While struggling with Pfizer second dose side effects yesterday, with little ability to do anything serious – so surreal to have a fever yet also certainty you’re not actually ill[1] – I thought I’d try building the branch of Emacs with native Wayland support, and try starting up Sway instead of i3. I recently upgraded my laptop to Debian bullseye, as I usually do at this stage of our pre-release freeze, and was wondering whether bullseye would be the release which would enable me to switch to Wayland.

Why might I want to do this? I don’t care about screen tearing and don’t have any fancy monitors with absurd numbers of pixels. Previously, I had been hoping to cling on to my X11 setup for as long as possible, and switch to Wayland only once things I want to use started working worse on X11, because all the developers of those things have stopped using X11. But then after upgrading to bullseye, I found I had to forward-port an old patch to xfce4-session to prevent it from resetting SSH_AUTH_SOCK to the wrong value, and I thought to myself, maybe I could cut out some of the layers here, and maybe it’ll be a bit less annoying. I have a pile of little scripts trying to glue together xfce4 and i3 to get all the functionality I need, but since there have been people who use their computers for similar purposes to me trying to make Sway useful for quite some time now, maybe there are more integrated solutions available.

I have also been getting tired of things which have only ever half-worked under X, like toggling autolock off when there isn’t fullscreen video playing (when I’m video conferencing on another device, I often want to prevent my laptop’s screen from locking, and it works most of the time, but sometimes still locks, sigh). I have a “normalise desktop” keybinding which tries to fix recurrent issues by doing things like restarting ibus, and it would be nice to drop something so hackish.

And indeed, a lot of basic things do work way better under Sway. swayidle is clean and sane, and I was easily able to add a keybinding which inhibits locking the screen when a certain window is visible. I could bind brightness up/down keys without having to invoke xfce4-power-manager – never managed that before – and, excitingly, I could have those keys bound such that they still work when the screen is locked. I still need two old scripts which interact with the i3/sway IPC, but those two are reasonable ways to extend functionality, rather than bad hacks.

The main thing that I could not figure out is IME – various people claim online to have got typing their Asian languages working natively under Sway, not just into Xwayland windows, but I couldn’t, and there is no standard way to do it yet, it would seem. Also, it seems Qt in Debian doesn’t support Wayland natively, so far as I could tell. And there isn’t really a drop-in replacement for dmenu yet, so you have to run that under Xwayland. A lot of this is probably going to be fixed during 2021, but the thing is, I’ll be on Debian bullseye, so how it works now is probably as good as it is going to get for the next two years or so.

So, wanting to get back to doing something more useful today, I reluctantly booted back into X11. I’m really looking forward to switching to Sway, and getting rid of some of my hacks, but I think I am probably going to have to wait for Debian bookworm – unless I completely run out of patience with the various X11 annoyances described above, and start furiously backporting things.

Update, later that afternoon… Newer versions of fcitx5 packages hit Debian testing within the past few days, it turns out, and the IME problem is solved! So looks like I am slowly going to be able to migrate to Sway during the Debian bullseye lifecycle after all. How nice. Many thanks to various upstreams and those who have been working on these packages in Debian.

[1] Okay, I suppose I could have caught the disease a few days ago and it became symptomatic at the same time I was experiencing the side effects.

I’d like to briefly introduce my new project, Consfigurator:

Consfigurator is a system for declarative configuration management using Common Lisp. You can use it to configure hosts as root, deploy services as unprivileged users, build and deploy containers, and produce disc images. [not all of these are implemented yet, but the design permits them to be]

Consfigurator’s design gives you a great deal of flexibility about how to control the hosts you want to configure. If there is a command you can run which will obtain input and output streams attached to an interactive POSIX sh running on the target host/container, then with a little glue code, you can use much of Consfigurator’s functionality to configure that host/container. But if it is possible to get an implementation of Common Lisp started up on the host, then Configurator can transparently execute your deployment code over on the remote side, rather than exchanging information via POSIX sh. This lets you use the full power of Common Lisp to deploy your configuration.

Configurator has convenient abstractions for combining these different ways to execute your configuration on hosts with different ways of connecting to them. Connections can be arbitrarily nested. For example, to combine SSHing to a Debian machine as an unprivileged user, using sudo to become root, and then starting up a Lisp image to execute your deployment code, you would evaluate

    (deploy ((:ssh (:sudo :as "spwhitton@athena.example.com") :debian-sbcl)) athena.example.com)

Declarative configuration management systems like Consfigurator and Propellor share a number of goals with projects like the GNU Guix System and NixOS. However, tools like Consfigurator and Propellor try to layer the power of declarative and reproducible configuration on top of traditional, battle-tested unix system administration infrastructure like apt, dpkg, yum, and distro package archives, rather than seeking to replace any of those. Let’s get as much as we can out of all that existing distro policy-compliant work!

Please check out the user’s manual, which includes a tutorial/quick start guide, and come join us in #consfigurator on irc.oftc.net. It’s early days but you can already do a fair few things with Consfigurator. It’s a good time to come help get all the basic properties defined!

I had thought that Emacs’ C-t was mainly about correcting typos. It turns out to be extremely useful when working on Lisp macros which themselves write macros. This typically involves nested quasiquotation, where you can have multiple alternating sequences of open parentheses and backticks, or of commas, quotation marks and ampersats. While you’re working on it you often need to reorder these character sequences and C-t does a great job.

I was shocked to learn today that Richard Stallman has been reinstated as a member of the board of the Free Software Foundation. I think this is plain inappropriate, but I cannot see how anyone who doesn’t think that could fail to see the reinstatement as counterproductive. As Bradley M. Kuhn put it,

The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. It really doesn’t matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction from the radical activism you’re actively trying to advance. The message of universal software freedom is a radical cause; it’s basically impossible for one individual to effectively push forward two unrelated controversial agendas at once. In short, the radical message of software freedom became overshadowed by RMS’ radical views about sexual morality.

There is an open letter calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation in response. I haven’t signed the letter because the Free Software Foundation Board’s vote to reinstate Stallman was not unanimous, so the call to remove all of them does not make sense to me. I agree with the open letter’s call to remove Stallman from other positions of leadership. I hope that this whole situation can be resolved quickly.