Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2026

2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on February 22^nd for our first meeting of the year!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
released lintian version 2.130.0
upstreamed a patch for python-wilderness, fixed a few things and released version 0.1.10-3
updated python-clevercsv to version 0.8.4
updated python-mediafile to version 0.14.0

lelutin:

opened up a RFH for co-maintenance for smokeping and added Marc Haber who responded really quickly to the call
with mjeanson's help: prepped and uploaded a new smokeping version to release pending work
opened a NM request to become DM

viashimo:

fixed freshrss timer
updated freshrss
installed new navidrome container
configured backups for new host (beelink mini s12)

tvaz:

did NM work
learned more about debusine and tested it
uploaded antimony to debusine
(co-)convinced lelutin to apply for DM (yay!)

lavamind:

worked on autopkgtests for a new version of jruby

Pictures

This time around, we held our meeting at cégep du Vieux Montréal, the college where I currently work. Here is the view we had:

We also ordered some delicious pizzas from Pizzeria dei Compari, a nice pizzeria on Saint-Denis street that's been there forever.

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Amère à boire, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2025 edition

2026-02-08T00:00:00-05:00

Another year of data from Société de Transport de Montréal, Montreal's transit agency!

A few highlights this year:

Although the Saint-Michel station closed for emergency repairs in November 2024, traffic never bounced back to its pre-closure levels and is still stuck somewhere around 2022 Q2 levels. I wonder if this could be caused by the roadwork on Jean-Talon for the new Blue Line stations making it harder for folks in Montreal-Nord to reach the station by bus.
The effects of the opening of the Royalmount shopping center has had a durable impact on the traffic at the De la Savane station. I reported on this last year, but it seems this wasn't just a fad.
With the completion of the Deux-Montagnes branch of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM, a light-rail, above the surface transit network still in construction), the transfer stations to the Montreal subway have seen major traffic increases. The Édouard-Montpetit station has nearly reached its previous all-time record of 2015 and the McGill station has recovered from the general slump all the other stations have had in 2025.
The Assomption station, which used to have one of the lowest number of riders of the subway network, has had a tremendous growth in the past few years. This is mostly explained by the many high-rise projects that were built around the station since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although still affected by a very high seasonality, the Jean-Drapeau station broke its previous record of 2019, a testament of the continued attraction power of the various summer festivals taking place on the Sainte-Hélène et Notre-Dame islands.

More generally, it seems the Montreal subway has had a pretty bad year. Traffic had been slowly climbing back since the COVID-19 pandemic, but this is the first year since 2020 such a sharp decline can be witnessed. Even major stations like Jean-Talon or Lionel-Groulx are on a downward trend and it is pretty worrisome.

As for causes, a few things come to mind. First of all, as the number of Montrealers commuting to work by bike continues to rise¹, a modal shift from public transit to active mobility is to be expected. As local experts put it, this is not uncommon and has been seen in other cities before.

Another important factor that certainly turned people away from the subway this year has been the impacts of the continued housing crisis in Montreal. As more and more people get kicked out of their apartments, many have been seeking refuge in the subway stations to find shelter.

Sadly, this also brought a unprecedented wave of incivilities. As riders' sense of security sharply decreased, the STM eventually resorted to banning unhoused people from sheltering in the subway. This decision did bring back some peace to the network, but one can posit damage had already been done and many casual riders are still avoiding the subway for this reason.

Finally, the weekslong STM worker's strike in Q4 had an important impact on general traffic, as it severely reduced the opening hours of the subway. As for the previous item, once people find alternative ways to get around, it's always harder to bring them back.

Hopefully, my 2026 report will be a more cheerful one...

By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

Licences

The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It has not changed in a few years.

Mostly thanks to major improvements to the cycling network and the BIXI bikesharing program. ↩

Reducing the size of initramfs kernel images

2026-01-13T00:00:00-05:00

In the past few years, the size of the kernel images in Debian have been steadily growing. I don't see this as a problem per se, but it has been causing me trouble, as my /boot partition has become too small to accommodate two kernel images at the same time.

Since I'm running Debian Unstable on my personal systems and keep them updated with unattended-upgrade, this meant each (frequent) kernel upgrade triggered an error like this one:

update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.17.11+deb14-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
 error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This would in turn break the automated upgrade process and require me to manually delete the currently running kernel (which works, but isn't great) to complete the upgrade.

The "obvious" solution would have been to increase the size of my /boot partition to something larger than the default 456M. Since my systems use full-disk encryption and LVM, this isn't trivial and would have required me to play Tetris and swap files back and forth using another drive.

Another solution proposed by anarcat was to migrate to systemd-boot (I'm still using grub), use Unified Kernel Images (UKI) and merge the /boot and /boot/efi partitions. Since I already have a bunch of configurations using grub and I am not too keen on systemd taking over all the things on my computer, I was somewhat reluctant.

As my computers are all configured by Puppet, I could of course have done a complete system reinstallation, but again, this was somewhat more involved than what I wanted it to be.

After looking online for a while, I finally stumbled on this blog post by Neil Brown detailing how to shrink the size of the initramfs images. With MODULES=dep my images shrunk from 188M to 41M, fixing my issue. Thanks Neil!

I was somewhat worried removing kernel modules would break something on my systems, but so far, I only had to manually load the i2c_dev module, as I need it to manage my home monitor's brightness using ddcutil.

2025 — A Musical Retrospective

2026-01-03T00:00:00-05:00

2026 already! The winter weather here has really been beautiful and I always enjoy this time of year. Writing this yearly musical retrospective has now become a beloved tradition of mine¹ and I enjoy retracing the year's various events through albums I listened to and concerts I went to.

Albums

In 2025, I added 141 new albums to my collection, around 60% more than last year's haul. I think this might have been too much? I feel like I didn't have time to properly enjoy all of them and as such, I decided to slow down my acquisition spree sometimes in early December, around the time I normally do the complete opposite.

This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. Most of the other albums I bought as CDs and ripped them.

Concerts

In 2025, I went to the following 25 (!!) concerts:

January 17^th: Uzu, Young Blades, She came to quit, Fever Visions
February 1^st: Over the Hill, Jail, Mortier, Ain't Right
February 7^th: Béton Armé, Mulchulation II, Ooz
February 15^th: The Prowlers, Ultra Razzia, Sistema de Muerte, Trauma Bond
February 28^th: Francbâtards
March 28^th: Conflit Majeur, to Even Exist, Crachat
April 12^th: Jetsam, Mortier, NIIVI, Canette
April 26^th-27^th (Montreal Oi! Fest 2025): The Buzzers, Bad Terms, Sons of Pride, Liberty and Justice, Flafoot 56, The Beltones, Mortier, Street Code, The Stress, Alternate Action
May 1^st: Bauxite, Atomic threat, the 351's
May 30^th: Uzu, Tenaz, Extraña Humana, Sistema de muerte
June 7^th: Ordures Ioniques, Tulaviok, Fucking Raymonds, Voyou
June 18^th: Tiken Jah Fakoly
June 21^st: Saïan Supa Celebration
June 26^th: Taxi Girls, Death Proof, Laura Krieg
July 4^th: Frente Cumbiero
July 12^th: Montreal's Big Fiesta DJ Set
August 16^th: Guerilla Poubelle
September 11^th: No Suicide Act, Mortier
September 20^th: Hors Contrôle, Union Thugs, Barricade Mentale
October 20^th: Ezra Furman, The Golden Dregs
October 24^th: Overbass, Hommage à Bérurier Noir, Self Control, Vermin Kaos
November 6^th: Béton Armé, Faze, Slash Need, Chain Block
November 28^th (Blood Moon Ritual 2025): Bhatt, Channeler, Pyrocene Death Cult, Masse d'Armes
December 13^th (Stomp Records' 30^th Anniversary Bash): The Planet Smashers, The Flatliners, Wine Lips, The Anti-Queens, Crash ton rock

Although I haven't touched metalfinder's code in a good while, my instance still works very well and I get the occasional match when a big-name artist in my collection comes in town. Most the venues that advertise on Bandsintown are tied to Ticketmaster though, which means most underground artists (i.e. most of the music I listen to) end up playing elsewhere.

As such, shout out again to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there.

See you all in 2026!

see the 2022, 2023 and 2024 entries ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - September 2025

2025-10-11T00:00:00-04:00

Our Debian User Group met on September 27^th for our first meeting since our summer hiatus. As always, it was fun and productive!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
triaged lintian bugs #960909, #1014162 and #978552

sergiodj:

worked on the following bugs:
- #1097457
- #1097487
- #1097969
- #1097995
- #1096367
- #1096478
- #1096503
- #1097445
- #1097460

LeLutin:

switched from sbuild-qemu to sbuild-unshare
worked on the following bugs:
- #1092937
- #996824
- #1112079
- #1110355

tvaz:

answered applicants (usual Application Manager stuff) as part of the New Member team
dealt with less pleasant stuff as part of the Community team
learned about aibohphobia!

viashimo:

looked at hardware on PCPartPicker
starting to port a zig version of soundscraper from zig 0.12 to 0.15.1

tassia:

set up a local instance of openQA for functionality tests of Debian images
test-drove said instance and suggested improvements to the new documentation based on a Trixie VM

Pictures

This time again, we were hosted at La Balise (formely ATSÉ).

It's nice to see this community project continuing to improve: the social housing apartments on the top floors should be opening this month! Lots of construction work was also ongoing to make the Espace des Possibles more accessible from the street level.

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

Adulting

2025-07-12T00:00:00-04:00

In the last past weeks, I have done something I had been meaning to do for a while but always pushed back at the bottom of my TODO pile: prepare for my death.

I am still quite young and perfectly healthy (mentally and physically) and I do plan to live a long and full life, but death is something that comes from us all and can strike anytime. Having witnessed friends and colleagues who lost loved ones who did not prepare adequately for their passing, dealing with all this legal stuff ahead of time seems like the best gift you can leave them.

Writing my will was the easiest part of this "preparation for death" process. I have few material possessions and I'm leaving everything to my SO. As for the copyright for my code, I have decided everything I wrote will be licensed under CC0 (public domain) when I die. Quebec — where I live — also accepts holograph wills, which means I didn't have to hire a notary.

Apart from the will, I also wrote a protection mandate¹, filled out Quebec's organ donation form², took a contract for prearranged funeral services³ and finally, wrote a disaster recovery plan.

This recovery plan was by far the longest and most tedious part of this entire ordeal. If all your machines use full-disk encryption and you die or forget your passwords (for example after a head injury), can your data be recovered? How do you arbitrate between easy recovery and data security? If all your local devices burn down and you also pass away in the process, how will your next of kin access your remote backups and extract the relevant data (in my case, my password manager)?

I had to ask myself many complex questions in this process and although I won't be sharing my disaster recovery plan here (security through obscurity), I urge you to take the time to do something similar yourself and make sure you will leave a house in order when you go away.

in case I become incapacitated and can't make choices by myself anymore. ↩
it's sadly still opt-in here... ↩
you pay now for the services you want, the money is kept in a trust in your name and you can't be charged extra when you do pass away. This protects you from inflation and is a great way to make sure your next of kin don't have to deal with the complexities of funeral services while grieving. ↩

One last Bookworm for the road — report from the Montreal 2025 BSP

2025-04-22T00:00:00-04:00

Hello, hello, hello!

This report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal on March 28-29th is very late ... but better late than never? We're now at our fifth BSP in a row¹, which is both nice and somewhat terrifying.

Have I really been around for five Debian releases already? Geez...

This year, around 13 different people showed up, including some brand new folks! All in all, we ended up working on 77 bugs, 61 of which have since been closed.

This is somewhat skewed by the large number of Lintian bugs I closed by merging and releasing the very many patches submitted by Maytham Alsudany (hello Maytham!), but that was still work :D

For our past few events, we have been renting a space at Ateliers de la transition socio-écologique. This building used to be nunnery (thus the huge cross on the top floor), but has since been transformed into a multi-faceted project.

BSPs are great and this one was no exception. You should try to join an upcoming event or to organise one if you can. It is loads of fun and you will be helping the Debian project release its next stable version sooner!

As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue.

Pictures

Here are a bunch of pictures of the BSP, mixed in with some other pictures I took at this venue during a previous event.

See our previous BSPs in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023! ↩

Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2024 edition

2025-01-14T00:00:00-05:00

Another year of data from Société de Transport de Montréal, Montreal's transit agency!

A few highlights this year:

The closure of the Saint-Michel station had a drastic impact on D'Iberville, the station closest to it.
The opening of the Royalmount shopping center nearly doubled the traffic of the De La Savane station.
The Montreal subway continues to grow, but has not yet recovered from the pandemic. Berri-UQAM station (the largest one) is still below 1 million entries per quarter compared to its pre-pandemic record.

By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

Licences

The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. STM apparently changed (again!) the way they are exporting data, and since it's now somewhat sane, I didn't have to rely on a converter script.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - December 2024

2025-01-04T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on December 22^nd for our last meeting of 2024. I wasn't sure at first it was a good idea, but many people showed up and it was great!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

migrated to a new Yubikey
merged a lintian MR

anarcat:

fought with the Supersonic flatpak to fix build with latest placebo (failed), but managed to update to the latest upstream
realized that keyring-pass does the inverse of what he needs, whereas pass_secret_service, which does, is poorly maintained and depends on the dead pypass library
uploaded new upstream versions of etckeeper, mdformat and python-internetarchive
improved a lintian warning
opened yet another sbuild bug
started playing with sfwbar

lelutin:

worked on the 2024 Advent of Code in Rust

lavamind:

installed Debian on an oooollld (as in, with a modem) laptop
debugged a FTBFS on jruby

tvaz:

did some simple packaging QA
added basic salsa CI and some RFA for a bunch of packages (python-midiutil, antimony, python-pyo, rakarrack, python-pyknon, soundcraft-utils, cecilia, nasty, gnome-icon-theme-nuovo, gnome-extra-iconsg, nome-subtitles, timgm6mb-soundfont)

mjeanson and joeDoe:

hanged out and did some stuff :)

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue.

Pictures

This time around, we were hosted by l'Espace des possibles, at their new location (they moved since our last visit). It was great! People liked the space so much we actually discussed going back there more often :)

2024 — A Musical Retrospective

2025-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

Another musical retrospective. If you enjoy this, I also did a 2022 and a 2023 one.

Albums

In 2024, I added 88 new albums to my collection — that's a lot!

This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. To be honest, I'm quite distraught by what's become of that website. Although it stays a wonderful place to buy underground music, Songtradr, the new owner of the platform, has been shown to be viciously anti-union.

Money continues to ruin the world, I guess.

Concerts

I continued to go to a lot of concerts in 2024 (25!). Over the past 3 years, I have been going to more and more concerts, and I think I've reached my "peak". A mean of a concert every two weeks is quite a lot :)

If you also like music and concerts, but find yourself not going to as many as you would like, the real secret is not to be afraid to go to concerts alone. Going with friends is always fun, but if I restricted myself to only going to concerts in a group, I'd barely see a few each year.

Another good advice is to bring a book or something else¹ to pass the time between sets. It can often take 30-45 minutes between sets for the artists to get their instruments ready, which can get quite boring if you just stand there and wait.

Anyway, here are the concerts I went to in 2024:

February 22^nd-23^rd-24^th (Montreal Madhouse 2024): Scorching Tomb, Bruiserweight, Scaramanga, Cloned Apparition, Chain Block, Freezerburn, Béton Armé, Mil-Spec, NUKE, Friction, Reality Denied, SOV, Deathnap, Glint, Mulch, Stigmatism, Plus Minus, Puffer, Deadbolt, Apes, Pale Ache, Total Nada, Verify, Cross Check
March 16^th: Kavinsky
April 11^th: Agriculture
April 26^th-27^th (Oi! Fest 2024): Bishops Green, The Partisans, Mess, Fuerza Bruta, Empire Down, Unwanted Noise, Lion's Law, The Oppressed, Ultra Sect, Reckless Upstarts, 21 Gun Salute, Jail
May 4^th: MASTER BOOT RECORD
May 16^th: Wayfarer, Valdrin, Sonja
May 25^th: Union Thugs
June 15^th: Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill, Street Code, Mortier
September 5^th-6^th (Droogs Fest 2024): Skarface, Inspecter 7, 2 Stone 2 Skank, Francbâtards, Les Happycuriens, Perkele, Blanks 77, Violent Way, La Gachette, Jenny Woo
September 16^th: Too Many Zoos
September 27^th: The Slads, Young Blades, New Release, Mortier
October 2^nd: Amorphis, Dark Tranquility, Fires in the Distance
October 7^th: Jordi Savall & Hespèrion XXI, accompanied by La Capella Reial de Catalunya
October 11^th-12^th (Revolution Fest 2024): René Binamé, Dirty Old Mat, Union Thugs, Gunh Twei, Vermine Kaos, Inner Terrestrials, Ultra Razzia, Battery March, Uzu, One Last Thread, Years of Lead
October 19^th (Varning from Montreal XVI): Coupe Gorge, Flash, Imploders, Young Blades, Tenaz, Mötorwölf
November 2^nd: Kon-Fusion, Union Thugs
November 12^th: Chat Pile, Agriculture, Traindodge
November 25^th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
November 27^th: Zeal & Ardour, Gaerea, Zetra
December 7^th: Perestroïka, Priors, White Knuckles, Tenaz

Shout out to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there.

See you all in 2025!

I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a handheld Linux console running OnionOS, for that express reason. So far it's been great and I've been very happy to revisit some childhood classics. ↩

lintian.debian.org: Episode IV – A New Hope

2024-12-07T00:00:00-05:00

After weeks – dare I say months – of work, it is finally done. lintian.debian.org is back online!

Many, many thanks to everyone who worked hard to make this possible:

Thanks to Nicolas Peugnet, the author of lintian-ssg, who handed us this custom static site generator on a silver platter. I'm happy I didn't have to code this myself :)
Thanks to Otto Kekäläinen, maintainer of the lintian-ssg package in Debian, who worked in tandem with Nicolas to iron out problems.
Thanks to Philipp Kern, who did the work on the DSA side to put the website back online.

All in all, I did very little (mostly coordinating these fine folks) and they should get the credit for this very useful service being back.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2024

2024-11-13T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on November 2nd after a somewhat longer summer hiatus than normal. It was lovely to see a bunch of people again and to be able to dedicate a whole day to hacking :)

Here is what we did:

lavamind:

reproduced puppetdb FTBFS #1084038 and reported the issue upstream
uploaded a new upstream version for pgpainless (1.6.8-1)
uploaded a new revision for ruby-moneta (1.6.0-3)
sent an inquiry to the backports team about #1081696

pollo:

reviewed & merged many lintian merge requests, clearing out most of the queue
uploaded a new lintian release (1.120.0)
worked on unblocking the revival of lintian.debian.org (many thanks to anarcat and pkern)
apparently (kindly) told people to rtfm at least 4 times :)

anarcat:

figured out he still can't figure out how to do 3D printing and should probably just delegate these prints, currently in his wishlist:
- k4vp VHF HT radio case (fits on your phone)
- (tr)uSDX HF radio (fits in your hand!)
- framework expansion card holder (fits in my bag!)
- Ortlieb QUICK-LOCK1 compatible inserts (fits on my bike?)
fixed an RC bug in python-ulid
sponsored fuzzel 1.11.1+ds-2 upload, resolving a FTBFS on non-x86 arches
tried to move the sigal packaging forward a little, failing in obscure pybuild land

LeLutin:

opened an RFS on the ruby team mailing list for the new upstream version of ruby-necromancer
worked on packaging the new upstream version of ruby-pathspec

tvaz:

did AM (Application Manager) work

tassia:

explored the Debian Jr. project (website, wiki, mailing list, salsa repositories)
played a few games for Nico's entertainment :-)
built and tested a Debian Jr. live image

Pictures

This time around, we went back to Foulab. Thanks for hosting us!

As always, the hacklab was full of interesting stuff and I took a few (bad) pictures for this blog post:

A Selection of DebConf24 Talks

2024-08-08T00:00:00-04:00

DebConf24 is now over! I'm very happy I was able to attend this year. If you haven't had time to look at the schedule yet, here is a selection of talks I liked.

What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging

A great talk by Weezel showcasing how easy it is to migrate to PEP-518 for existing Python projects.

This is the kind of thing I've been doing a lot when packaging upstream projects that still use setup.py. I encourage you to send this kind of patch upstream, as it makes everyone's life much easier.

Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next?

A talk by Alper Nebi Yasak, who has done great work on running Debian and the Debian Installer on Chromebooks.

With Chromebooks being very popular machines in schools, it's nice to see people working on a path to liberate them.

Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian

I had the chance to see Justus' talk on Sequoia — an OpenPGP implementation in Rust — at DebConf22 in Kosovo. Back then, the conclusion was that sq wasn't ready for production yet.

Well it seems it now is! This in-depth talk goes through the history of the project and its goals. There is also a very good section on the current OpenPGP/LibrePGP schism.

Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust

A very short talk by Holger on Chameleon, a tool to make migration to Sequoia easier.

TL;DW: apt install gpg-from-sq

Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding

Although I used to enjoy signing people's OpenPGP keys, I completely gave up on this practice around 2019 when dkg's key was flooded with bogus certifications and have been refusing to do so since.

In this talk, Gunnar talks about his PhD work on fixing this issue and making sure we can eventually restore this important function on keyservers.

Bits from the DPL

Bits from the DPL! A DebConf classic.

Linux live patching in Debian

Having to reboot servers after kernel upgrades is a hassle, especially with machines that have encrypted disk drives.

Although kernel live patching in Debian is still a work in progress, it is encouraging to see people trying to fix this issue.

"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends

A fun talk by Samuel Henrique on little changes and tricks one can make to their setup to make life easier.

Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward

Another in-depth talk by Alper, this time on the Debian Installer and his ideas to try to make it better. I learned a lot about the d-i internals!

Lightning Talks

Lighting talks are always fun to watch! This year, the following talks happened:

Customizing your Linux icons
A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
Desktop computing is irrelevant
An introduction to wcurl
Aliasing in dpkg
A DebConf art space
Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
Data processing and visualisation in the shell

Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era?

As an economist, I've been interested in Copyright and business models in the Free Software ecosystem for a while. In this talk, Hatta-san and Bruce Perens discuss the idea of alternative licences that are not DFSG-free, like Post-Open.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - March 2024

2024-04-20T00:00:00-04:00

Time really flies when ~~you are really busy~~ you have fun! Our Montréal Debian User Group met on Sunday March 31st and I only just found the time to write our report :)

This time around, 9 of us we met at EfficiOS's offices¹ to chat, hang out and work on Debian and other stuff!

Here is what we did:

pollo:

did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

tvaz:

organized his custom Application Manager stuff in a private repo
did some coding for the New Maintainers website to make sure applicants agree with the Debian Code of Conduct alongside the SC/DFSG/DMUP
closed #1057910 (new apticron upload)

tassia:

planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
babysat a future contributor!
closed #1067649
learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

viashimo:

uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
updated various services in personal infra
cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
extended GPG key expiry
looked at options for a new backup machine

lavamind:

updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

justin:

opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

Pictures

Here are pictures of the event. Well, one picture (thanks Tassia!) of the event itself and another one of the crisp Italian lager I drank at the bar after the event :)

Maintainers, amongst other things, of the great LTTng. ↩

Acts of active procrastination: example of a silly Python script for Moodle

2024-03-09T00:00:00-05:00

My brain is currently suffering from an overload caused by grading student assignments.

In search of a somewhat productive way to procrastinate, I thought I would share a small script I wrote sometime in 2023 to facilitate my grading work.

I use Moodle for all the classes I teach and students use it to hand me out their papers. When I'm ready to grade them, I download the ZIP archive Moodle provides containing all their PDF files and comment them using xournalpp and my Wacom tablet.

Once this is done, I have a directory structure that looks like this:

Assignment FooBar/
├── Student A_21100_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student A's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student A's perfectly named assignment.xopp
├── Student B_21094_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student B's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student B's perfectly named assignment.xopp
├── Student C_21093_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student C's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student C's perfectly named assignment.xopp
⋮

Before I can upload files back to Moodle, this directory needs to be copied (I have to keep the original files), cleaned of everything but the graded paper.pdf files and compressed in a ZIP.

You can see how this can quickly get tedious to do by hand. Not being a complete tool, I often resorted to crafting a few spurious shell one-liners each time I had to do this¹. Eventually I got tired of ctrl-R-ing my shell history and wrote something reusable.

Behold this script! When I began writing this post, I was certain I had cheaped out on my 2021 New Year's resolution and written it in Shell, but glory!, it seems I used a proper scripting language instead.

#!/usr/bin/python3

# Copyright (C) 2023, Louis-Philippe Véronneau <pollo@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

"""
This script aims to take a directory containing PDF files exported via the
Moodle mass download function, remove everything but the final files to submit
back to the students and zip it back.

usage: ./moodle-zip.py <target_dir>
"""

import os
import shutil
import sys
import tempfile

from fnmatch import fnmatch


def sanity(directory):
    """Run sanity checks before doing anything else"""
    base_directory = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(directory))
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        sys.exit(f"Target directory {directory} is not a valid directory")
    if os.path.exists(f"/tmp/{base_directory}.zip"):
        sys.exit(f"Final ZIP file path '/tmp/{base_directory}.zip' already exists")
    for root, dirnames, _ in os.walk(directory):
        for dirname in dirnames:
            corrige_present = False
            for file in os.listdir(os.path.join(root, dirname)):
                if fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    corrige_present = True
            if corrige_present is False:
                sys.exit(f"Directory {dirname} does not contain a 'graded paper.pdf' file")


def clean(directory):
    """Remove superfluous files, to keep only the graded PDF"""
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
        shutil.copytree(directory, tmp_dir, dirs_exist_ok=True)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk(tmp_dir):
            for file in filenames:
                if not fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    os.remove(os.path.join(root, file))
        compress(tmp_dir, directory)


def compress(directory, target_dir):
    """Compress directory into a ZIP file and save it to the target dir"""
    target_dir = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(target_dir))
    shutil.make_archive(f"/tmp/{target_dir}", 'zip', directory)
    print(f"Final ZIP file has been saved to '/tmp/{target_dir}.zip'")


def main():
    """Main function"""
    target_dir = sys.argv[1]
    sanity(target_dir)
    clean(target_dir)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

If for some reason you happen to have a similar workflow as I and end up using this script, hit me up?

Now, back to grading...

If I recall correctly, the lazy way I used to do it involved copying the directory, renaming the extension of the graded paper.pdf files, deleting all .pdf and .xopp files using find and changing graded paper.foobar back to a PDF. Some clever regex or learning awk from the ground up could've probably done the job as well, but you know, that would have required using my brain and spending spoons... ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2024

2024-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

New Year, Same Great People! Our Debian User Group met for the first of our 2024 bi-monthly meetings on February 4th and it was loads of fun. Around twelve different people made it this time to Koumbit, where the meeting happened.

As a reminder, our meetings are called "Debian & Stuff" because we want to be as open as possible and welcome people that want to work on "other stuff" than Debian.

Here is what we did:

pollo:

tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the problem was indeed with the battery :D)
renewed his expiring OpenPGP key
worked on removing trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure from the DebCI reject_list
helped anarcat with packaging sigal
managed to feed most of the people present :)

LeLutin:

worked with lavamind to upload new upstream release of smokeping

mjeanson:

migrated from lxd to incus on his servers
helped anarcat with flashing his AirGradient

lavamind:

submitted a bug report on r-cran-rserve (promptly fixed/uploaded by maintainer!)
reviewed and uploaded smokeping
bug triaged the facter package
worked on puppet-agent new upstream version 8.4.0

viashimo:

updated puppet-strings from 2.9.0 to 4.2.1
reported upstream test failures on puppet-strings with recent versions of mdl

tvaz & tassia:

drafted a call & request for funding for the Vanier College FLOSS Club hardware marathon at Eastern Bloc
worked on an application to conduct research at Vanier College on Debian usability
babysitted :-)

joeDoe:

worked on his AirGradient
debugged the WiFi and VPN setup on his new laptop

anarcat:

worked on packaging sigal
worked on flashing his AirGradient boards
rewrote a Prometheus exporter for Airgradient devices
brought over a car full of old computer gear to donate

Pictures

I was pretty busy this time around and ended up not taking a lot of pictures. Here's a bad one of the ceiling at Koumbit I took, and a picture by anarcat of the content of his boxes of loot:

Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2023 edition

2024-01-24T00:00:00-05:00

For the fifth year in a row, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway.

By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

Licences

The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. I tweaked last's year converter script and although I had to clean some of the data by hand, it worked pretty well.

2023 — A Musical Retrospective

2024-01-09T00:00:00-05:00

I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :)

Albums

In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection — nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them.

I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available.

Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly Oï!) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montréal Skinhead/Punk concert scene.

Concerts

A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month...

Here are the concerts I went to in 2023:

March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
April 11th: Alexandra Stréliski
April 12th: Bikini Kill
April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill
May 3rd: First Fragment
May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
May 13th: Aeternam
June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
July 9th: Richard Galliano
August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
September 14th: Jinjer
September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety

Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montréal underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :)

That's it for 2023!

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2023

2023-12-06T00:00:00-05:00

Hello from a snowy Montréal! My life has been pretty busy lately¹ so please forgive this late report.

On November 19th, our local Debian User Group met at Montreal's most prominent hackerspace, Foulab. We've been there a few times already, but since our last visit, Foulab has had some membership/financial troubles. Happy to say things are going well again and a new team has taken over the space.

This meetup wasn't the most productive day for me (something about being exhausted apparently makes it hard to concentrate), but other people did a bunch of interesting stuff :)

Kienan & Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl package (now in Sid!), which is needed for smokeping.
Jérôme worked on updating JRuby to the latest upstream version.
I failed to update monitoring-plugins-systemd to the latest upstream version. It seems the entire test suite has been re-written and I couldn't make it work in sbuild...
Tiago and Tassia worked on the Debian Contributors website. More specifically, they added a DSA domains data source and created a scheduler on dcf.debian.net to make daily updates on the data sources in the dc-sources repository.
Michael worked on the 2024 NorthSec badge.
Gerard worked on debugging his broken AirGradient board.

Pictures

Here are a bunch of pictures I took! Foulab is always a great place to snap quirky things :)

More busy than the typical end of semester rush... At work, we are currently renegotiating our collective bargaining agreement and things aren't going so well. We went on strike for a few days already and we're planning on another 7 days starting on Friday 8th. ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023

2023-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"!

It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd, so I didn't try to organise one.

All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :)

This event was also the first time we were hosted by L'Espace des possibles - Petite Patrie, a social venue that aims to provide a space for not-for-profit activities, like repair cafés, sowing classes, board game nights, etc. It was really nice and we will surely meet there again in the future.

Many people came to the event, including some new ones. Although people always tend to come and go during the day, a total of 12 people attended the event.

As always, people worked on very different projects! One of the focus of this D&S was assembling AirGradient DIY basic kits. Our local community has been talking a lot about air quality metrics in the past few months¹. Tiago thus decided to have a company print the PCBs for this kit and graciously gave away a few spares. Michael then took upon himself to order parts on AliExpress and a few of us ended up soldering the kits together while chatting.

Otherwise, some Debian work was also done:

I triaged and closed a bunch of bug reports and started packaging labwc, a Wayland compositor heavily inspired by Openbox.
Jérôme did some work on Clojure libraries that broke when Java 21 became supported in Sid.
Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl library.
Tiago and Tassia continued their work on the new DC Sources project and Tiago applied for a debian.net VM for this service.

The whole event was super fun, the tacos we had for lunch were delicious (and very authentic!), and we ended up at a local microbrewery to share a pint later in the evening.

Looking forward to the next event!

Mostly as a result of the large forest fires in Canada this summer. I myself blogged twice about air quality-related projects recently. ↩