Foss on Pensées de Michel

Introducing dbranch 🍥→🤝

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Caveat lector

This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now

Today’s post introduces dbranch, a tool to update a Debian package in unstable, and rebuild downstream branches (currently supports Ubuntu PPAs and stable proposed-updates; backports support could be easily added once I have a package that needs it). Eagle-eyed readers might notice the naming similarity with my previous tool ebranch; and the credit for the name and inspiration eventually came from Jens Petersen’s fbrnch.

Work-Life Balance 🏖️ with Sandogasa 👒 Hat-Track

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Caveat lector

This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now

Happy Friday! Of course it’s not Friday anymore in Asia, and if I finish this post in time, it’s still the work day in the Western Hemisphere.

When you work in a large distributed project, it’s not dissimilar to working in a large multinational company - there are too many people to know everyone (or at least not at once!) and you might not know where someone is and if you’re pinging them in the middle of the night.

Sandogasa, now for EPEL and CentOS SIG workflows too!

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Caveat lector

This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now

This is a follow-up to the original Sandogasa announcement. Before I ended up fedora-cve-triage to extract library crates and reuse them in the other Sandogasa tools, I already created two tools for managing CentOS Hyperscale SIG workflows, hs-intake and hs-relmon. It simply makes sense to also merge them back in and deduplicate functionalities.

Announcing Sandogasa, a set of Rust crates to help with Fedora packaging workflows

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:06:34 +0000

Caveat lector

This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now

I’ve spent the past few weeks of having to use LLMs to scratch some long-standing itches that, unfortunately, no one in the community has had the time to solve programmatically.

fedora-cve-triage

It started off with fedora-cve-triage, written to address the issue that a lot of CVE bugs filed against Fedora packages are badly attributed, and there is a lack of automation for handling issues filed against CVEs that have been addressed in a software update but failed to reference said issue.

Hi, my name is Michel, and I (reluctantly) use LLMs

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:41:31 +0000

the old pen resists
but the cursor blinks, waiting—
I press Enter. Fine.

~ Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)

If you know where I work, you’ve probably heard of news reports that we will be judged on AI-driven impact. I’ll let you drawn your own conclusion on how much truth there is in the reports, but you can listen to what Zuck said about AI in a recent earnings report.

Hello from Europe!

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have informed colleagues and close external collaborators already, but today it’s finally time to make it public: as of now I am officially working out of Meta’s Dublin office¹, and am no longer based in the US.

Why Ireland?

Some reasons I am happy to disclose publicly; for the rest, feel free to ask me to regale you in person, if we know each other; preferably over a beer or something stronger.

On working sustainably

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Looking at what tags to use for this post, it surprised me that it’s been over two years since I posted about taking recharge (basically a short sabbatical).

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Some reorganizations happen at work, but I’m still basically working upstream on Linux distributions. I have a US passport now, which means traveling to the Schengen area is now straightforward; on the other hand it does mean more travel and more jet lag… and I got promoted!

Hello Nushell!

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After about two years of on-and-off work, I’m happy to report that Nushell has finally landed in Fedora and EPEL 9, and can be installed simply using sudo dnf --refresh install nu on Fedora and your favorite Enterprise Linux distribution (I’m partial to CentOS Stream myself, but also RHEL, AlmaLinux, etc.)

(For those not familiar with Nushell yet, think of it as a cross-platform Powershell written in Rust - it lets you manipulate pipelines of structured data, the way you might be using jc and jq with a regular shell)

Strange Loop recap

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got round to attending the Strange Loop conference for the first and last time (since the organizers won’t do another one) .

What’s in a name?

From an old write-up on UIUC’s website) - this being the alma mater of organizer Alex Miller: the conference has been described as a “who’s - who of interesting people doing applied computer science”. The current website describes its goal as “to make connections with the creators and users of the languages, libraries, tools, and techniques at the forefront of the industry”.

On recharge

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been over 6 years since I started working at Meta (then known as Facebook). Not going to comment here about all the controversies surrounding our products, but as an employee, I have been lucky enough to work on interesting teams that, yes, don’t do anything that give me cause to be sleepless at night.

One perk we have (that is no big deal to friends in Europe, but is a big deal in the US) is being able to take 30 calendar days of recharge leave (think of it as a short sabbatical) after each 5 years of employment (together with the 21 work days of PTO a year, this roughly brings us in line with what Europeans get courtesy of employment laws. Lucky y’all!)

Distrobox for Ubuntu (and soon, Debian!)

Wed, 04 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a fan of distrobox for a while - it really makes it easy to experiment with different Linux distributions, and also to do packaging work for different distributions regardless of what’s running on the physical machine¹.

It’s not only ridiculously flexible, compared to the Toolbx project that inspires it - the latter requires specially modified containers - but it also just consists of Bash scripts, with a simple installation script. Perfect for getting to grips with the idiosyncracies of a different distribution’s packaging methodologies!

Goodbye Twitter: all in on the Fediverse

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the Twitter board accepting Elon’s buyout offer, I’ve reached the point where I can no longer maintain a presence on this network; I’ll post a link to this blog post, wipe all other tweets, and then delete the account after a week.

There are many reasons for this:

I don’t like to depend on the largesse of a billionaire
- see Now & Then’s Tax Dollars and Tech Dollars on a good historical discussion on billionaire ‘philanthropy’
Elon Musk is a modern-day Carnegie or Rockefeller; see the Behind the Bastards takedown
his free speech maximalism is a terrible idea. If you think Twitter’s moderation policy is insufficient already, the guardrails will come off
that dogecoin comment. I already dislike how Twitter’s Blue Sky is overly heavy on “crypto” and “web3” style blockchain based decentralization, rather than federation a la the Fediverse … but now it will get worse

Scrapping advertisements, if it happens, is a positive, but not enough to outweigh the rest. I like the idea of switching to subscriptions, but making it cheaper seems non-workable ($2.99/mo is much cheaper than Reddit Premium’s $5.99/mo). Also - gee thanks Twitter for killing Scroll post-acquisition. I want to read a news site by going to their site directly, not relying on finding the article I want in their Twitter feed, thank you.

Navigating repositories with myrepos-utils

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using myrepos for a while - as someone who juggles a lot of repositories, both for personal projects and as a Fedora and CentOS packager, a ~/.mrconfig synced via Nextcloud really makes checking out repositories consistently, on different computers, straightforward.

As the number of tracked repos grow, however, trying to remember where each repo is checked out gets a bit time consuming – and also, keeping the configuration file organized as well; mr register on an existing repo would add the entry for that repo at the end of the file, and I was previously resorting to editing the file by hand to get it sorted - with a varying degree of success.

The Lagrange Gemini client is in Fedora

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Lagrange, probably the most beautiful looking Gemini client, is now available on Fedora and EPEL.

This means that you can install it with as little as

sudo dnf install lagrange

and this would work on all supported and in-development Fedora releases (Rawhide, 36, 35, 34) as well as on any RHEL / CentOS Stream 8 and 9 derivatives (RHEL, CentOS Stream, Alma, Rocky) that have the EPEL repos enabled.

CentOS Dojo is over, hello FOSDEM!

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The first CentOS Dojo of the year is, as usual, held as a FOSDEM Fringe event. It’s virtual - again - which is a blessing and a curse. It would be fun to travel and meet people in person again once the situation permits, then again, given my family situation that would have meant I would have to skip for the next year or two anyway.

That being said, it was held on Hopin, which has a decent hallway track experience. Nothing much is changing on the platform front - linux.conf.au was on Venueless again, and FOSDEM is again using a bleeding edge Element web client at chat.fosdem.org. I like the Hopin and Element experience, though I admit to a bias - Element because I like decentralized platforms, and Hopin because I know more people among the attendees of events held there. And Hopin is still unpredictably buggy on Firefox!

2021H1 recap: Fedora 34, CentOS Dojo, team switch, and back on leave

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Half of 2021 is gone already! I’m back on parental leave, but want to post a quick recap of the past few months.

Parental leave

I’m out from July 15 until the end of October.

I am signed up to some virtual conferences this summer and fall, but do not anticipate really being there except for a few selected talks. Best way to reach me is async via Matrix or email (see links on the main page). Responses to Pagure and Bugzilla issues might be delayed.

Software and Wetware: Taking a short hiatus

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 24 whole days since my last post! It’s been quite a productive time, and one full of surprises.

My Desktop Linux at Facebook talk happened, and the recorded video is now available in WebM and MP4 formats. Linux Unplugged and Phoronix had some nice coverage (thanks Stefano for noticing these!)
The changes I’m involved in for Fedora 34, enabling Btrfs transparent compression and enabling systemd’s oomd userspace out-of-memory killer reached feature completion. Many thanks from the change owners especially to Chris Murphy, Neal Gompa, and the Anaconda developers (Jiří, Martin, Vendula, and Vojtěch) for all their feedback and assistance!
For EPEL Packaging we’re close to allowing branching only for allowlisted branches. This will help the maintenance of packages many RHEL and CentOS users need, since the primary maintainer might not want to support EPEL, or allow the EPEL maintainers to commit to the Fedora branches, but previously without full commit access a maintainer cannot request the package to be branched for new EL releases

The other major development is the launch of Michel 2.0¹ into the world, with only minor hiccups, ahead of schedule! Most of the credit for this, of course, belongs to my lovely wife; I’m really blessed to have them both in my life. I’ll be only sporadically online for the next few weeks, dedicating myself to a deep dive of this novel Baby Operating System :D

Come watch our talks at FOSDEM and CentOS Dojo!

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll be presenting (and last-minute-volunteering) at FOSDEM, and some colleagues from Facebook are presenting at the adjacent CentOS Dojo on topics I’m involved in - and we’d love to get your feedback and hopefully get you involved!

Dojo, Feb 5, 15:00 UTC - Davide Cavalca will introduce the new Hyperscale SIG, a community effort to produce an optional repository to make CentOS Stream more suitable for large-scale deployments
Dojo, Feb 5, 16:00 UTC - Matthew Almond will present Speeding up DNF and RPM using Copy on Write, which will hopefully land soon in the upcoming Fedora 34
FOSDEM, Feb 6, 16:00 UTC/17:00 CET - I will be doing my Desktop Linux at Facebook talk

Both events are free to attend - follow the CentOS Dojo link above to register (you need a free account on hopin.com). FOSDEM does not require registration, but make sure to read the practical information page beforehand especially if you don’t already have a Matrix account (does not matter which domain as long as it federates).

Hello Friend NG, meet Pixelfed!

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My blog is built using the Hugo static side generator, using a lightly forked version of hello-friend-ng.

Until yesterday, the only change was to strip prism.js to slim down the site (not upstreaming this yet until I could figure out a way to selectively disable it on pages that don’t need it).

Yesterday I sent back my first two pull requests though:

PR 257 fixing links in the SVG documentation
PR 258 adding an SVG icon for Pixelfed, a decentralized alternative to image-sharing social networks such as Instagram or Tumblr

It’s a fun little weekend exercise. At the beginning I was looking at previous pull requests adding other icons, and noticed, huh, you just copy the <svg> parts of a file to the master list of all SVG icons, that’s easy. Pixelfed is open sourced, of course, so grabbing the initial SVG just involves looking at its Git repo.

Commenting via Mastodon!

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Following Carl Schwann’s post, I have now enabled comments on my blog, starting with this post. It’s surprisingly simple for someone who has not done much mucking around with Hugo before!

If you’re also using Hugo, here’s how I did mine:

Refer to Carl’s commit
Copy your theme’s relevant template, preserving the same path, to override its behavior. I use a slightly modified hello-friend-ng so I copied themes/hello-friend-ng/layouts/posts/single.html to layouts/posts/single.html
Create a new partial layout (mine is layouts/partials/mastodon_comments.html) based on Carl’s change to his article.html
Check in purify.min.js to your static/js folder

In my case, my theme already has optional Disqus support, so I reworked the single.html template a bit:

Fedora packaging tedium and bulk-rebuild

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent thread on Fedora’s development list, Miroslav Suchý asked about what Fedora packagers found most time-consuming, that could be simplified or better automated.

For me, personally, it’s rebuilding a stack of packages that Facebook develop - due to a lack of stable ABI (so it’s partly our own doing, yes), the entire stack has to be rebuilt each time.

There are some Fedora tooling that make this easier – rpmdev-bumpspec can automate the process of updating the version and changelog on simple spec files, and fedpkg request-side-tag lets any packager get a ‘side tag’ based off of an existing release, so packages can be built individually then merged back as a set, so there is no window in which the set of packages in, say, Rawhide, are inconsistent with each other, and there is no need to use buildroot overrides (which exposes the unreleased packages to other developers when they might still be buggy).

The 512KB Club and Debloating

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I ran across Kev Quick’s announcement for The 512KB Club last month, and noticed that this blog, using the Academic theme for Hugo, was… a bit on the bloated side, clocking in at a whopping 748KB (including 246KB font, 206KB JS, and 190K CSS).

This became an added incentive for switching theme - something that’s already on the todo list after a previous theme update necessitates some painful configuration refactor.

I noticed that both figura.im and secluded.site use hello-friend-ng and clock in at under the limit – and sport cleaner looks as well, and finally got around to switch to the same theme today.

On Safety Razors and Technology

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On safety razors

I recently switched over from the ubiquitous cartridge razors to double-edge safety razors. The original impetus was not finding a non-charging base for my GiletteLabs Heated Razors - the battery in the stem made it too wide for most razor holders - and noticing that a lot of reviews swear by various safety razors.

I ended up buying the Rex Ambassador¹ a few months ago - and then held off on actually using it, telling myself I need to learn how to properly use it first. In the end I told myself I would stop using my Gilette the day after the US Presidential Election, and start using the safety razor the morning after the US Presidential Election is finally called – which was Sunday the 8th, with a nice 5-day stubble to test it on.

Does social media bring you joy?

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I deleted my Instagram accounts today. The process is needlessly obscure - the flow on the app and the web interface only exposes an option to temporarily disable your account - which is an alarming anti-pattern; it is indeed one of the walled gardens I alluded to in an earlier post.

What was the impetus for this, you might ask? There are multiple factors I took into consideration, but the final straw was watching Jeff Orlowski’s thought-provoking documentary, The Social Dilemma. It’s on Netflix right now, and is a highly recommended watch. Even as someone who has, for a while, been highly skeptical of algorithmic newsfeeds in particular, and the attention economy in general, this still sends chills down my spine. A lot of tech insiders have second thoughts about the products they built, worry about its impact on the world, and try to insulate their children from it.

HOWTO: Run a Fedora 32-bit ARM VM emulated on x86-64

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Background

I am writing this as a memory aid to myself the next time I have to do this, but this might make a nice addition to the Fedora ARM wiki once cleaned up.

I need a 32-bit ARM VM to debug some issues with armhfp image creation; the most efficient way to do this would be to use KVM on an aarch64 host like a Raspberry Pi 4, but mine is still in storage – and WFH means I’m getting too used to programming from my laptop while wandering around the house anyway. So … until my Pinebook Pro arrives, armhfp-on-x86_64 it is.

Breaking out of walled gardens

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have been progressively getting more and more dissatisfied with the grip Big Tech firms have over our collective lives, and have been gradually pruning my use of proprietary technologies over the past months.

It’s quite surprising how much mental energy you save by not engaging with controversial content that algorithmic news feeds at Facebook and Twitter foist on you to keep your eyes glued to the screen (and, with luck, your replies keep other people’s eyes glued too) so they¹ can sell you ads!

Linux in the Time of COVID-19

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Can’t believe I managed to spend more than a year without updating this blog! In hindsight, perhaps sticking to open-source communication channels should have been in my 2019 resolutions…

I’ve been meaning to write a comprehensive status update, but perhaps starting small and updating more often is the way to go. So here goes…

On WFH and moving

Thanks to the #COVID19 situation, everyone at Facebook has been working from home for a few weeks now. It’s a blessing and a curse – my wife and I were in the process of relocating, so while not having to commute means I have more time to pack, it also means – I was working from a tiny apartment where everything was in the process of being boxed up!

2019: New Year's Resolutions

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of the year again, and after a whirlwind 2018 - switching teams, a lot of work-related travel, and all those scandals in the news, it’s time to reflect on the year past and plan changes for the coming year ahead.

With that in mind, here are some resolutions I’m aiming for in 2019:

better work-life balance
- attend a conference
- exercise more
- healthier social media usage
- more realistic reading challenge target
learn a new programming language
actively support cooperatives

Happy New Year everyone!

Hello GitLab Pages!

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With the recent Google announcement that Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as insecure, it’s time to say farewell to GitHub Pages, which I switched to more than two years ago, and move to GitLab Pages.

Main reason being, despite multiple requests, GitHub still does not support HTTPS on custom domains, without using another service like Cloudflare (which is a bit overkill for a static site!).

There are several additional advantages to the move:

Property-based Testing in Python with Hypothesis @ GeekCamp.ID

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Several months ago I discovered David R. MacIver’s impressive property-based testing library for Python, Hypothesis. Having been a big fan of Haskell’s QuickCheck – but not having much opportunity to use Haskell in daily life – this is hugely exciting. A mature property-testing tool, targeting a popular dynamic language … soon afterwards I packaged this library for Fedora – fellow Fedora users can install it with a simple

dnf install python-hypothesis

or, to specify the Python interpreter explicitly,

Assign Phabricator reviewers based on module ownership

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At Traveloka, Indonesia’s leading travel booking site, we use Phabricator for code reviews - and as a growing company it might not be straightforward to figure out who is knowledgeable about a particular part of the code base and thus would be a good reviewer.

Inspired by Quora’s Moving Fast With High Code Quality post, we are thus implementing a review routing system - the code is live on GitHub at phabricator-utils. It’s written in Python (hey, we’re a Java/JS/Python shop), though we do plan to contribute closer to the Phabricator codebase itself and that will be in PHP.

Hello Cryogen

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to switch to a statically-generated blog for a while, and specifically to Cryogen hosted on GitHub Pages, for a combination of several reason:

I am already writing my posts in Markdown for Ghost, and prior to that, Scriptogr.am
Overhead of maintaining a Ghost blog is hosted on OpenShift Online
I prefer Clojure to JavaScript
Cryogen developer lacarmen is amazingly responsive. This request for tag-specific RSS feeds is done within a day. Ghost dragged its feet on this.

Will set up Disqus integration later – and need to work on a better-looking site theme too, but that can wait. For now, hello!