I had been meaning for a long time to try out Wayland, which is designed as a modern replacement for the Linux graphical stack, the X Window System. The main selling point of Wayland for me is that it is better designed in terms of security: processes don't have access to each other's events, unlike X where any process can listen to all events that happen on the server. The lack of security in the design of X is a real problem: no matter which other kind of sandboxing you put in place (e.g., separate users, containers, etc.), you can't prevent a rogue process (e.g., malicious JavaScript using a browser security vulnerability) to access all events and, e.g., log all keystrokes that happen elsewhere in the session.

It is possible to sandbox processes in X by running an X server within the X server, e.g., Xnest, or more commonly Xpra. The way this works is that Xpra acts both as a client for the running X server, and as an X server in which you can run the process that you wish to sandbox: Xpra does not give the running process access to all events of the X server, but only gives it the events that it needs. This is what is done by Subuser, and it is what I did in my old setup to sandbox Skype. However, this is a rather ugly hack, and my experience the performance of the applications running inside Xpra has always been quite bad -- usable for Skype, but not really usable for something like a web browser. (I had tested this long ago by compiling the latest version of Xpra, and I just tested it again with the version packaged by Debian: video playback in a Web browser is not smooth.)

Another solution is what is done by QubesOS, which I haven't tested yet, but seems difficult to separate from the rest of their system (which looks interesting, but I'm not ready to migrate there yet). They are also thinking about using Wayland.

Anyway, Wayland looked like a reasonable solution to the problem, especially as the window manager that I use, i3, has been faithfully adapted to Wayland: sway. So I tried it out, and after some hours it seems to be fairly usable (using the Wayland packaged by Debian testing). This blogpost documents what I did.

Installing sway and its dependencies

Use apt-get to install all requisite dependencies for sway, and its dependency wlroots. The list of the packages that I installed for this is here. We will also need a recent version of libjson-c, because the one packaged by Debian is too old.

Essentially it should be something like:

mkdir ~/apps
cd apps

git clone 'https://github.com/json-c/json-c'
cd json-c
sh autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

git clone 'https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots'
cd wlroots
meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install
cd ..

git clone 'https://github.com/swaywm/sway'
cd sway
meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

You can then copy your i3 config to sway:

mkdir -p ~/.config/sway
cp ~/.config/{i3,sway}/config

And then you can try running sway in a TTY and see what happens. For me, everything almost worked out of the box: I document here what needs to be adapted. You can also have a look at my sway configuration, with only minimal changes relative to my i3 configuration,

For some reason the font in window titles and in the sway bar was wrong, but this was simply fixed by changing the font names in the config file to "Terminus". I think this is essentially the only change I had to make. When using sway there are some very small differences with i3 (e.g., the formatting of window title bars, or the precise behavior), but honestly the difference is hardly noticeable and I'm rather impressed at how close the adaptation is.

Fixing the keyboard layout

I have my custom keyboard which adapts the US Dvorak layout with some key combinations to write French accented characters. I used to load it with xkbcomp, but this no longer works with Wayland.

What works instead is to write a keyboard description like this and put it in ~/.xkb/symbols. Note that this includes some external files, some of which are in in the systemwide /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols folder, and others are applying my customizations (see, e.g., this) and they should also go in ~/.xkb/symbols. For some reason, trying to load this keyboard description by running setxkbmap a3nm will not work. However, it works to load the keyboard description in sway, by running XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=a3nm sway or editing the sway configuration file to add an input * block containing the xkb_layout a3nm directive, i.e.:

input * {
  repeat_delay 250
  repeat_rate 50
  xkb_layout a3nm
}

Note that this is also where I configure the keyboard repeat delay and rate.

Many thanks to ManDay for helping me figure this out on the #sway IRC channel.

Switching to apps with native support for Wayland

Most applications do not yet support Wayland, but there is a compatibility layer to run them on Wayland, called XWayland. The way this works is that, when you run an application with no Wayland support (or where Wayland support is not enabled), it will instead be run in an X server that will display in Wayland. For me this worked fine, with no noticeable lags or performance loss. However, all X applications run in XWayland share the same instance (for now), so in terms of security these applications are not better isolated from one another than with X.

So what matters is that applications manipulating sensitive information (e.g., for me, terminal emulators) should not be run in XWayland. This means switching to a Wayland-compatible terminal emulator. My current terminal emulator, rxvt-unicode, is not. For now I just went back to gnome-terminal, which works. Suggestions of terminals to try out (which I haven't tested yet) include:

• Alacritty
• Germinal
• Kitty, which is packaged for Debian but the packaged version doesn't use Wayland (and I didn't find a way to convince it to do otherwise)
• Termite

Again, thanks for ManDay for suggestions here.

As for other applications I don't care much except for the Web browser. Experimental support for Wayland just landed in Firefox Nightly, you can download it here, uncompress it, and then run it with GDK_BACKEND=wayland ./firefox. This is promising, however from my tests it's still not very stable: opening a second window often made it hang or at least fail to redraw the window that was being manipulated. I hope that this will improve and eventually be available in the normal Firefox releases.

Tearing

Not a point to fix, but just a remark: one of the things that interested me in testing Wayland was that it is supposed to help reduce screen tearing. That said, it seems I'm no longer able to reproduce tearing on X either... Testing on some videos I didn't manage to see any noticeable difference between X and Wayland, so I can't really claim this as a benefit.

In terms of video playback: Debian's mpv in testing is able to use Wayland natively by running mpv --gpu-context=wayland. For me it worked fine but I couldn't see any difference with running it in XWayland. VLC, however, does not use Wayland (I couldn't figure out if there was a Wayland backend). In terms of performance (measured by CPU usage on the same file) for mpv and VLC:

• VLC on Wayland (in XWayland) or in X, and mpv with hardware acceleration (--hwdec=auto) and with the native Wayland backend or in X, are the most efficient (around 8% CPU)
• Running mpv with hardware acceleration and in XWayland is a bit worse (15% CPU)
• Without hardware acceleration, mpv is much less efficient at around 45% CPU, both in X and in Wayland (both for XWayland and for the native backend).

Disclaimer: enabling hardware acceleration for mpv is discouraged.

Taking screenshots

I used to take screenshots with scrot, but it is an X utility, so it will fail silently. Instead, you can use grim, as suggested in the sway wiki.

cd ~/apps

git clone 'https://github.com/emersion/grim'
cd grim
meson build
ninja -C build

You cannot invoke grim without specifying an output file. I preferred scrot's way of automatically generating a filename based on date and time, so you just have to write a wrapper script, e.g., this.

Changing the screen locker

It seems that my previous screen locker (xtrlock) worked with Wayland, but I thought it safer to switch to the one supplied with sway, i.e., swaylock. I customized it to the way I like, e.g., I like to have the possibility of locking my session without hiding what's on the screen (e.g., to monitor stuff). The result is here.

Sandboxing a process

With sway in place, sandboxing a process is rather easy. Let's say that the process to sandbox uses X (not Wayland natively), and that it is running as user sandbox. In Wayland, you just need to issue xhost +si:localuser:sandbox (which will set the access controls for the XWayland server), and then run the process with sudo -u sandbox process as usual: the process will display while running in XWayland, and will be indistinguishable from other performances, in particular I didn't notice any performance problems. (For instance, playing a video on Youtube in Firefox is hungry in terms of CPU, using around 120-150%, but that's the same figure as running Firefox under X.) The sandboxed process will have access to all events in other X applications that use XWayland, but it is not able to access the events of native Wayland applications, and these applications cannot access the events of one another.

You can use xinput test (running in XWayland) to see the events that are communicated to the XWayland X server. In fact, this is the easiest way I found to test if a window was running natively in Wayland or in XWayland.

Remaining issues

To me the main issues that remain with the setup are:

• General perceived sluggishness. It's hard to explain why but I get the impression that some things are less smooth in Wayland, in particular moving windows around (while in tiling mode), but even displaying text in a terminal emulator just feels a tiny bit slower. I'm not sure if I'm just imagining this, or I'll stop noticing this after a while, or if there's a way to improve performance, or if it will improve over time as the code of sway, wlroots, etc., improves. For now it's just a rather mild annoyance. We'll see whether I stick with Wayland nevertheless or if I get fed up with it and give up.
• Having to install programs (sway and dependencies) that are not packaged for Debian yet. That said, there has been some interest in packaging sway for Debian, and hopefully it will happen once sway reaches version 1.0, which doesn't seem so far away.
• Lack of native apps for Wayland, in particular having to go back to gnome-terminal or to try more experimental terminals.
• The realization that X applications are not isolated from one another as they are all running with the same XWayland server.
• I did not try using a projector yet. With X you use xrandr (see my guide here), but this doesn't work on Wayland. It looks like you should configure it instead with sway by specifying the coordinates of the various outputs. However, I don't know whether projectors would work fine, given that the list of modes that they support is often pretty erratic, whereas with my laptop's screen, for instance, sway only shows one available mode. Also, there is no support yet for showing the same content on two monitors, e.g., on the screen and on the projector.
• There is no support for the nm-applet icon to configure NetworkManager, see this issue.

A more subtle point is that there is no discernible benefit to the user in running Wayland: at best it works just like X. For me the main benefit is security, but this is a pretty hard benefit to notice...

Thanks to linkmauve for proofreading and suggestions.

I have just finished writing up a long document that tries to give a comprehensive list of problems affecting academic research.

Writing this document is something that I had been meaning to do for a very long time, almost since I got started in academia in 2012 with my master's internship. Many academic practices did not make any sense to me already at the time, e.g., hiding research articles behind paywalls rather than simply hosting them online. I tried to ignore these concerns for a while, and did my PhD without questioning too much the order of things: for some practices I eventually saw a justification, but for many others I did not, and they made me more and more uneasy. So I thought that I should eventually come back to these problems, to re-examine my beliefs about the way academia works. Hence this long list of all the problems that annoy me, which I will try to keep up-to-date as time passes and my experience evolves.

Of course, complaining is always easy, so I have also tried to give some thought in the document about ways to fix these problems. The document does not mention my own initiatives in this direction (e.g., refusing to review for closed-access venues), which I will eventually write up separately.

So I encourage you to have a look at the document, What's wrong with academia?, and share with me any feedback that you may have!

The DBLP service is a great bibliographical tool for computer science research. In this post, I explain how to use it to prepare the list of members of a research community. I will be using the theoretical database community, whose two conferences are PODS and ICDT.

The list of publications for one edition of a conference can be found on DBLP as XML, e.g., for ICDT'18. It is then easy to use xmlstarlet to find the list of people who have published at that conference:

curl -s 'https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/icdt/icdt2018.xml' |
  xmlstarlet sel -T -t -m "//inproceedings/author" -m . -c '.' -n |
  sort | uniq

For each person in the list, we can obtain detailed XML information, including its homepage, ORCID, etc., using the DBLP API again. (This also gives us a canonical form for the name, which may appear in different ways in various inproceedings entries.) This is just a bit more complicated than it should, because of a limitation of the DBLP search API: when queried with a name, sometimes the API inexplicably favors non-exact matches even in some cases where an exact match exist. So we must filter the matches ourselves to use an exact match if one exists, and a non-exact match otherwise. Of course, independently from this problem, you may be getting the wrong author, in particular because of homonyms, so these results should be taken with a grain of salt.

NAME="Antoine Amarilli"
ENAME=$(echo "$NAME" | sed 's/ /%20/g')
curl -s "https://dblp.org/search/author/api?h=1000&q=$ENAME" > matches.xml
URL=$(xmlstarlet sel -T -t -m "/result/hits/hit/info[author='$NAME']" \
    -c url -n < matches.xml | head -1)
if [[ -z "$URL" ]]
then
  URL=$(xmlstarlet sel -T -t -m /result/hits/hit/info/url \
      -c . -n < matches.xml | head -1)
fi
curl -L "${URL}.xml"

From there, we can use this to prepare a list of community members. Of course, any criterion for inclusion is completely arbitrary... My criterion to get a list of "active community members" is to select the who have published on three different years, with one publication in 2015 or later. Which gives:

Corrected one error in this list caused by the DBLP search API limitation

Another inclusion criterion for a "historical" list would be the list of people who are not necessarily still active but have published over a long period, say, 10 different (not necessarily contiguous) years. Here is the resulting list, sorted by the year where the person has last published in ICDT or PODS.

Another kind of statistics that can be computed in this way is the "neighboring" conferences, i.e., the other conferences where members of the community have published. Here is the list of the top neighboring conferences of PODS and ICDT, sorted by the number of active community members who have published at least once there since 2015 (with hyperlinks and descriptions added manually):

• 38: SIGMOD Conference, the practical database conference held jointly with PODS
• 34: AMW, the database theory workshop held in honor of Alberto O. Mendelzon (whom you may remember from the previous list)
• 29: IJCAI, an AI conference
• 28: ICALP, a theoretical CS conference on logics and automata
• 26: LICS, another theoretical CS conference about logics
• 20: SODA, a theoretical CS conference on algorithms
• 19: AAAI, another AI conference
• 19: EDBT, the practical database conference held jointly with ICDT
• 18: WWW, a conference about the World Wide Web
• 15: Description Logics, the workshop on description logics
• 15: ICDE, a practical data management conference
• 13: CIKM, an information and knowledge management conference
• 12: SEBD, the Italian conference on databases
• 12: STOC, a general-purpose theoretical computer science conference
• 11: KR, a conference on knowledge representation and reasoning
• 11: FOCS, another general-purpose theoretical computer science conference

It would be interesting to visualize this data differently, e.g., visualize a world map with the community members, but sadly the affiliation information in DBLP is too sparse for this to work.

Since version 0.26, the mail indexing tool that I use, notmuch, now makes it easy to index encrypted mail.

The original behavior was that notmuch did not index the contents of encrypted emails, as they were encrypted and it couldn't access them. This meant that you couldn't search inside encrypted emails (except for headers, e.g., the subject, recipient, etc.).

Now, notmuch is able to use gpg (and gpg-agent) to read and index the cleartext of encrypted emails. Of course, this means that notmuch's index can now be used to reconstruct encrypted emails; in particular, as notmuch stores the session keys for messages in its index, this means that any attacker who can access the index can decrypt the messages¹. For my use case, I think that this security risk is acceptable: I essentially see GPG as a tool to ensure that messages are not altered between the sender and recipient, my notmuch index is stored on an encrypted partition anyway, and my GPG passphrase is usually cached by gpg-agent so an attacker who has control over my machine would be able to access the plaintext of encrypted messages quite easily.

So, if you also use notmuch, if you also have your passphrase cached by gpg-agent at least part of the time, and if you want notmuch to index the cleartext of your encrypted emails, here is what you should do. First, you should make sure that you have notmuch 0.26 or a more recent version. Second, you should tell notmuch that you want it to index the cleartext of encrypted email:

notmuch config set index.decrypt true

Beware, this configuration flag lives only in the database, not in the config file; hence, e.g., it will not be synchronized across multiple machines if you synchronize your config files from one machine to another.

Then you should reindex all encrypted email that notmuch knows about but hasn't indexed yet (this took around 15 mins in my case):

notmuch reindex tag:encrypted and not property:index.decryption=success

Of course, you will be prompted for your GPG passphrase if it isn't cached (and also possibly for the passphrase of other keys that you have used in the past). Once this has completed, you should check the encrypted messages that notmuch was still unable to index:

notmuch search tag:encrypted and not property:index.decryption=success

In my case, there were only a few that couldn't be indexed -- and usually it was because they hadn't been encrypted for my key because the sender had made some mistake.

From now on, notmuch new should automatically index the cleartext of incoming messages when your GPG passphrase is cached by gpg-agent. The last step is the following: if your passphrase is not cached all the time, then you should arrange for the notmuch reindex command above to be executed regularly, so that encrypted messages will eventually be indexed.

The setup described in this post lead to unpleasant side effects where GPG invocations would hang, probably because notmuch tried to ask for a passphrase. To avoid this, I had to ensure that the notmuch reindex command, when run regularly, never tried to ask for a passphrase if it wasn't currently stored by the agent. I did this by setting PINENTRY_USER_DATA=none and modifying my custom pinentry script to handle properly this value. (Of course, this means that encrypted messages will not be correctly indexed when the GPG agent hasn't cached the passphrase, but the hope is that they will eventually be indexed.)

Another problem that I had is that notmuch reindex would waste CPU time by trying to reindex each time the emails where it had previously failed. To avoid this, I reviewed manually the mails that couldn't be indexed, tagged them with a special tag, and then excluded mails with that tag from the notmuch reindex command. I also added a crontab entry to review periodically the emails where indexing failed, so I will tag them appropriately if the failure is expected. A more elaborate idea would be to exclude from the notmuch reindex command the emails that are too ancient; or maybe script things so that when all GPG keys are available in the agent but notmuch cannot index a message then it should tag it so as not to try again.

I'm still having problems with pinentry misbehaving, i.e., either not showing up anymore because a pinentry-curses is waiting for input somewhere, or having pinentry-gtk popping up uninvited. I can live with it for now but at some point I should investigate this and tidy it up.

I serve my git repositories over HTTP for people who want to browse them without having to clone them. I used to do this with cgit, which is a server-side dynamic solution written in C. It worked nicely, but lately some bots have been busy crawling these git repositories, and I regularly ran into trouble where the cgit.cgi processes ended up in a busy loop, eating 100% of CPU for unclear reasons. More generally, I had always been anxious about using a dynamic solution to serve these repositories: all the rest of my website is static, which I think is more elegant and more reassuring in terms of security.

The natural approach would be to turn cgit into a static solution by precompiling all pages whenever a git repository is updated. However, this is not reasonable: cgit allows you, e.g., to see the status of every file at every commit, or to diff any pair of commits, which would be too expensive to precompute. These features are not very useful, so I was considering to do it but tweak cgit's output to suppress the useless parts; but this would have been tedious.

Fortunately, there is a better way: the stagit tool is a minimalistic variant of cgit, also written in C, which is designed to be static. So I have just removed cgit from my server and installed stagit instead. Obviously it's too early for me to say whether stagit is a perfect solution, but I'm happy with what I have seen so far. Here are some quick and messy notes about how I did it and what surprised me, in case you are considering doing the same. As of 2022, stagit works fine and I'm still using it.

Stagit is not packaged for Debian yet but it's easy to compile and install (and the source code is rather short if you want to hack it). You will need libgit2-dev, which is packaged by Debian. I edited a bit the source to suit my needs; cf my local fork: I changed a bit the HTML, fixed the CSS to work better on mobile displays, renamed some files, etc. It's a bit ugly to have HTML boilerplate hardcoded in the C code, but it works, and if it starts misbehaving it will be easier for me to investigate.

Stagit provides one command stagit to generate the HTML for a repository, and one command stagit-index to generate an index of the various repositories. The README is rather clear (you can also look at the manpages in the repo). Of course, you need to re-run stagit whenever a git repository is updated, so you'll need a post-receive hook like the one they provide, which I adapted to my needs. One concern is that running stagit is synchronous, i.e., when doing a git push, you must wait for stagit to complete. However, it seems to run instantly on my repositories, so that's no big deal.

To get a nice index of the repositories, you need to change your git repositories to edit description with a description and url with the clone URL. There is also support for a owner field, but I removed this from the generated HTML as I'm the owner of all the repos I host. As the setup of a new git repository had become a bit tedious, I wrote a script for that, too.

About the url: you should know that stagit does not take care of allowing people to clone your repository. One solution is to run a git server for that (which the official stagit repository seems to do), but I didn't want it because it's not static. Instead, I intend people to clone my repositories using the dumb HTTP protocol: it only requires you to serve your git repositories with your Web server, and to run git update-server-info, as can be done easily using the post-update.sample hook. So for each repository you will have the stagit version and the bare repository. However, this will mean that the git clone URL will be different from the stagit URL, which is a bit jarring. So I cheated using some lighttpd mod_rewrite rules to transparently do the redirection. (Note that git clone will still point out the existence of this redirect when doing the cloning, so it's not completely transparent.) Here are the rules, following this page thanks to immae for suggesting an improvement:

  "^/git/([^/.]*)/HEAD$" => "/git/$1.git/HEAD",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/info/(.*)$" => "/git/$1.git/info/$2",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/objects/(.*)$" => "/git/$1.git/objects/$2",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/git-upload-pack$" => "/git/$1.git/git-upload-pack",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/git-receive-pack$" => "/git/$1.git/git-receive-pack",

One last thing about the migration to stagit is that I didn't want to break all the cgit URLs that used to work before. Of course, not all cgit pages have a stagit counterpart, but most of the important ones do, however their names are a bit different. Again, not very robust, but here goes:

  "^/git/([^/.]*)/commit/\?id=(.*)$" => "/git/$1/commit/$2.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/about(/.*)?$" => "/git/$1/file/README.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/log(/.*)?$" => "/git/$1/index.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/refs(/.*)?$" => "/git/$1/refs.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/tree/?(\?.*)?$" => "/git/$1/files.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/tree/([^?]*)(\?.*)?$" => "/git/$1/file/$2.html",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/plain/([^?]*)(\?.*)?$" => "/git/$1/file/$2.html",
  "^/git/([^.?]*)\?.*$" => "/git/$1",
  "^/git/([^/.]*)/([^?]*)\?.*$" => "/git/$1",

So there you have it: a completely static web version of my git repositories that can also be used to clone them with the dumb HTTP transport, a hook to update the web version, a script to create a new repository, and no more problems or possible security vulnerabilities with cgit!