Debconf 2018, MATE 1.2.0, libqalculate transition etc.

Dear all,

First up is news on Debconf 2018 which will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Apparently, the CFP or Call for Proposals was made just a few days ago and I probably forgot to share about it. Registration has also been opened now.

The only thing most people have to figure out is how to get a system-generated certificate, make sure to have an expiry date, I usually have a year, make it at least 6 months as you would need to put up your proposal for contention and let the content-team decide it on the proposal merit. This may at some point move from alioth to salsa as the alioth service is going away.

The best advice I can give is to put your proposal in and keep reworking/polishing it till the end date for applications is near. At the same time do not over commit yourself. From a very Indian perspective and somebody who has been to one debconf, you can think of the debconf as a kind of ‘khumb‘ Mela or gathering as you will. You can definitely network with all the topics and people you care for, but the most rewarding are those talks which were totally unplanned for. Also it does get crazy sometime so it’s nice if you are able to have some sane time for yourself even if it just a 5-10 minute walk.

On the budgeting side of things, things have been going well but could be better. The team has managed to raise probably bit more than half the target. See the list of the sponsors of Debconf. With so many companies using the products the Debian Developers work hard at maintaining, it would be in the companies self-enlightened interest to keep the pot going. There are high hopes that it will be a healthy turnout and influences hardware, software, Information technology policymakers to have a more open and secure society where people are just not data.

In other news, I’m excited to see MATE 1.20 which is now in testing. I asked people from the mate-team last month for the new packages, came to know of the gtk3+ port which was unfortunately postponed to 3.20.1 which is also complete and might be in a little later. I love mate quite a bit for the functionality and yet low memory usage it provides. I tried to push to have a mate-desktop install CD but was consequently denied. While he didn’t elaborate the reasons, I can hypothesize some of the reasons that might be an influence –

a. Any -desktop CD would not be for a single architecture but all of the architectures.
b. Which in turn would bring headaches from storage at the mirror network
c. not to mention making sure that mate is always at a releasable state especially in point releases.

I have to admit that I have become a bit of mate fanboy since I started using it sometime back.

The mate-team atm consists of Mike Gabriel and Martin Wimpress with Martin usually doing the patching work while Mike does the uploading work to the archive. There are well-wishers like me who do chime in from time to time but probably needs 1 or 2 dedicated people who make things easier. If you have the technical chops and want to learn packaging it might be a good way to get into it. It isn’t big and heavy like GNOME, nor is it at light as some of the other competitors in the desktop space. It’s just right. Add to that it brings in its own unique themeing and looks which makes it look unique than other distributions.

The only thing bad about it is that upstream is a bit secretive about what can we expect in the releases round the corner and in the near/late future probably bit of reason might be constrained resources.

Update – For what it’s worth they have started the package uploads of the new version having the debian-mate@lists.debian.org which means by the pkg-mate-team archives are now in read-only mode. While I dunno what the long-term plans for the alioth infrastructure is, but probably think as more and more packages support shift to lists.debian.org, lists.alioth.debian.org would turn to read-only and then at some point a highly compressed data-dump for historical purposes where crazy people like me might come from time-to-time in order to have history of the packaging, collaboration or something about any of the teams or the packages that the teams maintained.

One of the interesting and yet frustrating things I have been seeing from far is how nodejs is missing the whole build from the source and in turn the reproducible builds concept. I have been looking to see riot.im come into debian but it seems it will just take forever. Just this github discussion is enough to highlight the difference between the two cultures and understandings. And that is a problem because then you are trusting riot.im with your data. I know at least quite a few people in debian-in want to see this come in Debian as well as people from different groups. Why, even in the last -debconf bi-weekly meeting somebody mentioned how matrix (riot’s web-browser based client) lags. So I/We are not the only users of this particular piece of software. How to get it would probably be another story in itself.

In Debian even if nothing, at least many packages initial packaging has some hardening flags which at the very least give some protection. The goal is though to have the whole archive in hardened mode and more. The matrix wiki page is a nice page to watch over and see how things come in Debian.

I don’t want to delve too much into it as there is a whole team called debian-security where probably lot of white hats, grey hats and even black hats might be congregating 🙂

This is one of the reasons why I love and use Debian so much , you get the convenience and the security at the same time which is rare although that is more for packages in stable rather than unstable or even testing.

There is a bit of lost cause in qalculate though. I had a chat with maintainer though both on-list and off-list and it seems he isn’t able to find time to maintain it anymore. So sometime back, I filed a RFH Request for help for the package. While there are other calculator applications this is the only one which goes through the web to site, download all the exchange rates for the moment and is helpful to people who might be budgeting to go to conferences or holidays or both or be a part-time foreign currency market watcher . With the right script, you might be even able to put charts and have an understanding of how money markets are behaving and maybe even anticipate how the markets will behave.

Update 23/03/2018 – Most of the parts of the library of the new qalculate version are now in experimental. The only ones which are not in experimental is qalculate-gtk.

$ apt-cache policy qalculate-gtk
qalculate-gtk:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 0.9.7-6+b1
Version table:
0.9.9-1 100
100 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
0.9.7-6+b1 900
900 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
100 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages

$ apt-cache policy libqalculate14-data
libqalculate14-data:
Installed: 2.2.1-1
Candidate: 2.2.1-1
Version table:
*** 2.2.1-1 100
100 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I did see Vincent’s work and checked out his personal repo. at https://people.debian.org/~vlegout/qalc/ and was able to install his qalculate binaries and even put couple of tickets on upstream while trying to figure out things, 71 and 72 . I am just hoping it comes into experimental so can play with it more.

I also sort of butted in #852035 which I normally wouldn’t have if the spectre-meltdown-checker had refused to tell part of the check without binutils installed. As it is, it is way above my pay-grade.

For quite sometime now, I had been thinking of how to get a stock ticker working in GNU/Linux. I know and knew lot of large financial institutions use GNU/Linux as finances are secrets and GNU/Linux is or can be great at keeping secrets. Hence I was under probably the false impression, I would just need to go to github or some code-sharing place and somebody would already have done something. For self-security as I’m a freelancer (we don’t have pensions in our part of world apart from Government and the defense services) I have invested some money in equities and some in Mutual Funds. Now the Bombay Stock Exchange lists both equities and mutual funds on its exchange. Now tuning on TV and trying to figure out stocks and what they are listing is a major time sink. I don’t need real-time quotes. There are quite a few services which give near-realtime quotes but even they are a bit of overkill for what I have in my mind.

I just need a ticker which takes the BSE codes and gives near-realtime quotes and displays it in the ticker. Joey Hess made one and its lying orphaned in debian.

That doesn’t really work for me. I did try the example as given by joeyh in

/usr/share/doc/ticker/examples$ cat sysinfo-ticker

while it works on the console on the upper part, I need it to be more of a stand-alone ticker which scrolls at the bottom near the bottom panel.

Brownie points if it’s able to store the output to another .json file along with IST time-stamp. Better if it’s also able to share the volume of trade. BSE does give all this info. for free in near-realtime quotes as money is made by big punters who do real-time purchase and sale within the working day itself.

I did see another one at jstock.org and https://github.com/yccheok/jstock but github.com software doesn’t give any instructions for self-compile or/and testing. Also don’t like .bin files.

Just to check out the competition, I did a search-engine fu search to see if there is a ticker for MS-Windows and somebody already made it.

If this is made possible and maybe at some future date might do a gnuplot once enough data is there.

For the data part, there are two competing services so it might be possible to use one as primary source and the other as secondary or fallback resource.