are probably breaking a record for all recent Debian releases (though I don’t have hard numbers for that). It seems that auto-removals of RC-buggy non-key packages helped a lot to keep the bug number under control. Assuming that all RC-buggy non-key packages were removed (which would be quite sad of course), we would even be down to about 150 RC bugs!

Could we have the shorter Debian freeze ever? (wheezy: 44 weeks; squeeze: 26 weeks; lenny: 28 weeks; etch: 17 weeks). Given that FOSDEM is 12 weeks away, could we even release before FOSDEM, and have a big party there to celebrate?

That’s not impossible, but we need everybody’s help. Random tip and tricks:

  • Richard Hartmann’s weekly stats are actually generated from this web page, that provides a good live breakdown of RC bugs per category. Some RC bugs are hard, but some just deserve more attention. Some ideas of rather easy tasks:
    • In the RC bugs list, sort bugs by last modification, take a bug that wasn’t worked on recently, and try to provide a summary of the situation and of possible actions.
    • In the RC bugs list, sort bugs by bug number, and look at recent bugs: you might be among the first ones to look at them, so there might still be easy ways to make progress.
    • Review and analyze proposed solutions in the lists of bugs with patches, or which have been fixed in unstable but not unblocked yet.
    • And of course, try to attack the bulk of bugs without known fixes, and advance towards such a fix!
  • If you are not so good at fixing bugs, do like me, and become good at opening new (real) bugs: the sooner they will be found, the sooner they can be fixed! I just opened ~100 RC bugs this morning, caused by packages failing to build from source in jessie.

Tentative summary of the amendments of the init system coupling GR

This is an update of my previous attempt at summarizing this discussion. As I proposed one of the amendments, you should not blindly trust me, of course. :-)

First, let’s address two FAQ:

What is the impact on jessie?
On the technical level, none. The current state of jessie already matches what is expected by all proposals. It’s a different story on the social level.

Why are we voting now, then?
Ian Jackson, who submitted the original proposal, explained his motivation in this mail.

We now have four different proposals: (summaries are mine)

  • [iwj] Original proposal (Ian Jackson): Packages may not (in general) require one specific init system (Choice 1 on this page)
  • [lucas] Amendment A (Lucas Nussbaum): support for alternative init systems is desirable but not mandatory (Choice 2 on this page)
  • [dktrkranz] Amendment B (Luca Falavigna): Packages may require a specific init system (Choice 3 on this page)
  • [plessy] Amendment C (Charles Plessy): No GR, please: no GR required (Choice 4 on this page)

[plessy] is the simplest, and does not discuss the questions that the other proposals are answering, given it considers that the normal Debian decision-making processes have not been exhausted.

In order to understand the three other proposals, it’s useful to break them down into several questions.

Q1: support for the default init system on Linux
A1.1: packages MUST work with the default init system on Linux as PID 1.
(That is the case in both [iwj] and [lucas])

A1.2: packages SHOULD work with the default init system on Linux as PID 1.
With [dktrkranz], it would no longer be required to support the default init system, as maintainers could choose to require another init system than the default, if they consider this a prerequisite for its proper operation; and no patches or other derived works exist in order to support other init systems. That would not be a policy violation. (see this mail and its reply for details). Theoretically, it could also create fragmentation among Debian packages requiring different init systems: you would not be able to run pkgA and pkgB at the same time, because they would require different init systems.

Q2: support for alternative init systems as PID 1
A2.1: packages MUST work with one alternative init system (in [iwj])
(Initially, I thought that “one” here should be understood as “sysvinit”, as this mail, Ian detailed why he chose to be unspecific about the target init system. However, in that mail, he later clarified that a package requiring systemd or uselessd would be fine as well, given that in practice there aren’t going to be many packages that would want to couple specifically to systemd _or_ uselessd, but where support for other init systems is hard to provide.)
To the user, that brings the freedom to switch init systems (assuming that the package will not just support two init systems with specific interfaces, but rather a generic interface common to many init systems).
However, it might require the maintainer to do the required work to support additional init systems, possibly without upstream cooperation.
Lack of support is a policy violation (severity >= serious, RC).
Bugs about degraded operation on some init systems follow the normal bug severity rules.

A2.2: packages SHOULD work with alternative init systems as PID 1. (in [lucas])
This is a recommendation. Lack of support is not a policy violation (bug severity < serious, not RC). A2.3: nothing is said about alternative init systems (in [dktrkranz]). Lack of support would likely be a wishlist bug.

Q3: special rule for sysvinit to ease wheezy->jessie upgrades
(this question is implicitly dealt with in [iwj], assuming that one of the supported init systems is sysvinit)

A3.1: continue support for sysvinit (in [lucas])
For the jessie release, all software available in Debian ‘wheezy’ that supports being run under sysvinit should continue to support sysvinit unless there is no technically feasible way to do so.

A3.2: no requirement to support sysvinit (in [dktrkranz])
Theoretically, this could require two-step upgrades: first reboot with systemd, then upgrade other packages

Q4: non-binding recommendation to maintainers
A4.1: recommend that maintainers accept patches that add or improve
support for alternative init systems. (in both [iwj] and [lucas], with a different wording)

A4.2: say nothing (in [dktrkranz])

Q5: support for init systems with are the default on non-Linux ports
A5.1: non-binding recommendation to add/improve support with a high priority (in [lucas])

A5.2: say nothing (in [iwj] and [dktrkranz])

 

Comments are closed: please discuss by replying to that mail.

Debian Package of the Day revival (quite)

TL;DR: static version of http://debaday.debian.net/, as it was when it was shut down in 2009, available!

A long time ago, between 2006 and 2009, there was a blog called Debian Package of the Day. About once per week, it featured an article about one of the gems available in the Debian archive: one of those many great packages that you had never heard about.

At some point in November 2009, after 181 articles, the blog was hacked and never brought up again. Last week I retrieved the old database, generated a static version, and put it online with the help of DSA. It is now available again at http://debaday.debian.net/. Some of the articles are clearly outdated, but many of them are about packages that are still available in Debian, and still very relevant today.