The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal).

(Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and Jonathan busy elsewhere.)

We've made loads of progress! Some highlights:

• We did a lot of triaging of outstanding bugs and merge requests against our ansible repository. Stale issues were closed, merge requests have been merged (or closed when they weren't relevant anymore), and new issues that we found while working on them were fixed. We also improved our test coverage for some of our ansible roles, and modernized as well as improved the way our documentation is built. (Louis-Philippe, Stefano, Kyle, Wouter, Nicolas)
• Some work was done on SReview, our video review and transcode tool: I fixed up the metadata export code and did some other backend work, while Stefano worked a bit on the frontend, bringing it up to date to use bootstrap 4, and adding client-side filtering using vue. Future work on this will allow editing various things from the webinterface -- currently that requires issuing SQL commands directly. (Wouter and Stefano)
• Jonathan explored new features in OBS. We've been using OBS for our "loopy" setup since DebConf20, which is used for the slightly more interactive sponsor loop that is shown in between talks. The result is that we'll be able to simplify and improve that setup in future (mini)DebConf instances. (Jonathan)
• Kyle had a look at options for capturing hardware. We currently use Opsis boards, but they are not an ideal solution, and we are exploring alternatives. (Kyle)
• Some package uploads happened! libmedia-convert-perl will now (hopefully) migrate to testing; and if all goes well, a new version of SReview will be available in unstable soon.

The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of things have already happened. Stay tuned!

A notorious ex-DD decided to post garbage on his site in which he links my name to the suicide of Frans Pop, and mentions that my GPG key is currently disabled in the Debian keyring, along with some manufactured screenshots of the Debian NM site that allegedly show I'm no longer a DD. I'm not going to link to the post -- he deserves to be ridiculed, not given attention.

Just to set the record straight, however:

Frans Pop was my friend. I never treated him with anything but respect. I do not know why he chose to take his own life, but I grieved for him for a long time. It saddens me that Mr. Notorious believes it a good idea to drag Frans' name through the mud like this, but then, one can hardly expect anything else from him by this point.

Although his post is mostly garbage, there is one bit of information that is correct, and that is that my GPG key is currently no longer in the Debian keyring. Nothing sinister is going on here, however; the simple fact of the matter is that I misplaced my OpenPGP key card, which means there is a (very very slight) chance that a malicious actor (like, perhaps, Mr. Notorious) would get access to my GPG key and abuse that to upload packages to Debian. Obviously we can't have that -- certainly not from him -- so for that reason, I asked the Debian keyring maintainers to please disable my key in the Debian keyring.

I've ordered new cards; as soon as they arrive I'll generate a new key and perform the necessary steps to get my new key into the Debian keyring again. Given that shipping key cards to South Africa takes a while, this has taken longer than I would have initially hoped, but I'm hoping at this point that by about halfway September this hurdle will have been taken, meaning, I will be able to exercise my rights as a Debian Developer again.

As for Mr. Notorious, one can only hope he will get the psychiatric help he very obviously needs, sooner rather than later, because right now he appears to be more like a goat yelling in the desert.

Ah well.

Sometimes, it's useful to get a notification that a command has finished doing something you were waiting for:

make my-large-program && notify-send "compile finished" "success" || notify-send "compile finished" "failure"

This will send a notification message with the title "compile finished", and a body of "success" or "failure" depending on whether the command completed successfully, and allows you to minimize (or otherwise hide) the terminal window while you do something else, which can be a very useful thing to do.

It works great when you're running something on your own machine, but what if you're running it remotely?

There might be something easy to do, but I whipped up a bit of Perl instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

use Glib::Object::Introspection;
Glib::Object::Introspection->setup(
    basename => "Notify",
    version => "0.7",
    package => "Gtk3::Notify",
);

use Mojolicious::Lite -signatures;

Gtk3::Notify->init();

get '/notify' => sub ($c) {
    my $msg = $c->param("message");
    if(!defined($msg)) {
        $msg = "message";
    }
    my $title = $c->param("title");
    if(!defined($title)) {
        $title = "title";
    }
    app->log->debug("Sending notification '$msg' with title '$title'");
    my $n = Gtk3::Notify::Notification->new($title, $msg, "");
    $n->show;
    $c->render(text => "OK");
};

app->start;

This requires the packages libglib-object-introspection-perl, gir1.2-notify-0.7, and libmojolicious-perl to be installed, and can then be started like so:

./remote-notify daemon -l http://0.0.0.0:3000/

(assuming you did what I did and saved the above as "remote-notify")

Once you've done that, you can just curl a notification message to yourself:

curl 'http://localhost:3000/notify?title=test&message=test+body'

Doing this via localhost is rather silly (much better to use notify-send for that), but it becomes much more interesting if you're going to run this to your laptop from a remote system.

An obvious TODO would be to add in some form of security, but that's left as an exercise to the reader...

I run Debian on my laptop (obviously); but occasionally, for $DAYJOB, I have some work to do on Windows. In order to do so, I have had a Windows 10 VM in my libvirt configuration that I can use.

A while ago, Microsoft issued Windows 11. I recently found out that all the components for running Windows 11 inside a libvirt VM are available, and so I set out to upgrade my VM from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This wasn't as easy as I thought, so here's a bit of a writeup of all the things I ran against, and how I fixed them.

Windows 11 has a number of hardware requirements that aren't necessary for Windows 10. There are a number of them, but the most important three are:

• Secure Boot is required (Windows 10 would still boot on a machine without Secure Boot, although buying hardware without at least support for that hasn't been possible for several years now)
• A v2.0 TPM module (Windows 10 didn't need any TPM)
• A modern enough processor.

So let's see about all three.

A modern enough processor

If your processor isn't modern enough to run Windows 11, then you can probably forget about it (unless you want to use qemu JIT compilation -- I dunno, probably not going to work, and also not worth it if it were). If it is, all you need is the "host-passthrough" setting in libvirt, which I've been using for a long time now. Since my laptop is less than two months old, that's not a problem for me.

A TPM 2.0 module

My Windows 10 VM did not have a TPM configured, because it wasn't needed. Luckily, a quick web search told me that enabling that is not hard. All you need to do is:

• Install the swtpm and swtpm-tools packages

• Adding the TPM module, by adding the following XML snippet to your VM configuration:

  <devices>
    <tpm model='tpm-tis'>
      <backend type='emulator' version='2.0'/>
    </tpm>
  </devices>
  

  Alternatively, if you prefer the graphical interface, click on the "Add hardware" button in the VM properties, choose the TPM, set it to Emulated, model TIS, and set its version to 2.0.

You're done!

Well, with this part, anyway. Read on.

Secure boot

Here is where it gets interesting.

My Windows 10 VM was old enough that it was configured for the older i440fx chipset. This one is limited to PCI and IDE, unlike the more modern q35 chipset (which supports PCIe and SATA, and does not support IDE nor SATA in IDE mode).

There is a UEFI/Secure Boot-capable BIOS for qemu, but it apparently requires the q35 chipset,

Fun fact (which I found out the hard way): Windows stores where its boot partition is somewhere. If you change the hard drive controller from an IDE one to a SATA one, you will get a BSOD at startup. In order to fix that, you need a recovery drive. To create the virtual USB disk, go to the VM properties, click "Add hardware", choose "Storage", choose the USB bus, and then under "Advanced options", select the "Removable" option, so it shows up as a USB stick in the VM. Note: this takes a while to do (took about an hour on my system), and your virtual USB drive needs to be 16G or larger (I used the libvirt default of 20G).

There is no possibility, using the buttons in the virt-manager GUI, to convert the machine from i440fx to q35. However, that doesn't mean it's not possible to do so. I found that the easiest way is to use the direct XML editing capabilities in the virt-manager interface; if you edit the XML in an editor it will produce error messages if something doesn't look right and tell you to go and fix it, whereas the virt-manager GUI will actually fix things itself in some cases (and will produce helpful error messages if not).

What I did was:

• Take backups of everything. No, really. If you fuck up, you'll have to start from scratch. I'm not responsible if you do.
• Go to the Edit->Preferences option in the VM manager, then on the "General" tab, choose "Enable XML editing"
• Open the Windows VM properties, and in the "Overview" section, go to the "XML" tab.
• Change the value of the machine attribute of the domain.os.type element, so that it says pc-q35-7.0.
• Search for the domain.devices.controller element that has pci in its type attribute and pci-root in its model one, and set the model attribute to pcie-root instead.
• Find all domain.devices.disk.target elements, setting their dev=hdX to dev=sdX, and bus="ide" to bus="sata"
• Find the USB controller (domain.devices.controller with type="usb", and set its model to qemu-xhci. You may also want to add ports="15" if you didn't have that yet.

• Perhaps also add a few PCIe root ports:

  <controller type="pci" index="1" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  <controller type="pci" index="2" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  <controller type="pci" index="3" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  

I figured out most of this by starting the process for creating a new VM, on the last page of the wizard that pops up selecting the "Modify configuration before installation" option, going to the "XML" tab on the "Overview" section of the new window that shows up, and then comparing that against what my current VM had.

Also, it took me a while to get this right, so I might have forgotten something. If virt-manager gives you an error when you hit the Apply button, compare notes against the VM that you're in the process of creating, and copy/paste things from there to the old VM to make the errors go away. As long as you don't remove configuration that is critical for things to start, this shouldn't break matters permanently (but hey, use your backups if you do break -- you have backups, right?)

OK, cool, so now we have a Windows VM that is... unable to boot. Remember what I said about Windows storing where the controller is? Yeah, there you go. Boot from the virtual USB disk that you created above, and select the "Fix the boot" option in the menu. That will fix it.

Ha ha, only kidding. Of course it doesn't.

I honestly can't tell you everything that I fiddled with, but I think the bit that eventually fixed it was where I chose "safe mode", which caused the system to do a hickup, a regular reboot, and then suddenly everything was working again. Meh.

Don't throw the virtual USB disk away yet, you'll still need it.

Anyway, once you have it booting again, you will now have a machine that theoretically supports Secure Boot, but you're still running off an MBR partition. I found a procedure on how to convert things from MBR to GPT that was written almost 10 years ago, but surprisingly it still works, except for the bit where the procedure suggests you use diskmgmt.msc (for one thing, that was renamed; and for another, it can't touch the partition table of the system disk either).

The last step in that procedure says to restart your computer!, which is fine, except at this point you obviously need to switch over to the TianoCore firmware, otherwise you're trying to read a UEFI boot configuration on a system that only supports MBR booting, which obviously won't work. In order to do that, you need to add a loader element to the domain.os element of your libvirt configuration:

<loader readonly="yes" type="pflash">/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.ms.fd</loader>

When you do this, you'll note that virt-manager automatically adds an nvram element. That's fine, let it.

I figured this out by looking at the documentation for enabling Secure Boot in a VM on the Debian wiki, and using the same trick as for how to switch chipsets that I explained above.

Okay, yay, so now secure boot is enabled, and we can install Windows 11! All good? Well, almost.

I found that once I enabled secure boot, my display reverted to a 1024x768 screen. This turned out to be because I was using older unsigned drivers, and since we're using Secure Boot, that's no longer allowed, which means Windows reverts to the default VGA driver, and that only supports the 1024x768 resolution. Yeah, I know. The solution is to download the virtio-win ISO from one of the links in the virtio-win github project, connecting it to the VM, going to Device manager, selecting the display controller, clicking on the "Update driver" button, telling the system that you have the driver on your computer, browsing to the CD-ROM drive, clicking the "include subdirectories" option, and then tell Windows to do its thing. While there, it might be good to do the same thing for unrecognized devices in the device manager, if any.

So, all I have to do next is to get used to the completely different user interface of Windows 11. Sigh.

Oh, and to rename the "w10" VM to "w11", or some such. Maybe.

Almost 2 decades ago, Planet Debian was created using the "planetplanet" RSS aggregator. A short while later, I created Planet Grep using the same software.

Over the years, the blog aggregator landscape has changed a bit. First of all, planetplanet was abandoned, forked into Planet Venus, and then abandoned again. Second, the world of blogging (aka the "blogosphere") has disappeared much, and the more modern world uses things like "Social Networks", etc, making blogs less relevant these days.

A blog aggregator community site is still useful, however, and so I've never taken Planet Grep down, even though over the years the number of blogs that was carried on Planet Grep has been reducing. In the past almost 20 years, I've just run Planet Grep on my personal server, upgrading its Debian release from whichever was the most recent stable release in 2005 to buster, never encountering any problems.

That all changed when I did the upgrade to Debian bullseye, however. Planet Venus is a Python 2 application, which was never updated to Python 3. Since Debian bullseye drops support for much of Python 2, focusing only on Python 3 (in accordance with python upstream's policy on the matter), that means I have had to run Planet Venus from inside a VM for a while now, which works as a short-term solution but not as a long-term one.

Although there are other implementations of blog aggregation software out there, I wanted to stick with something (mostly) similar. Additionally, I have been wanting to add functionality to it to also pull stuff from Social Networks, where possible (and legal, since some of these have... scary Terms Of Use documents).

So, as of today, Planet Grep is no longer powered by Planet Venus, but instead by PtLink. Rather than Python, it was written in Perl (a language with which I am more familiar), and there are plans for me to extend things in ways that have little to do with blog aggregation anymore...

There are a few other Planets out there that also use Planet Venus at this point -- Planet Debian and Planet FSFE are two that I'm currently already aware of, but I'm sure there might be more, too.

At this point, PtLink is not yet on feature parity with Planet Venus -- as shown by the fact that it can't yet build either Planet Debian or Planet FSFE successfully. But I'm not stopping my development here, and hopefully I'll have something that successfully builds both of those soon, too.

As a side note, PtLink is not intended to be bug compatible with Planet Venus. For one example, the configuration for Planet Grep contains an entry for Frederic Descamps, but somehow Planet Venus failed to fetch his feed. With the switch to PtLink, that seems fixed, and now some entries from Frederic seem to appear. I'm not going to be "fixing" that feature... but of course there might be other issues that will appear. If that's the case, let me know.

If you're reading this post through Planet Grep, consider this a public service announcement for the possibility (hopefully a remote one) of minor issues.

I have a new laptop. The new one is a Dell Latitude 5521, whereas the old one was a Dell Latitude 5590.

As both the old and the new laptops are owned by the people who pay my paycheck, I'm supposed to copy all my data off the old laptop and then return it to the IT department.

A simple way of doing this (and what I'd usually use) is to just rsync the home directory (and other relevant locations) to the new machine. However, for various reasons I didn't want to do that this time around; for one, my home directory on the old laptop is a bit of a mess, and a new laptop is an ideal moment in time to clean that up. If I were to just rsync over the new home directory, then, well.

So instead, I'm creating a tar ball. The first attempt was quite slow:

tar cvpzf wouter@new-laptop:old-laptop.tar.gz /home /var /etc

The problem here is that the default compression algorithm, gzip, is quite slow, especially if you use the default non-parallel implementation.

So we tried something else:

tar cvpf wouter@new-laptop:old-laptop.tar.gz -Ipigz /home /var /etc

Better, but not quite great yet. The old laptop now has bursts of maxing out CPU, but it doesn't even come close to maxing out the gigabit network cable between the two.

Tar can compress to the LZ4 algorithm. That algorithm doesn't compress very well, but it's the best algorithm if "speed" is the most important consideration. So I could do that:

tar cvpf wouter@new-laptop:old-laptop.tar.gz -Ilz4 /home /var /etc

The trouble with that, however, is that the tarball will then be quite big.

So why not use the CPU power of the new laptop?

tar cvpf - /home /var /etc | ssh new-laptop "pigz > old-laptop.tar.gz"

Yeah, that's much faster. Except, now the network speed becomes the limiting factor. We can do better.

tar cvpf - -Ilz4 /home /var /etc | ssh new-laptop "lz4 -d | pigz > old-laptop.tar.gz"

This uses about 70% of the link speed, just over one core on the old laptop, and 60% of CPU time on the new laptop.

After also adding a bit of --exclude="*cache*", to avoid files we don't care about, things go quite quickly now: somewhere between 200 and 250G (uncompressed) was transferred into a 74G file, in 20 minutes. My first attempt hadn't even done 10G after an hour!

In my previous post, I explained how I recently set up backups for my home server to be synced using Amazon's services. I received a (correct) comment on that by Iustin Pop which pointed out that while it is reasonably cheap to upload data into Amazon's offering, the reverse -- extracting data -- is not as cheap.

He is right, in that extracting data from S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs over an order of magnitude more than it costs to store it there on a monthly basis -- in my case, I expect to have to pay somewhere in the vicinity of 300-400 USD for a full restore. However, I do not consider this to be a major problem, as these backups are only to fulfill the rarer of the two types of backups cases.

There are two reasons why you should have backups.

The first is the most common one: "oops, I shouldn't have deleted that file". This happens reasonably often; people will occasionally delete or edit a file that they did not mean to, and then they will want to recover their data. At my first job, a significant part of my job was to handle recovery requests from users who had accidentally deleted a file that they still needed.

Ideally, backups to handle this type of situation are easily accessible to end users, and are performed reasonably frequently. A system that automatically creates and deletes filesystem snapshots (such as the zfsnap script for ZFS snapshots, which I use on my server) works well. The crucial bit here is to ensure that it is easier to copy an older version of a file than it is to start again from scratch -- if a user must file a support request that may or may not be answered within a day or so, it is likely they will not do so for a file they were working on for only half a day, which means they lose half a day of work in such a case. If, on the other hand, they can just go into the snapshots directory themselves and it takes them all of two minutes to copy their file, then they will also do that for files they only created half an hour ago, so they don't even lose half an hour of work and can get right back to it. This means that backup strategies to mitigate the "oops I lost a file" case ideally do not involve off-site file storage, and instead are performed online.

The second case is the much rarer one, but (when required) has the much bigger impact: "oops the building burned down". Variants of this can involve things like lightning strikes, thieves, earth quakes, and the like; in all cases, the point is that you want to be able to recover all your files, even if every piece of equipment you own is no longer usable.

That being the case, you will first need to replace that equipment, which is not going to be cheap, and it is also not going to be an overnight thing. In order to still be useful after you lost all your equipment, they must also be stored off-site, and should preferably be offline backups, too. Since replacing your equipment is going to cost you time and money, it's fine if restoring the backups is going to take a while -- you can't really restore from backup any time soon anyway. And since you will lose a number of days of content that you can't create when you can only fall back on your off-site backups, it's fine if you also lose a few days of content that you will have to re-create.

All in all, the two types of backups have opposing requirements: "oops I lost a file" backups should be performed often and should be easily available; "oops I lost my building" backups should not be easily available, and are ideally done less often, so you don't pay a high amount of money for storage of your off-sites.

In my opinion, if you have good "lost my file" backups, then it's also fine if the recovery of your backups are a bit more expensive. You don't expect to have to ever pay for these; you may end up with a situation where you don't have a choice, and then you'll be happy that the choice is there, but as long as you can reasonably pay for the worst case scenario of a full restore, it's not a case you should be worried about much.

As such, and given that a full restore from Amazon Storage Gateway is going to be somewhere between 300 and 400 USD for my case -- a price I can afford, although it's not something I want to pay every day -- I don't think it's a major issue that extracting data is significantly more expensive than uploading data.

But of course, this is something everyone should consider for themselves...

I have a home server.

Initially conceived and sized so I could digitize my (rather sizeable) DVD collection, I started using it for other things; I added a few play VMs on it, started using it as a destination for the deja-dup-based backups of my laptop and the time machine-based ones of the various macs in the house, and used it as the primary location of all the photos I've taken with my cameras over the years (currently taking up somewhere around 500G) as well as those that were taking at our wedding (another 100G). To add to that, I've copied the data that my wife had on various older laptops and external hard drives onto this home server as well, so that we don't lose the data should something happen to one or more of these bits of older hardware.

Needless to say, the server was running full, so a few months ago I replaced the 4x2T hard drives that I originally put in the server with 4x6T ones, and there was much rejoicing.

But then I started considering what I was doing. Originally, the intent was for the server to contain DVD rips of my collection; if I were to lose the server, I could always re-rip the collection and recover that way (unless something happened that caused me to lose both at the same time, of course, but I consider that sufficiently unlikely that I don't want to worry about it). Much of the new data on the server, however, cannot be recovered like that; if the server dies, I lose my photos forever, with no way of recovering them. Obviously that can't be okay.

So I started looking at options to create backups of my data, preferably in ways that make it easily doable for me to automate the backups -- because backups that have to be initiated are backups that will be forgotten, and backups that are forgotten are backups that don't exist. So let's not try that.

When I was still self-employed in Belgium and running a consultancy business, I sold a number of lower-end tape libraries for which I then configured bacula, and I preferred a solution that would be similar to that without costing an arm and a leg. I did have a look at a few second-hand tape libraries, but even second hand these are still way outside what I can budget for this kind of thing, so that was out too.

After looking at a few solutions that seemed very hackish and would require quite a bit of handholding (which I don't think is a good idea), I remembered that a few years ago, I had a look at the Amazon Storage Gateway for a customer. This gateway provides a virtual tape library with 10 drives and 3200 slots (half of which are import/export slots) over iSCSI. The idea is that you install the VM on a local machine, you connect it to your Amazon account, you connect your backup software to it over iSCSI, and then it syncs the data that you write to Amazon S3, with the ability to archive data to S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. I didn't end up using it at the time because it required a VMWare virtualization infrastructure (which I'm not interested in), but I found out that these days, they also provide VM images for Linux KVM-based virtual machines (amongst others), so that changes things significantly.

After making a few calculations, I figured out that for the amount of data that I would need to back up, I would require a monthly budget of somewhere between 10 and 20 USD if the bulk of the data would be on S3 Glacier Deep Archive. This is well within my means, so I gave it a try.

The VM's technical requirements state that you need to assign four vCPUs and 16GiB of RAM, which just so happens to be the exact amount of RAM and CPU that my physical home server has. Obviously we can't do that. I tried getting away with 4GiB and 2 vCPUs, but that didn't work; the backup failed out after about 500G out of 2T had been written, due to the VM running out of resources. On the VM's console I found complaints that it required more memory, and I saw it mention something in the vicinity of 7GiB instead, so I decided to try again, this time with 8GiB of RAM rather than 4. This worked, and the backup was successful.

As far as bacula is concerned, the tape library is just a (very big...) normal tape library, and I got data throughput of about 30M/s while the VM's upload buffer hadn't run full yet, with things slowing down to pretty much my Internet line speed when it had. With those speeds, Bacula finished the backup successfully in "1 day 6 hours 43 mins 45 secs", although the storage gateway was still uploading things to S3 Glacier for a few hours after that.

All in all, this seems like a viable backup solution for large(r) amounts of data, although I haven't yet tried to perform a restore.

A vote has been proposed in Debian to change the formal procedure in Debian by which General Resolutions (our name for "votes") are proposed. The original proposal is based on a text by Russ Allberry, which changes a number of rules to be less ambiguous and, frankly, less weird.

One thing Russ' proposal does, however, which I am absolutely not in agreement with, is to add a absolutly hard time limit after three weeks. That is, in the proposed procedure, the discussion time will be two weeks initially (unless the Debian Project Leader chooses to reduce it, which they can do by up to one week), and it will be extended if more options are added to the ballot; but after three weeks, no matter where the discussion stands, the discussion period ends and Russ' proposed procedure forces us to go to a vote, unless all proposers of ballot options agree to withdraw their option.

I believe this is a big mistake. I think any procedure we come up with should allow for the possibility that we may end up with a situation where everyone agrees that extending the discussion time a short time is a good idea, without necessarily resetting the whole discussion time to another two weeks (modulo a decision by the DPL).

At the same time, any procedure we come up with should try to avoid the possibility of process abuse by people who would rather delay a vote ad infinitum than to see it voted upon. A hard time limit certainly does that; but I believe it causes more problems than it solves.

I think insted that it is necessary for any procedure to allow for the discussion time to be extended as long as a strong enough consensus exists that this would be beneficial.

As such, I have proposed an amendment to Russ' proposal (a full version of my proposed constitution can be seen on salsa) that hopefully solves these issues in a novel way: it allows anyone to request an extension to the discussion time, which then needs to be sponsored according to the same rules as a new ballot option. If the time extension is successfully created, those who supported the extension can then also no longer propose any new ones. Additionally, after 4 weeks, the proposed procedure allows anyone to object, so that 4 weeks is probably the practical limit -- although the possibility exists if enough support exists to extend the discussion time (or not enough to end it). The full rules involve slightly more than that (I don't like to put too much formal language in a blog post), but they're not too complicated, I think.

That proposal has received a number of seconds, but after a week it hasn't yet reached the constitutional requirement for the option to be on the ballot.

So, I guess this is a public request for more support to my proposal. If you're a Debian Developer and you agree with me that my proposed procedure is better than the alternative, please step forward and let yourself be heard.

Thanks!

SReview, the video review and transcode tool that I originally wrote for FOSDEM 2017 but which has since been used for debconfs and minidebconfs as well, has long had a sizeable component for inspecting media files with ffprobe, and generating ffmpeg command lines to convert media files from one format to another.

This component, SReview::Video (plus a number of supporting modules), is really not tied very much to the SReview webinterface or the transcoding backend. That is, the webinterface and the transcoding backend obviously use the ffmpeg handling library, but they don't provide any services that SReview::Video could not live without. It did use the configuration API that I wrote for SReview, but disentangling that turned out to be very easy.

As I think SReview::Video is actually an easy to use, flexible API, I decided to refactor it into Media::Convert, and have just uploaded the latter to CPAN itself.

The intent is to refactor the SReview webinterface and transcoding backend so that they will also use Media::Convert instead of SReview::Video in the near future -- otherwise I would end up maintaining everything twice, and then what's the point. This hasn't happened yet, but it will soon (this shouldn't be too difficult after all).

Unfortunately Media::Convert doesn't currently install cleanly from CPAN, since I made it depend on Alien::ffmpeg which currently doesn't work (I'm in communication with the Alien::ffmpeg maintainer in order to get that resolved), so if you want to try it out you'll have to do a few steps manually.

I'll upload it to Debian soon, too.