I don't know about you, but I frequently get mails announcing that I was picked as the lucky winner of a lottery, compensation program or simply as "business associate". Obvious Spam of course, that never happens in reality. Just like my personal "favorite" at the moment: Mails notifying me of inheritance from a previously (more or less) unknown relative. Its just that this is what has happend basically a few weeks ago in reality to me (over the phone through) – and I am still dealing with the bureaucracy required of teaching everyone that I had absolutely no contact in the last two decades with the person for which I am supposed to be one of the legal successors now, regardless of how close the family relation is on paper… but that might be the topic of another day.

On the 1st March a mail titled "Google Open Source Peer Bonus Program" looked at first as if it would fall into this lottery spam class. It didn't exactly help that the mail was multipart HTML and text, but the text really only the text, not mentioning the embedded links used in the HTML part. It even included a prominent and obvious red flag: "Please fill out the form". 20% Bayes score didn't come from nothing. Still, for better or worse the words "Open Source" made it unlikely to be spam similar to how the word PGP indicates authenticity. So it happened, another spam message became true for me. I wonder which one will be next…

You have probably figured out by now that I didn't know that program before. Kinda embarrassing for a previous Google Summer of Code student (GSoC is run by the same office), but the idea behind it is simple: Google employees can nominate contributors to open source stuff for a small monetary "thank you!" gift card. Earlier this week winners for this round were announced – 52 contributors including yours truly. You might be surprised, but the rational given behind my name is APT (I got a private mail with the full rational from my "patron", just in case you wonder if at least I would know more).

It is funny how a guy who was taken aback by the prospect of needing a package manager like YaST to use Linux contributed just months later the first patch to apt and has roughly 8 years later amassed more than 2400 commits. It's birthday season in my family with e.g. mine just a few days ago, so its seems natural that apt has its own birthday today just as if it would be part of my family: 19th years this little bundle of bugs joy is now! In more sober moments I wonder sometimes how apt and I would have turned out if we hadn't meet. Would apt have met someone else? Would I? Given that I am still the newest team member and only recently joined Debian as DD at all…

APT has some strange ways of showing that it loves you: It e.g. helps users compose mails which end in a dilemma to give a recent example. Perhaps you need to be a special kind of crazy¹ to consider this good, but as I see it apt has a big enough userbase that regardless of what your patch is doing, someone will like it. That drastically increases the chances that someone will also like it enough to say so in public – offsetting complains from all those who don't like the (effects of the) patch which are omnipresent. And twice in a blue moon some of those will even step forward and thank you explicitly. Not that it would be necessary, but it is nice anyhow. So, thanks for the love supercow, Google & apt users! 🙂

Or in other words: APT might very well be one of the most friendly (package manager related) project to contribute to as the language-specific managers have smaller userbases and hence a smaller chance of having someone liking your work (in public)… so contribute a patch or two and be loved, too! 💖

Disclaimer: I get no bonus for posting this nor are any other strings attached. Birthdays are just a good time to reflect. In terms of what I do with my new found riches (in case I really receive them – I haven't yet so that could still be an elaborate scam…): APT is a very humble program, but even it is thinking about moving away from a dev-box with less than 4 GB of RAM and no SSD, so it is happily accepting the gift and expects me to upgrade sooner now. What kind of precedence this sets for the two decades milestone next year? If APT isn't obsolete by then… We will see.

It happened: Now that I am an uploading DD for a few months I finally made my first upload of a package – mind you, not of apt, but of a package I declared my intend to "steal" from another person a few weeks ago on deity@ and later also in a bugreport (#835128).

The result is that apt-transport-tor which used to be maintained by Tim Retout as a modified copy of apt code is now maintained by the APT team (with him and me as uploaders) using the apt code directly via a few symlinks.

That brings along a bunch of changes which I mentioned in the list/bug as well, but for completeness:

• tor+https options consistently fall back to tor -> https -> http
• tor+http options consistently fall back to tor -> http
• socks5h isn't forced. It is just the default (and the only one which will work with (tor+)http at the moment; any with tor+https)
• a tor-proxy having apt-transport-tor as username & no password (default) will automatically pick a password based on the target host to get you in a new circuit for each host.
• the User-Agent isn't forced to an all-tor-users-have-the-same value. Especially with tor+http being our normal http I think its better to "hide" between other http users than saying straight that you are a tor user (even if the IP gives it away that you are).
• tor+https doesn't allow redirection to tor+http. We have this for a while for https -> http already (-tor "broke" it). I think if a user went as far as configuring a https source it should stay an https source or fail.
• http/https can be disabled to avoid accidentally adding such sources
• http will not try to connect to .onion domains (RFC7687) and the error hints at using tor+http
• the methods run as _apt instead of root (like the rest of the apt methods)

I had tried a few times to get people to provide feedback, but there wasn't much. I guess this is good as it means nobody has any complains about it. We will see if that will change now that it is on its way to archive, buildds, mirrors and users: Brace for impact in any case!