Firefox flatpak
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
$ rpm-ostree override remove firefox
$ flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
The future is here!
Ported apt-browser to Rust
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
I ported https://apt-browser.toolforge.org/ from Python/Flask to #Rust/Rocket
It's already faster and I didn't even finish all the performance improvements on it (e.g lazy_static for regexes).
Thank you for supporting my WMF Board candidacy
While we're waiting for the results (September 21st at the earliest), I want to thank everyone who helped with my WMF Board candidacy.
From the people who initially gave me the confidence to run, to the people who helped me get through the Affiliate round, and then the people who ran Get Out The Vote efforts for the community voting period or even just told me that they were supporting me: thank you.
A very special set of people were there every stage of the way, I can't really express in words how much I appreciate each of you. <3
Globally, voter turnout was down: only 5,955 votes this year compared to last year's 6,873. Yet, in each group of users we tracked, turnout was solidly up:
| Group | 2021 | 2022 | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stewards | 47.37% | 63.16% | 15.79 points |
| mediawiki.org admins | 44.26% | 67.74% | 23.48 points |
| en.wikipedia.org admins | 22.35% | 26.41% | 4.07 points |
| NYC meetup list | 26.92% | 33.33% | 6.41 points |
| Signers of NPP letter | 29.82% | 46.35% | 16.52 points |
| [[Category:Wikipedians who use Discord (software)]] | 14.45% | 29.24% | 14.79 points |
| [[Category:Wikipedians who use Internet Relay Chat]] | 16.94% | 31.40% | 14.47 points |
Pretty incredible. Now it's at least two more weeks of anxious waiting and hopefully some time for actual wiki editing!
Avery Brundage
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
Avery Brundage is Today's Featured Article on the English Wikipedia, which notes that he "fought zealously" against boycotting the Games in Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery_Brundage
The "Legacy" section spells it out clearly, noting he's well known as an anti-Semite, racist and admirer of Hitler.
So it's a good day for me to re-post the editorial I co-wrote in 2019 asking the USOC to remove him from their Hall of Fame: https://sjsunews.com/article/remove-brundage-from-olympic-hall-of-fame
Sadly, he's still in it: https://www.teamusa.org/Hall-of-Fame/Hall-of-Fame-Members/Avery-Brundage
Final day for voting in the WMF Board Election
As I posted about earlier, the election for the WMF Board of Trustees is wrapping up. Today is the final day for voting, it closes at 23:59 September 6 UTC (in your local timezone).
You should:
- Read about the candidates
- Vote!
- Tell other people to vote!
Thank you to everyone who has already voted and is encouraging other Wikimedians to vote. This is an incredibly important election and every vote counts.
Kiwix in Debian, 2022 update
Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017.
This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for new libzim and libkiwix versions.
- libzim: 6.3.0 → 8.0.0
- zim-tools: 2.1.0 → 3.1.1
- python-libzim: 0.0.3 → 1.1.1 (with a cherry-picked patch)
- libkiwix: 9.4.1 → 11.0.0 (with DFSG issues fixed!)
- kiwix-tools: 3.1.2 → 3.3.0
- kiwix (desktop): 2.0.5 → 2.2.2
The Debian Package Tracker makes it really easy to keep an eye on all Kiwix-related packages.
All of the "user-facing" packages (zim-tools, kiwix-tools, kiwix) now have very basic autopkgtests that can provide a bit of confidence that the package isn't totally broken. I recommend reading the "FAQ for package maintainers" to learn about all the benefits you get from having autopkgtests.
Finally, back in March I wrote a blog post, How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix, which got significant readership (compared to most posts on this blog), including being quoted by LWN!
We are always looking for more contributors, please reach out if you're interested. The Kiwix team is one of my favorite groups of people to work with and they love Debian too.