PlanetChez Charleshttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/planet/Chez Charlesikiwiki2023-05-11T00:03:57ZUpvote to patch Firefox to render Markdownhttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/markdown2/2023-05-10T23:43:33Z2023-05-10T23:43:33Z
<p>I <a href="http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/markdown/">previously wrote</a> that when Firefox receives a file whose
media type is <em>text/markdown</em>, it prompts the user to download it, whereas
other browsers display rendered results.</p>
<p>Now it is possible to upvote a proposal on
<a href="https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/display-markdown-files/idi-p/6000">connect.mozilla.org</a>
asking that Firefox renders Markdown by default.</p>
If you work at Dreamhost, can you help us?http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/dreamhost/2023-03-09T13:35:00Z2023-03-09T13:35:00Z
<p><strong><em>Update: thanks to the very kind involvment of the widow of our wemaster, we
could provide enough private information to Dreamhost, who finally accepted to
reset the password and the MFA. We have recovered evrything! Many thanks to
everybody who helped us!</em></strong></p>
<p>Due to tragic circumstances, one association that I am part of,
<a href="https://www.sciencescope.org">Sciencescope</a> got locked out of its account
at Dreamhost. Locked out, we can not pay the annual bill. Dreamhost
contacted us about the payment, but will not let us recover the access to
our account in order to pay. So they will soon close the account. Our
website, mailing lists and archives, will be erased. We provided plenty of
evidence that we are not scammers and that we are the legitimate owners of
the account, but reviewing it is above the pay grade of the custommer
support (I don't blame them) and I could not convince them to let somebody
higher have a look at our case.</p>
<p>If you work at Dreamhost and want to keep us as custommers instead of
kicking us like that, please ask the support service in charge of ticket
225948648 to send the recovery URL to the <em>secondary</em> email adddresses (the
ones you used to contact us about the bill!) in addition to the <em>primary</em>
one (which nobody will read anymore). You can encrypt it for my Debian
Developer key 73471499CC60ED9EEE805946C5BD6C8F2295D502 if you worry it gets
in wrong hands. If you still have doubts I am available for calls any time.</p>
<p>If you know somebody working at Dreamhost can you pass them the message?
This would be a big, big, relief for our non-profit association.</p>
Could somebody patch Firefox to display Markdown files?http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/markdown/2023-01-08T00:18:53Z2023-01-08T00:18:53Z
<p>When Firefox receives a file with media type <em>text/markdown</em>, it prompts the
user to download it, while other browsers display it as plain text. In the
ticket <a href="">1319262</a>, it is proposed to display Markdown files by default, but
there needs a patch…</p>
Bad words in Debian.http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/grosmot/2022-12-16T13:00:03Z2022-12-16T13:00:03Z
<p>A discussion on the <em>debian-project</em> mailing list caught my attention to an
Italian word meaning something like “would you be so kind to please go
somewhere else?”, but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used
<a href="http://codesearch.debian.net">http://codesearch.debian.net</a> to study its usage more in detail.</p>
<p>I found it in:</p>
<ul>
<li>the source code of XEmacs;</li>
<li>a list of bad words to filter conversations in BZflag;</li>
<li>the random sentence generator PolyGen;</li>
<li>the source code of the board game Tagua;</li>
<li>a database of offensive fortunes for the educative platform WIMS;</li>
<li>the crossword game parolottero;</li>
<li>a database of offensive fortunes for login screens and email signatures;</li>
<li>a list of (too) frequent passwords;</li>
<li>a source code comment aimed at somebody called Wolf;</li>
<li>a collection of rude gestures in the xwrists package.</li>
</ul>
<p>That was a refreshing and pleasant recreation in the Debian package
universe.</p>
New media types in 2022http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/media-types-2022/2022-02-24T12:32:36Z2022-02-24T12:32:36Z
<p>At the beginning of this year I updated a hundred of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_type">media
types</a> associated with file name
extensions in the file called <code>/etc/mime.types</code>, distributed by the
<a href="http://packages.debian.org/media%2Dtypes">media-types</a> package. Most
<a href="https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/m/media-types/media-types_5.0.0_changelog">changes</a>
are additions originating from recent submissions to the
<a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types">IANA</a>. Amon the themes that
caught my attention, there are telecommunications, computer security,
commerce, healthcare and industrial automation. The vast majority of the
update come from western provenance. Did the rest of the World decide to
move ahead without us?</p>
Search in Debian's sourceshttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/codesearch/2021-07-22T08:24:34Z2021-07-22T08:24:34Z
<p>Via my work on the <a href="http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/planet/packages.debian.org/media-types"><code>media-types</code></a> package,</p>
<p>I wanted to know which packages were using the media type
<code>application/x-xcf</code>,
which apparently is not correct (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/991158">#991158</a>).
The <a href="https://codesearch.debian.net">https://codesearch.debian.net</a> site gives the answer. (Thanks!)</p>
<p>Moreover, one can <a href="https://codesearch.debian.net/apikeys/">create a user
key</a>, for command-line remote
access; here is an example below (the file <code>dcs-apikeyHeader-plessy.txt</code>
contains <code>x-dcs-apikey:</code> followed by my access key).</p>
<pre><code>curl -X GET "https://codesearch.debian.net/api/v1/searchperpackage?query=application/x-xcf&match_mode=literal" -H @dcs-apikeyHeader-plessy.txt > result.json
</code></pre>
<p>The result is serialised in JSON. Here is how I transformed it to make a
list of email addresses that I could easily paste in <code>mutt</code>.</p>
<pre><code>cat result.json |
jq --raw-output '.[]."package"' |
dd-list --stdin |
sed -e '/^ /d' -e '/^$/'d -e 's/$/,/' -e 's/^/ /'
</code></pre>
Trying R 4.1http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/r-4.1/2021-05-24T01:22:43Z2021-05-24T01:22:43Z
<p>I am trying <a href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2021-May/080724.html">R
4.1</a> in a
<a href="https://manpages.debian.org/schroot">schroot</a> <em>experimental</em> container,
while waiting that <em>Bullseye</em>'s release will allow the package to be
uploaded to <em>Sid</em> and the needed dependencies to be recompiled.</p>
<p>The <em>schroot</em>:</p>
<pre><code>sudo debootstrap sid /srv/chroot/r-4.1 http://deb.debian.org/debian
sudo vi /etc/schroot/chroot.d/r-4.1
# Edit it to have something like
[r-4.1]
description=R 4.1 (experimental)
type=directory
directory=/srv/chroot/r-4.1
users= # Here put your username
root-groups=root
profile=desktop
personality=linux
preserve-environment=true
sudo schroot -c r-4.1
vi /etc/apt/sources.list # To add the experimental distribution
apt update
apt install sudo vim wget
exit
</code></pre>
<p>Installation of R:</p>
<pre><code>schroot -c r-4.1
sudo apt install r-base/experimental -texperimental
sudo apt install -texperimental pandoc libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev git libssl-dev texlive
</code></pre>
<p>And RStudio (<em>preview</em> version needed)</p>
<pre><code>wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/rstudio-ide-build/desktop/bionic/amd64/rstudio-1.4.1714-amd64.deb
sudo apt install libnss3 libasound2
sudo dpkg -i rstudio-1.4.1714-amd64.deb
sudo apt -f install -texperimental
</code></pre>
Debian Bullseye: more openhttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/open/2021-04-10T22:21:40Z2021-04-10T22:21:40Z
<p>Debian Bullseye will provide the command <code>/usr/bin/open</code> for your greatest
comfort at the command line. On a system with a graphical desktop
environment, the command should have a similar result as when opening a
document from a mouse-and-click file browser.</p>
<p>Technically, <code>/usr/bin/open</code> is a symbolic link managed by
<a href="https://manpages.debian.org/update-alternatives"><code>update-alternatives</code></a> to
point towards <a href="https://manpages.debian.org/xdg-open"><code>xdg-open</code></a> if
available and otherwise
<a href="https://manpages.debian.org/run-mailcap"><code>run-mailcap</code></a>.</p>
Debian Analyticahttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/DebianAnalytica/2021-04-05T13:33:55Z2021-04-05T13:33:55Z
<p>A couple of days ago I wrote on <em>debian-vote@</em> that a junior analyst could
study the tally sheets of our general resolutions and find the cracks in our
community.</p>
<p>In the end, with a quite naïve approach and a time budget of a few hours, I
did not manage anything of interest. The figure below shows one circle per
voter and my position as a red dot. The circles are spaces according to the
similarity of the vote profiles after I concatenated the results of all GRs
until 2010.</p>
<p><a href="http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/DebianAnalytica.png"><img src="http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/DebianAnalytica.png" width="432" height="429" class="img" /></a></p>
<p>So if there is something to extract from these data, it will need a more
expert analyst… This said, I think that our future votes should all be
anonymous, and that we should stop distributing that kind of data.</p>
GR toxiquehttp://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/grToxique/2021-03-27T01:37:36Z2021-03-27T01:06:40Z
<p>Many quickly reacted to the return of rms to the FSF and asked that he
leaves again; some also asked for the whole board of directors to resign and
some not. Meanwhile, Debian discusses a general resolution on that
matter. Maybe it was not the original intent, but in practice the object of
the GR is about FSF's board of directors. Perhaps we will have the result
after rms resigns? Like many GRs, it will divide Debian and leave scars, at
least a tally sheet of who voted what, and who voted like whom.</p>
<p>I think that most other organisations did not go through a process as
plenary and collegial, but also heavy and cleaving, to decide which way to
go.</p>
<p>What if our two DPL candidates would issue a statement that, if elected,
they would refuse to fund events linked to the FSF until rms quits again
(and also the directors, if that is what the DPL candidate wishes to
propose). This would let Debian be part of the wave of reaction on time, and
maybe allow us to cancel this GR?</p>