Other articles

1. ITP: kanata

   After having successfully packaged QMK, I just have created an ITP: kanata bug on wnpp.

   Indeed, carrying a QMK-enabled keyboard with you at all times might not be practical when on the go with a laptop. Since laptop keyboards are (usually) dumb and not reprogrammable using QMK, kanata becomes the …

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2. lintian-ng parallel benchmark: tar.gz bottleneck

   The current bottleneck of lintian-ng is decompressing the gzipped tar file in memory. Given the structure of gzip-compressed data and tar files, the reading can only be done by one thread. By delegating the checks to other threads, we try to make sure that the reading thread goes as fast …

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3. Performance analysis: running Lintian against a Linux kernel package

   I have run Lintian against a (Ubuntu) kernel package. It took 1702 seconds, (~ 28 min). Of that time, the profiler analysed 1225 seconds (~ 20 min) I profiled it using the NYTProf Perl profiler. Here are the results:

   

   We can see that most of the time is spent in the visit_files …

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4. What would it take to rewrite Lintian in Rust?

   During DebConf 2024 Busan the poor state of maintenance and performance of Lintian was mentioned (again).

   I have been affected by long check times especially as packages grows in size and Lintian only uses one core of my otherwise beefy machines. I took a very short look at how Lintian …

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5. alacritty hints for Launchpad and BTS bugs

   Due to a weird font rendering bug in kitty, I switched to alacritty as my primary terminal emulator for the time being.

   One missing feature when doing Debian and Ubuntu work is the possibility to click on bug numbers to open them in a web browser. Ubuntu patches gnome-terminal (60_add_lp_handler …

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6. qmk available in unstable

   I have finalized the packaging of qmk cli. It is available in unstable, and should soon be available in testing (trixie).

   # apt install qmk
   $ qmk
   usage: qmk […]
   
   cli wrapper for running qmk commands.
   […]
   

   qmk_cli is a program that helps interact with the qmk_firmware repository. It is used to build and …

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