With the trixie release approaching, I had the idea back in April to organize a bug squashing party with the Debian Brasil community. I believe the outcome was very positive, and we were able to tackle and fix quite a number of release-critical bugs. This is a brief report of what we did. A remote BSP It’s not the first time I organize a BSP: back in 2019, I helped throw another similar party in Toronto.

Several people have been asking me to explain and/or write about my solution for chatting nowadays. I realize that the current scenario is much more complex than, say, 10 or 20 years ago. Back then, this post would probably be more about the IRC client I used than about different chatting technologies. I have also spent a non trivial amount of time setting things up the way I want, so I understand that it’s about time to write about my setup not only because I think it can be helpful to others, but also because I would like to document things for myself.

As promised in the last post, I have now orphaned the Pagure Debian package. Here’s the full text I posted on the BTS: After several years, I finally decided to orphan pagure :-(. I haven’t been using it as my personal forge anymore, and unfortunately upstream development slowed down quite a bit after the main author and maintainer stopped contributing regularly to the project. But that is not to say that upstream is dead; they are still working towards preparing the next release.

I have been thinking more and more about orphaning the Pagure Debian package. I don’t have the time to maintain it properly anymore, and I have also lost interest in doing so. What’s Pagure Pagure is a git forge written entirely in Python using pygit2. It was almost entirely developed by one person, Pierre-Yves Chibon. He is (was?) a Red Hat employee and started working on this new git forge almost 10 years ago because the company wanted to develop something in-house for Fedora.

After some thought, I decided to migrate my repositories to Forgejo. I know, I know… The name sucks a little bit, but nothing is perfect. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, and was created after some drama regarding Gitea Ltd taking over the development of the Gitea project. I have to be honest and say that I’m growing tired of seeing so much drama and confusion arise from Free Software communities and projects, but in a way this is just a reflection of what’s happening with the world in general, and there’s very little I can do about it.

You might remember that in my last post about the Ubuntu debuginfod service I talked about wanting to extend it and make it index and serve source code from packages. I’m excited to announce that this is now a reality since the Ubuntu Lunar (23.04) release. The feature should work for a lot of packages from the archive, but not all of them. Keep reading to better understand why. The problem While debugging a package in Ubuntu, one of the first steps you need to take is to install its source code.

These past couple of months I have been working to bring debuginfod to Ubuntu. I thought it would be a good idea to make this post and explain a little bit about what the service is and how I’m planning to deploy it. A quick recap: what’s debuginfod? Here’s a good summary of what debuginfod is: debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP. It is developed under the elfutils umbrella.

Hi there. Long time no write! This last Tuesday, February 23, 2021, I made an announcement at debian-devel-announce about a new service that I configured for Debian: a debuginfod server. This post serves two purposed: pay the promise I made to Jonathan Carter that I would write a blog post about the service, and go into a bit more detail about it. What’s debuginfod? From the announcement above: debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP.

Back in September, we had the GNU Tools Cauldron in the gorgeous city of Montréal (perhaps I should write a post specifically about it…). One of the sessions we had was the GDB BoF, where we discussed, among other things, how to improve our patch review system. I have my own personal opinions about the current review system we use (mailing list-based, in a nutshell), and I haven’t felt very confident to express it during the discussion.

Back in 2016, when life was simpler, a Fedora GDB user reported a bug (or a feature request, depending on how you interpret it) saying that GDB’s gcore command did not respect the COREFILTER_ELF_HEADERS flag, which instructs it to dump memory pages containing ELF headers. As you may or may not remember, I have already written about the broader topic of revamping GDB’s internal corefile dump algorithm; it’s an interesting read and I recommend it if you don’t know how Linux (or GDB) decides which mappings to dump to a corefile.

Heya! This past Saturday, April 27th, 2019, Samuel Vale, Alex Volkov and I organized the Toronto Bug Squashing Party here in the city. I was very happy with the outcome, especially the fact that we had more than 10 people attending, including a bunch of folks that came from Montréal! The start It was a cold day in Toronto, and we met at the Mozilla Toronto office at 9 in the morning.

Às vezes, é preciso combater. É preciso dizer que o outro está errado, que ele está falando besteira sobre um assunto que não conhece (e não quer conhecer). É preciso dizer o que é ético, o que é certo. É preciso discernir tudo o que é errado e anti-ético, imoral, e que faz mal. É preciso combater o ódio, muitas vezes com amor, outras tantas com força e integridade. É preciso falar praquele ignorante que ele não sabe o que é Software Livre.

After spending the last weeks struggling with this, I decided to write a blog post. First, what is “this” that you are talking about? The answer is: Linux kernel’s concept of memory mapping. I found it utterly confused, beyond my expectations, and so I believe that a blog post is the write way to (a) preserve and (b) share this knowledge. So, let’s do it! First things first First, I cannot begin this post without a few acknowledgements and “thank you’s”.

Deu saudade de escrever em português :-). E deu saudade, também, de fazer algum post mais “filosófico”. Não sei dizer o porquê, mas às vezes tenho uma mania besta: gosto de ficar procurando “sarna pra me coçar”. Em outras palavras, eu fico procurando coisas que me deixam mal, mesmo sabendo que vou ficar mal depois de vê-las. Não tenho explicação pra esse comportamento. É algo meio sabotador, meio sofredor, meio… Não sei.

A friend of mine, Blaise, once told me not to introduce myself as “… what you would call a radical…”. He had listened to me talking to a person who were questioning what a Free Software activist does. My friend’s rationale, to which I totally agree, is that you must let the other person decide whether she thinks you are a “radical” or not. In other words, if you say you are a “radical” from the beginning, it will probably induce the other person to a pre-judgement about you, which is not good for you and for her.

To what extent should Free Software respect its users? The question, strange as it may sound, is not only valid but also becoming more and more important these days. If you think that the four freedoms are enough to guarantee that the Free Software will respect the user, you are probably being oversimplistic. The four freedoms are essential, but they are not sufficient. You need more. I need more. And this is why I think the Free Software movement should have been called the Respectful Software movement.

Yes, you are reading correctly: I decided to buy a freacking Chromebook. I really needed a lightweight notebook with me for my daily hackings while waiting for my subway station, and this one seemed to be the best option available when comparing models and prices. To be fair, and before you throw me rocks, I visited the LibreBoot X60’s website for some time, because I was strongly considering buying one (even considering its weight); however, they did not have it in stock, and I did not want to wait anymore, so…

It has been a while since I dream of being able to send encrypted e-mail to everyone in my contact list. It is still a distant future, but fortunately it is getting closer with campaigns like the Reset the Net. And while I already send encrypted messages to a couple of friends, it is always good to discover (and share!) some configuration tips to make your life easy :-). I use Gnus as my e-mail (and news!

Após quase 1 mês, cá estou pra compartilhar minhas impressões a respeito do FISL 15, que aconteceu em Porto Alegre, RS, entre os dias 7 e 10 de Maio de 2014. Antes de mais nada, gostaria de fazer um pequeno “jabá”. Acho que mereço, por conta do trabalho que tive pra fazer isso (já explico) dar certo! Estou falando da palestra do Diego Aranha, que foi um dos destaques dessa edição do evento.

This post is massively inspired by a post in the gnu-prog-discuss mailing list. This is a closed list of the GNU Project, and only GNU maintainers and contributors can join, so I cannot put a link to the original message (by Mike Gerwitz), but this topic is being discussed over and over again at many places, so you will not have trouble finding similar opinions. I am also “responding” to a recent discussion that I had with Luiz Izidoro, which is a “friend” (as he himself likes to say) of the LibrePlanet São Paulo group.