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4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from February
2025</title>
5 <description>Entries from February
2025</description>
6 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/
</link>
10 <title>Some of my
2024 free software activities
</title>
11 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_of_my_2024_free_software_activities.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_of_my_2024_free_software_activities.html
</guid>
13 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Feb
2025 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14 <description><p
>It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and
15 open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a
16 quick summary of the major ones from last year.
</p
>
18 <p
>I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned
19 packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git
20 repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around
450
21 the orphaned packages needed git. I
've since migrated around
250 of
22 the packages to a salsa git repository, and around
40 packages were
23 left when I took a break. Not sure who did the around
160 conversions
24 I was not involved in, but I am very glad I got some help on the
25 project. I stopped partly because some of the remaining packages
26 needed more disk space to build than I have available on my
27 development machine, and partly because some had a strange build setup
28 I could not figure out. I had a time budget of
20 minutes per
29 package, if the package proved problematic and likely to take longer,
30 I moved to another package. Might continue later, if I manage to free
31 up some disk space.
</p
>
33 <p
>Another rather big project was the translation to Norwegian Bokmål
34 and publishing of the first book ever published by a Sámi woman, the
35 «
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/#infoerlifellerdoed2024
">Møter
36 vi liv eller død?
</a
>» book by Elsa Laula, with a PD0 and CC-BY
37 license. I released it during the summer, and to my surprise it has
38 already sold several copies. As I suck at marketing, I did not expect
39 to sell any.
</p
>
41 <p
>A smaller, but more long term project (for more than
10 years now),
42 and related to orphaned packages in Debian, is my project to ensure a
43 simple way to install hardware related packages in Debian when the
44 relevant hardware is present in a machine. It made a fairly big
45 advance forward last year, partly because I have been poking and
46 begging package maintainers and upstream developers to include
47 AppStream metadata XML in their packages. I
've also released a few
48 new versions of the isenkram system with some robustness improvements.
49 Today
127 packages in Debian provide such information, allowing
50 <tt
>isenkram-lookup
</tt
> to propose them. Will keep pushing until the
51 around
35 package names currently hard coded in the isenkram package
52 are down to zero, so only information provided by individual packages
53 are used for this feature.
</p
>
55 <p
>As part of the work on AppStream, I have sponsored several packages
56 into Debian where the maintainer wanted to fix the issue but lacked
57 direct upload rights. I
've also sponsored a few other packages, when
58 approached by the maintainer.
</p
>
60 <p
>I would also like to mention two hardware related packages in
61 particular where I have been involved, the megactl and mfi-util
62 packages. Both work with the hardware RAID systems in several Dell
63 PowerEdge servers, and the first one is already available in Debian
64 (and of course, proposed by isenkram when used on the appropriate Dell
65 server), the other is waiting for NEW processing since this autumn. I
66 manage several such Dell servers and would like the tools needed to
67 monitor and configure these RAID controllers to be available from
68 within Debian out of the box.
</p
>
70 <p
>Vaguely related to hardware support in Debian, I have also been
71 trying to find ways to help out the Debian ROCm team, to improve the
72 support in Debian for my artificial idiocy (AI) compute node. So far
73 only uploaded one package, helped test the initial packaging of
74 llama.cpp and tried to figure out how to get good speech recognition
75 like Whisper into Debian.
<p
>
77 <p
>I am still involved in the LinuxCNC project, and organised a
78 developer gathering in Norway last summer. A new one is planned the
79 summer of
2025. I
've also helped evaluate patches and uploaded new
80 versions of LinuxCNC into Debian.
</p
>
82 <p
>After a
10 years long break, we managed to get a new and improved
83 upstream version of
<tt
>lsdvd
</tt
> released just before Christmas. As
84 I use it regularly to maintain my DVD archive, I was very happy to
85 finally get out a version supporting DVDDiscID useful for uniquely
86 identifying DVDs. I am dreaming of a Internet service mapping DVD IDs
87 to IMDB movie IDs, to make life as a DVD collector easier.
</p
>
89 <p
>My involvement in Norwegian archive standardisation and the free
90 software implementation of the vendor neutral Noark
5 API continued
91 for the entire year. I
've been pushing patches into both the API and
92 the test code for the API, participated in several editorial meetings
93 regarding the Noark
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification, submitted
94 several proposals for improvements for the same. We also organised a
95 small seminar for Noark
5 interested people, and is organising a new
96 seminar in a month.
</p
>
98 <p
>Part of the year was spent working on and coordinating a Norwegian
99 Bokmål translation of the marvellous children
's book
100 «
<a href=
"https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/
">Ada and
101 Zangemann
<a
>», which focus on the right to repair and control your own
102 property, and the value of controlling the software on the devices you
103 own. The translation is mostly complete, and is now waiting for a
104 transformation of the project and manuscript to use Docbook XML
105 instead of a home made semi-text based format. Great progress is
106 being made and the new book build process is almost complete.
</p
>
108 <p
>I have also been looking at how to companies in Norway can use free
109 software to report their accounting summaries to the Norwegian
110 government. Several new regulations make it very hard for companies
111 to do use free software for accounting, and I would like to change
112 this. Found a few drafts for opening up the reporting process, and
113 have read up on some of the specifications, but nothing much is
114 working yet.
</p
>
116 <p
>These were just the top of the iceberg, but I guess this blog post
117 is long enough now. If you would like to help with any of these
118 projects, please get in touch, either directly on the project mailing
119 lists and forums, or with me via email, IRC or Signal. :)
</p
>
121 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
122 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
123 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
128 <title>New oggz release
1.1.2 after
15 years
</title>
129 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_oggz_release_1_1_2_after_15_years.html
</link>
130 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_oggz_release_1_1_2_after_15_years.html
</guid>
131 <pubDate>Sun,
9 Feb
2025 01:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
132 <description><p
>A little over a week ago, I noticed
133 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/liboggz
">the liboggz
134 package
</a
> on my Debian dashboard had not had a new upstream release
135 for a while. A closer look showed that its last release, version
136 1.1.1, happened in
2010. A few patches had accumulated in the Debian
137 package, and I even noticed that I had passed on these patches to
138 upstream five years ago. A handful crash bugs had been reported
139 against the Debian package, and looking at the upstream repository I
140 even found a few crash bugs reported there too. To add insult to
141 injury, I discovered that upstream had accumulated several fixes in the
142 years between
2010 and now, and many of them had not made their way
143 into the Debian package. I decided enough was enough, and that a new
144 upstream release was needed fixing these nasty crash bugs. Luckily I
145 am also a member of the Xiph team, aka upstream, and could actually go
146 to work immediately to fix it.
</p
>
148 <p
>I started by adding automatic build testing on
149 <a href=
"https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/liboggz
">the Xiph gitlab oggz
150 instance
</a
>, to get a better idea of the state of affairs with the
151 code base. This exposed a few build problems, which I had to fix. In
152 parallel to this, I sent an email announcing my wish for a new release
153 to every person who had committed to the upstream code base since
154 2010, and asked for help doing a new release both on email and on the
155 #xiph IRC channel. Sadly only a fraction of their email providers
156 accepted my email. But Ralph Giles in the Xiph team came to the
157 rescue and provided invaluable help to guide be through the release
158 Xiph process. While this was going on, I spent a few days tracking
159 down the crash bugs with good help from
160 <a href=
"https://www.valgrind.org/
">valgrind
</a
>, and came up with
161 patch proposals to get rid of at least these specific crash bugs. The
162 open issues also had to be checked. Several of them proved to be
163 fixed already, but a few I had to creat patches for. I also checked
164 out the Debian, Arch, Fedora, Suse and Gentoo packages to see if there
165 were patches applied in these Linux distributions that should be
166 passed upstream. The end result was ready yesterday. A new liboggz
167 release, version
1.1.2, was tagged, wrapped up and published on the
168 project page. And today, the new release was uploaded into
171 <p
>You are probably by now curious on what actually changed in the
172 library. I guess the most interesting new feature was support for
173 Opus and VP8. Almost all other changes were stability or
174 documentation fixes. The rest were related to the gitlab continuous
175 integration testing. All in all, this was really a minor update,
176 hence the version bump only from
1.1.1 to to
1.1.2, but it was long
177 overdue and I am very happy that it is out the door.
</p
>
179 <p
>One change proposed upstream was not included this time, as it
180 extended the API and changed some of the existing library methods, and
181 thus require a major SONAME bump and possibly code changes in every
182 program using the library. As I am not that familiar with the code
183 base, I am unsure if I am the right person to evaluate the change.
184 Perhaps later.
</p
>
186 <p
>Since the release was tagged, a few minor fixes has been committed
187 upstream already: automatic testing the cross building to Windows, and
188 documentation updates linking to the correct project page. If a
189 important issue is discovered with this release, I guess a new release
190 might happen soon including the minor fixes. If not, perhaps they can
191 wait fifteen years. :)
</p
>
193 <p
>I would like to send a big thank you to everyone that helped make
194 this release happen, from the people adding fixes upstream over the
195 course of fifteen years, to the ones reporting crash bugs, other bugs
196 and those maintaining the package in various Linux distributions.
197 Thank you very much for your time and interest.
</p
>
199 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
200 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
201 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
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