Search Results: "ema"

17 December 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.2.3-1 on CRAN: Upstream Update

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1272 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 43.2 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 661 times according to Google Scholar. This versions updates to the 15.2.3 upstream Armadillo release from yesterday. It brings minor changes over the RcppArmadillo 15.2.2 release made last month (and described in this post). As noted previously, and due to both the upstream transition to C++14 coupled with the CRAN move away from C++11, the package offers a transition by allowing packages to remain with the older, pre-15.0.0 legacy Armadillo yet offering the current version as the default. If and when CRAN will have nudged (nearly) all maintainers away from C++11 (and now also C++14 !!) we can remove the fallback. Our offer to help with the C++ modernization still stands, so please get in touch if we can be of assistance. As a reminder, the meta-issue #475 regroups all the resources for the C++11 transition. There were no R-side changes in this release. The detailed changes since the last release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.3-1 (2025-12-16)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.3 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
    • Faster .resize() for vectors
    • Faster repcube()

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

16 December 2025

Christian Kastner: Simple-PPA, a minimalistic PPA implementation

Today, the Debusine developers launched Debusine repositories, a beta implementation of PPAs. In the announcement, Colin remarks that "[d]iscussions about this have been happening for long enough that people started referring to PPAs for Debian as 'bikesheds'"; a characterization that I'm sure most will agree with. So it is with great amusement that on this same day, I launch a second PPA implementation for Debian: Simple-PPA. Simple-PPA was never meant to compete with Debusine, though. In fact, it's entirely the opposite: from discussions at DebConf, I knew that it was only a matter of time until Debusine gained a PPA-like feature, but I needed a stop-gap solution earlier, and with some polish, what was once by Python script already doing APT processing for apt.ai.debian.net, recently became Simple-PPA. Consequently, Simple-PPA lacks (and will always lack) all of the features that Debusine offers: there is no auto-building, no CI, nor any other type of QA. It's the simplest possible type of APT repository: you just upload packages, they get imported into an archive, and the archive is exposed via a web server. Under the hood, reprepro does all the heavy lifting. However, this also means it's trivial to set up. The following is the entire configuration that simple-ppa.debian.net started with: 
# simple-ppa.conf
[CORE]
SignWith = 2906D748B7551BC8
ExportDir = /srv/www/simple-ppa
MailFrom: Simple-PPA <admin@simple-ppa.debian.net>
Codenames = sid forky trixie trixie-backports bookworm bookworm-backports
AlsoAllow = forky: unstable
            trixie: unstable
            bookworm: unstable
[simple-ppa-dev]
Label = Simple-PPA's self-hosted development repository
# ckk's key
Uploaders = allow * by key E76004C5CEF0C94C+
[ckk]
Label = Christian Kastner at Simple-PPA
Uploaders = allow * by key E76004C5CEF0C94C+
The CORE section just sets some defaults and sensible rules. Two PPAs are defined, simple-ppa-dev and ckk, which accept packages signed by the key with the ID E76004C5CEF0C94C. These PPAs use the global defaults, but individual PPAs can override Architectures, Suites, and Components, and of course allow an arbitrary number of users. Users upload to this archive using SFTP (e.g.: with dput-ng). Every 15 minutes, uploads get processed, with ACCEPTED or REJECTED mails sent to the Maintainer address. The APT archive of all PPAs is signed with a single global key. I myself intend to use Debusine repositories soon, as the autobuilding and the QA tasks Debusine offers are something I need. However, I do still see a niche use case for Simple-PPA: when you need an APT archive, but don't want to do a deep dive into reprepro (which is extremely powerful). If you'd like to give Simple-PPA a try, head over to simple-ppa.debian.net and follow the instructions for users.

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2025 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for November.

Activity summary During the month of November, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 33 DLAs fixing 219 CVEs. The LTS Team kept going with the usual cadence of preparing security updates for Debian 11 bullseye , but also for Debian 12 bookworm , Debian 13 trixie and even Debian unstable. As in previous months, we are pleased to say that there have been multiple contributions of LTS uploads by Debian Fellows outside the regular LTS Team. Notable security updates:
  • Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA 4365-1 for unbound, a caching DNS resolver, fixing a cache poisoning vulnerability that could lead to domain hijacking.
  • Another update related to DNS software was made by Andreas Henriksson. Andreas completed the work on bind9, released as DLA 4364-1 to fix cache poisoning and Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities.
  • Chris Lamb released DLA 4374-1 to fix a potential arbitrary code execution vulnerability in pdfminer, a tool for extracting information from PDF documents.
  • Ben Hutchings published a regular security update for the linux 6.1 bullseye backport, as DLA 4379-1.
  • A couple of other important recurrent updates were prepared by Emilio Pozuelo, who handled firefox-esr and thunderbird (in collaboration with Christoph Goehre), published as DLAs DLA 4370-1 and DLA 4372-1, respectively.
Contributions from fellows outside the LTS Team:
  • Thomas Goirand uploaded a bullseye update for keystone and swift
  • Jeremy B cha prepared the bullseye update for gst-plugins-base1.0
  • As mentioned above, Christoph Goehre prepared the bullseye update for thunderbird.
  • Mathias Behrle provided feedback about the tryton-server and tryton-sao vulnerabilities that were disclosed last month, and helped to review the bullseye patches for tryton-server.
Other than the regular LTS updates for bullseye, the LTS Team has also contributed updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared a bookworm update for squid, the web proxy cache server.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara filed a bookworm point update request for gdk-pixbuf to fix CVE-2025-7345, a heap buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution.
  • Daniel Leidert prepared bookworm and trixie updates for r-cran-gh to fix CVE-2025-54956, an issue that may expose user credentials in HTTP responses.
  • Along with the bullseye updates for unbound mentioned above, Guilhem helped to prepare the trixie update for unbound.
  • In collaboration with Lukas M rdian, Tobias Frost prepared trixie and bookworm updates for log4cxx, the C++ port of the logging framework for JAVA.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof prepared a bookworm update for syslog-ng.
  • Utkarsh completed the bookworm update for wordpress, addressing multiple security issues in the popular blogging tool.
Beyond security updates, there has been a significant effort in revamping our documentation, aiming to make the processes more clear and consistent for all the members of the team. This work was mainly carried out by Sylvain, Jochen and Roberto. We would like to express our gratitude to the sponsors for making the Debian LTS project possible. Also, special thanks to the fellows outside the LTS team for their valuable help.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

13 December 2025

Junichi Uekawa: I was wondering if there was some debian thread and noticed maybe something is broken in my mail setup.

I was wondering if there was some debian thread and noticed maybe something is broken in my mail setup. The amount of emails I am receiving seems to be very small.

12 December 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Updates about DebConf Video Team Sprint, rebootstrap, SBOM tooling in Debian and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-11 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf Video Team Sprint The DebConf Video Team records, streams, and publishes talks from DebConf and many miniDebConfs. A lot of the infrastructure development happens during setup for these events, but we also try to organize a sprint once a year to work on infrastructure, when there isn t a DebConf about to happen. Stefano attended the sprint in Herefordshire this year and wrote up a report.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne A number of jobs were stuck in architecture-specific failures. gcc-15 and dpkg still disagree about whether PIE is enabled occasionally and big endian mipsen needed fixes in systemd. Beyond this regular uploads of libxml2 and gcc-15 required fixes and rebasing of pending patches. Earlier, Loongson used rebootstrap to create the initial package set for loong64 and Miao Wang now submitted their changes. Therefore, there is now initial support for suites other than unstable and use with derivatives.

Building the support for Software Bill Of Materials tooling in Debian, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Vendors of Debian-based products may/should be paying attention to the evolution of different jurisdictions (such as the CRA or updates on CISA s Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials) that require to make available Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of their products. It is important then to have tools in Debian to make it easier to produce such SBOMs. In this context, Santiago continued the work on packaging libraries related to SBOMs. This includes the packaging of the SPDX python library (python-spdx-tools), and its dependencies rdflib and mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin. System Package Data Exchange (SPDX), defined by ISO/IEC 5962:2021, is an open standard capable of representing systems with software components as SBOMs and other data and security references. SPDX and CycloneDX (whose python library python3-cyclonedx-lib was packaged by prior efforts this year), encompass the two main SBOM standards available today.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: added checking status of bug reports automatically via python-debianbts; changed some command line options naming or output based on user feedback; finished refactoring user interaction to rich; codebase is now flake8-compliant; added type safety with mypy.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager, created 19 bug reports for translations where the merge requests were pending; reviewed and created merge requests for 4 packages.
  • Carles planned a second version of the tool that detects packages that Recommends or Suggests packages which are not in Debian. He is taking ideas from dumat.
  • Carles submitted a pull request to python-unidiff2 (adapted from the original pull request to python-unidiff). He also started preparing a qnetload update.
  • Stefano did miscellaneous python package updates: mkdocs-macros-plugin, python-confuse, python-pip, python-mitogen.
  • Stefano reviewed a beets upload for a new maintainer who is taking it over.
  • Stefano handled some debian.net infrastructure requests.
  • Stefano updated debian.social infrastructure for the trixie point release.
  • The update broke jitsi.debian.social, Stefano put some time into debugging it and eventually enlisted upstream assistance, who solved the problem!
  • Stefano worked on some patches for Python that help Debian:
    • GH-139914: The main HP PA-RISC support patch for 3.14.
    • GH-141930: We observed an unhelpful error when failing to write a .pyc file during package installation. We may have fixed the problem, and at least made the error better.
    • GH-141011: Ignore missing ifunc support on HP PA-RISC.
  • Stefano spun up a website for hamburg2026.mini.debconf.org.
  • Rapha l reviewed a merge request updating tracker.debian.org to rely on bootstrap
    version 5.
  • Emilio coordinated various transitions.
  • Helmut sent patches for 26 cross build failures.
  • Helmut officially handed over the cleanup of the /usr-move transition.
  • Helmut monitored the transition moving libcrypt-dev out of build-essential and bumped the remaining bugs to rc-severity in coordination with the release team.
  • Helmut updated the Build-Profiles patch for debian-policy incorporating feedback from Sean Whitton with a lot of help from Nattie Mayer-Hutchings and Freexian colleagues.
  • Helmut discovered that the way mmdebstrap deals with start-stop-daemon may result in broken output and sent a patch.
  • As a result of armel being removed from sid , but not from forky , the multiarch hinter broke. Helmut fixed it.
  • Helmut uploaded debvm accepting a patch from Luca Boccassi to fix it for newer
    systemd.
  • Colin began preparing for the second stage of the OpenSSH GSS-API key exchange package split.
  • Colin caught and fixed a devscripts regression due to it breaking part of Debusine.
  • Colin packaged django-pgtransaction and backported it to trixie , since it looks useful for Debusine.
  • Thorsten uploaded the packages lprng, cpdb-backend-cups, cpdb-libs and ippsample to fix some RC bugs as well as other bugs that accumulated over time. He also uploaded cups-filters to all Debian releases to fix three CVEs.

8 December 2025

Fran ois Marier: Learning a new programming language with an LLM

I started learning Go this year. First, I picked a Perl project I wanted to rewrite, got a good book and ignored AI tools since I thought they would do nothing but interfere with learning. Eventually though, I decided to experiment a bit and ended up finding a few ways to use AI assistants effectively even when learning something new.

Searching more efficiently The first use case that worked for me was search. Instead of searching on a traditional search engine and then ending up on Stack Overflow, I could get the answer I was looking for directly in an AI side-window in my editor. Of course, that's bad news for Stack Overflow. I was however skeptical from the beginning since LLMs make mistakes, sometimes they making up function signatures or APIs that don't exist. Therefore I got into the habit of going to the official standard library documentation to double-check suggestions. For example, if the LLM suggests using strings.SplitN, I verify the function signature and behaviour carefully before using it. Basically, "don't trust and do verify." I stuck to the standard library in my project, but if an LLM recommends third-party dependencies for you, make sure they exist and that Socket doesn't flag them as malicious. Research has found that 5-20% of packages suggested by LLMs don't actually exist, making this a real attack vector (dubbed "slopsquatting").

Autocomplete is too distracting A step I took early on was to disable AI autocomplete in my editor. When learning a new language, you need to develop muscle memory for the syntax. Also, Go is no Java. There's not that much boilerplate to write in general. I found it quite distracting to see some almost correct code replace my thinking about the next step. I can see how one could go faster with these suggestions, but being a developer is not just about cranking out lines of code as fast as possible, it's also about constantly learning new things (and retaining them).

Asking about idiomatic code One of the most useful prompts when learning a new language is "Is this the most idiomatic way to do this in Go?". Large language models are good at recognizing patterns and can point out when you're writing code that works but doesn't follow the conventions of the language. This is especially valuable early on when you don't yet have a feel for what "good" code looks like in that language. It's usually pretty easy (at least for an experience developer) to tell when the LLM suggestion is actually counter productive or wrong. If it increases complexity or is harder to read/decode, it's probably not a good idea to do it.

Reviews One way a new dev gets better is through code review. If you have access to a friend who's an expert in the language you're learning, then you can definitely gain a lot by asking for feedback on your code. If you don't have access to such a valuable resource, or as a first step before you consult your friend, I found that AI-assisted code reviews can be useful:
  1. Get the model to write the review prompt for you. Describe what you want reviewed and let it generate a detailed prompt.
  2. Feed that prompt to multiple models. They each have different answers and will detect different problems.
  3. Be prepared to ignore 50% of what they recommend. Some suggestions will be stylistic preferences, others will be wrong, or irrelevant.
The value is in the other 50%: the suggestions that make you think about your code differently or catch genuine problems. Similarly for security reviews:
  • A lot of what they flag will need to be ignored (false positives, or things that don't apply to your threat model).
  • Some of it may highlight areas for improvement that you hadn't considered.
  • Occasionally, they will point out real vulnerabilities.
But always keep in mind that AI chatbots are trained to be people-pleasers and often feel the need to suggest something when nothing was needed

An unexpected benefit One side effect of using AI assistants was that having them write the scaffolding for unit tests motivated me to increase my code coverage. Trimming unnecessary test cases and adding missing ones is pretty quick when the grunt work is already done, and I ended up testing more of my code (being a personal project written in my own time) than I might have otherwise.

Learning In the end, I continue to believe in the value of learning from quality books (I find reading paper-based most effective). In addition, I like to create Anki questions for common mistakes or things I find I have to look up often. Remembering something will always be faster than asking an AI tool. So my experience this year tells me that LLMs can supplement traditional time-tested learning techniques, but I don't believe it obsoletes them. P.S. I experimented with getting an LLM to ghost-write this post for me from an outline (+ a detailed style guide) and I ended up having to rewrite at least 75% of it. It was largely a waste of time.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian's /usr-move transition has been completed (by Helmut Grohne)

By now, the /usr-merge is an old transition. Effectively, it turns top-level directories such as /bin into symbolic links pointing below /usr. That way the entire operating system can be contained below the /usr hierarchy enabling e.g. image based update mechanisms. It was first supported in Debian 9, which is no longer in active use at this point (except for users of Freexian s ELTS offer). When it became mandatory in Debian 12, it wasn t really done though, because Debian s package manager was not prepared to handle file system objects being referred to via two different paths. With nobody interested in handling the resulting issues, Freexian stepped in and funded a project lead by Helmut Grohne to resolve the remaining issues. While the initial idea was to enhance the package manager, Debian s members disagreed. They preferred an approach where files were simply tracked with their physical location while handling the resulting misbehavior of the package manager using package-specific workarounds. This has been recorded in the DEP17 document. During the Debian 13 release cycle, the plan has been implemented. A tool for detecting possible problems was developed specifically for this transition. Since all files are now tracked with their physical location and necessary workarounds have been added, problematic behavior is no longer triggered. An upgrade from Debian 12 to Debian 13 is unlikely to run into aliasing problems as a result. This whole project probably consumed more than 1500 hours of work from Debian contributors, of which 700 were sponsored by Freexian through the work of Helmut Grohne. What remains is eventually removing the workarounds.

7 December 2025

Vincent Bernat: Compressing embedded files in Go

Go s embed feature lets you bundle static assets into an executable, but it stores them uncompressed. This wastes space: a web interface with documentation can bloat your binary by dozens of megabytes. A proposition to optionally enable compression was declined because it is difficult to handle all use cases. One solution? Put all the assets into a ZIP archive!

Code The Go standard library includes a module to read and write ZIP archives. It contains a function that turns a ZIP archive into an io/fs.FS structure that can replace embed.FS in most contexts.1 
package embed
import (
  "archive/zip"
  "bytes"
  _ "embed"
  "fmt"
  "io/fs"
  "sync"
)
//go:embed data/embed.zip
var embeddedZip []byte
var dataOnce = sync.OnceValue(func() *zip.Reader  
  r, err := zip.NewReader(bytes.NewReader(embeddedZip), int64(len(embeddedZip)))
  if err != nil  
    panic(fmt.Sprintf("cannot read embedded archive: %s", err))
   
  return r
 )
func Data() fs.FS  
  return dataOnce()
We can build the embed.zip archive with a rule in a Makefile. We specify the files to embed as dependencies to ensure changes are detected. 
common/embed/data/embed.zip: console/data/frontend console/data/docs
common/embed/data/embed.zip: orchestrator/clickhouse/data/protocols.csv 
common/embed/data/embed.zip: orchestrator/clickhouse/data/icmp.csv
common/embed/data/embed.zip: orchestrator/clickhouse/data/asns.csv
common/embed/data/embed.zip:
    mkdir -p common/embed/data && zip --quiet --recurse-paths --filesync $@ $^
The automatic variable $@ is the rule target, while $^ expands to all the dependencies, modified or not.

Space gain Akvorado, a flow collector written in Go, embeds several static assets:
  • CSV files to translate port numbers, protocols or AS numbers, and
  • HTML, CSS, JS, and image files for the web interface, and
  • the documentation.
Breakdown of space used by each package before and after introducing embed.zip. It is displayed as a treemap and we can see many embedded files replaced by a bigger one.
Breakdown of the space used by each component before (left) and after (right) the introduction of embed.zip.
Embedding these assets into a ZIP archive reduced the size of the Akvorado executable by more than 4 MiB: 
$ unzip -p common/embed/data/embed.zip   wc -c   numfmt --to=iec
7.3M
$ ll common/embed/data/embed.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 bernat users 2.9M Dec  7 17:17 common/embed/data/embed.zip

Performance loss Reading from a compressed archive is not as fast as reading a flat file. A simple benchmark shows it is more than 4 slower. It also allocates some memory.2 
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: akvorado/common/embed
cpu: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
BenchmarkData/compressed-12     2262   526553 ns/op   610 B/op   10 allocs/op
BenchmarkData/uncompressed-12   9482   123175 ns/op     0 B/op    0 allocs/op
Each access to an asset requires a decompression step, as seen in this flame graph:
&#128444; Flame graph when reading data from embed.zip compared to reading data directly
CPU flame graph comparing the time spent on CPU when reading data from embed.zip (left) versus reading data directly (right). Because the Go testing framework executes the benchmark for uncompressed data 4 times more often, it uses the same horizontal space as the benchmark for compressed data. The graph is interactive.
While a ZIP archive has an index to quickly find the requested file, seeking inside a compressed file is currently not possible.3 Therefore, the files from a compressed archive do not implement the io.ReaderAt or io.Seeker interfaces, unlike directly embedded files. This prevents some features, like serving partial files or detecting MIME types when serving files over HTTP.
For Akvorado, this is an acceptable compromise to save a few mebibytes from an executable of almost 100 MiB. Next week, I will continue this futile adventure by explaining how I prevented Go from disabling dead code elimination!
  1. You can safely read multiple files concurrently. However, it does not implement ReadDir() and ReadFile() methods.
  2. You could keep frequently accessed assets in memory. This reduces CPU usage and trades cached memory for resident memory.
  3. SOZip is a profile that enables fast random access in a compressed file. However, Go s archive/zip module does not support it.

Iustin Pop: Yes, still alive!

Yeah, again three months have passed since my last (trivial) post, and I really don t know where the time has flown. I suppose the biggest problem was the long summer vacation, which threw me off-track, and then craziness started. Work work work, no time for anything, which kept me fully busy in August, and then you should travel . So mid-September I went on my first business trip since Covid, again to Kirkland, which in itself was awesome. Flew out Sunday, and as I was concerned I was going to lose too much fitness had a half-marathon planned on the weekend after the return I ran every morning of the four days I was there. And of course, on the last day, I woke up even earlier (05:30 AM), went out to run before sunrise, intending to do a very simple run along the road that borders the lake for 2.5K, then back . And right at the farthest point, a hundred metres before my goal of turning around, I tripped, started falling, and as I was falling, I hit sideways a metal pole. I was in a bus station, it was the pole that has the schedule at the top, and I hit it at relatively full speed, right across my left-side ribs. The crash took the entire air out of my lungs, and I don t remember if I ever felt pain/sensation like that I was seriously not able to breathe for 20 seconds or so, and I was wondering if I m going to pass out at this rate. Only 20 seconds, because my Garmin started howling like a police siren, and the screen was saying something along the lines of: Incident detected; contacting emergency services in 40 35 and I was fumbling to cancel that, since a) I wasn t that bad, b) notifying my wife that I had a crash would have not been a smart idea. My left leg was scraped in a few places, my left hand pretty badly, or more than just scraped, so my focus was on limping back, and finding a fountain to wash my injuries, which I did, so I kept running with blood dripping down my hand. Fun fun, everything was hurting, I took an Uber for the ~1Km to the office, had many meetings, took another Uber and flew back to Zurich. Seattle San Francisco Z rich, I think 14 hours, with my ribs hurting pretty badly. But I got home (Friday afternoon), and was wondering if I can run or not on Saturday. Saturday comes, I feel pretty OK, so I said let s try, will stop if the pain is too great. I pick up my number, I go to the start, of course in the last block and not my normal block, and I start running. After 50 metres, I knew this won t be good enough, but I said, let s make it to the first kilometre. Then to the first fuelling point, then to the first aid point, at which moment I felt good enough to go to the second one. Long story short, I ran the whole half marathon, with pain. Every stop for fuelling was mentally hard, as the pain stopped, and I knew I had to start running again, and the pain would resume. In the end, managed to finish: two and a half hours, instead of just two hours, but alive and very happy. Of course, I didn t know what was waiting for me Sunday I wake up in heavy pain, and despite painkillers, I was not feeling much better. The following night was terrible, Monday morning I went to the doctor, had X-rays, discussion with a radiologist. Not really broken, but more than just bruised. See this angle here? Bones don t have angles normally . Painkillers, chest/abdomen wrapping, no running! So my attempts to not lose fitness put me off running for a couple of weeks. Then October came, and I was getting better, but work was getting even more crazy. I don t know where November passed, honestly, and now we re already in December. I did manage to run, quite well, managed to bike a tiny bit and swim a little, but I m not in a place where I can keep a regular and consistent schedule. On the good side, I managed this year, for the first time since Covid, to not get sick. Hey, a sport injury is 100 better than a sickness, like I had in previous years, taking me out for two weeks. But life was crazy enough that I didn t read some of my email accounts for months, and I m just now starting to catch up to, well, baseline. Of course, the rib the lowest one on the left side is long-healed, or so I thought. After some strength training early this week, I was very sore the next day, and I wanted to test whether my rib is still sore. I touched it at the point , and it hurt so badly I couldn t believe. Two and a half months, and it s not done-done. And now it s just two weeks before Christmas and New Year s, and that time off will ruin my rhythm again. At least ski vacation is booked, ski service is done, and slowly, work is getting in good enough shape to actually enjoy thinking about vacation. So, in the end, a very adventurous last third of the year, and that wasn t even all. As I m writing this, my right wrist is bandaged and for the past 24 hours it hasn t hurt too much, but that s another, and not so interesting, story. I ll close with a yay for always being behind/backlogged, but alive and relatively well. My sport injuries are elective injuries so to speak, and I m very thankful for that. See you in the next post!

6 December 2025

Simon Josefsson: Reproducible Guix Container Images

Around a year ago I wrote about Guix Container Images for GitLab CI/CD and these images have served the community well. Besides continous use in CI/CD, these Guix container images are used to confirm reproducibility of the source tarball artifacts in the releases of Libtasn1 v4.20, InetUtils v2.6, Libidn2 v2.3.8, Libidn v1.43, SASL v2.2.2, Guile-GnuTLS v5.0.1, and OATH Toolkit v2.6.13. See how all those release announcements mention a Guix commit? That s the essential supply-chain information about the Guix build environment that allows the artifacts to be re-created. To make sure this is repeatable, the release tarball artifacts are re-created from source code every week in the verify-reproducible-artifacts project, that I wrote about earlier. Guix s time travelling feature make this sustainable to maintain, and hopefully will continue to be able to reproduce the exact same tarball artifacts for years to come. During the last year, unfortunately Guix was removed from Debian stable. My Guix container images were created from Debian with that Guix package. My setup continued to work since the old stage0 Debian+Guix containers were still available. Such a setup is not sustainable, as there will be bit-rot and we don t want to rely on old containers forever, which (after the removal of Guix in Debian) could not be re-produced any more. Let this be a reminder how user-empowering features such as Guix time-travelling is! I have reworked my Guix container image setup, and this post is an update on the current status of this effort. The first step was to re-engineer Debian container images with Guix, and I realized these were useful on their own, and warrant a separate project. A more narrowly scoped project makes will hopefully make it easier to keep them working. Now instead of apt-get install guix they use the official Guix guix-install.sh approach. Read more about that effort in the announcement of Debian with Guix. The second step was to reconsider my approach to generate the Guix images. The earlier design had several stages. First, Debian+Guix containers were created. Then from those containers, a pure Guix container was created. Finally, using the pure Guix container another pure Guix container was created. The idea behind that GCC-like approach was to get to reproducible images that were created from an image that had no Debian left on it. However, I never managed to finish this. Partially because I hadn t realized that every time you build a Guix container image from Guix, you effectively go back in time. When using Guix version X to build a container with Guix on it, it will not put Guix version X into the container but will put whatever version of Guix is available in its package archive, which will be an earlier version, such as version X-N. I had hope to overcome this somehow (running a guix pull in newly generated images may work), but never finished this before Guix was removed from Debian. So what could a better design look like? For efficiency, I had already started experimenting with generating the final images directly from the Debian+Guix images, and after reproducibility bugs were fixed I was able to get to reproducible images. However, I was still concerned that the Debian container could taint the process somehow, and was also concerned about the implied dependency on non-free software in Debian. I ve been using comparative rebuilds using similar distributions to confirm artifact reproducibility for my software projects, comparing builds on Trisquel 11 with Ubuntu 22.04, and AlmaLinux 9 with RockyLinux 9 for example. This works surprisingly well. Including one freedom-respecting distribution like Trisquel will detect if any non-free software has bearing on artifacts. Using different architectures, such as amd64 vs arm64 also help with deeper supply-chain concerns. My conclusion was that I wanted containers with the same Guix commit for both Trisquel and Ubuntu. Given the similarity with Debian, adapting and launching the Guix on Trisquel/Debian project was straight forward. So we now have Trisquel 11/12 and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 images with the same Guix on them. Do you see where the debian-with-guix and guix-on-dpkg projects are leading to? We are now ready to look at the modernized Guix Container Images project. The tags are the same as before: 
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:latest
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:slim
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:extra
registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:gash
The method to create them is different. Now there is a build job that uses the earlier Guix+Trisquel container (for amd64) or Guix+Debian (for arm64, pending Trisquel arm64 containers). The build job create the final containers directly. Next a Ubuntu reproduce job is launched that runs the same commands, failing if it cannot generate the bit-by-bit identical container. Then single-arch images are tested (installing/building GNU hello and building libksba), and then pushed to the GitLab registry, adding multi-arch images in the process. Then the final multi-arch containers are tested by building Guile-GnuTLS and, on success, uploaded to the Docker Hub. How would you use them? A small way to start the container is like this: 
jas@kaka:~$ podman run -it --privileged --entrypoint=/bin/sh registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:latest
sh-5.2# env HOME=/ guix describe # https://issues.guix.gnu.org/74949
  guix 21ce6b3
    repository URL: https://git.guix.gnu.org/guix.git
    branch: master
    commit: 21ce6b392ace4c4d22543abc41bd7c22596cd6d2
sh-5.2#
The need for --entrypoint=/bin/sh is because Guix s pack command sets up the entry point differently than most other containers. This could probably be fixed if people want that, and there may be open bug reports about this. The need for --privileged is more problematic, but is discussed upstream. The above example works fine without it, but running anything more elaborate with guix-daemon installing packages will trigger a fatal error. Speaking of that, here is a snippet of commands that allow you to install Guix packages in the container. 
cp -rL /gnu/store/*profile/etc/* /etc/
echo 'root:x:0:0:root:/:/bin/sh' > /etc/passwd
echo 'root:x:0:' > /etc/group
groupadd --system guixbuild
for i in $(seq -w 1 10); do useradd -g guixbuild -G guixbuild -d /var/empty -s $(command -v nologin) -c "Guix build user $i" --system guixbuilder$i; done
env LANG=C.UTF-8 guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild &
guix archive --authorize < /share/guix/ci.guix.gnu.org.pub
guix archive --authorize < /share/guix/bordeaux.guix.gnu.org.pub
guix install hello
GUIX_PROFILE="/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile"
. "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
hello
This could be simplified, but we chose to not hard-code in our containers because some of these are things that probably shouldn t be papered over but fixed properly somehow. In some execution environments, you may need to pass --disable-chroot to guix-daemon. To use the containers to build something in a GitLab pipeline, here is an example snippet: 
test-amd64-latest-wget-configure-make-libksba:
  image: registry.gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container:latest
  before_script:
  - cp -rL /gnu/store/*profile/etc/* /etc/
  - echo 'root:x:0:0:root:/:/bin/sh' > /etc/passwd
  - echo 'root:x:0:' > /etc/group
  - groupadd --system guixbuild
  - for i in $(seq -w 1 10); do useradd -g guixbuild -G guixbuild -d /var/empty -s $(command -v nologin) -c "Guix build user $i" --system guixbuilder$i; done
  - export HOME=/
  - env LANG=C.UTF-8 guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild &
  - guix archive --authorize < /share/guix/ci.guix.gnu.org.pub
  - guix archive --authorize < /share/guix/bordeaux.guix.gnu.org.pub
  - guix describe
  - guix install libgpg-error
  - GUIX_PROFILE="//.guix-profile"
  - . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
  script:
  - wget https://www.gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/libksba/libksba-1.6.7.tar.bz2
  - tar xfa libksba-1.6.7.tar.bz2
  - cd libksba-1.6.7
  - ./configure
  - make V=1
  - make check VERBOSE=t V=1
More help on the project page for the Guix Container Images. That s it for tonight folks, and remember, Happy Hacking!

Taavi V n nen: How to import a new Wikipedia language edition (in hard mode)

I created the latest Wikipedia language edition, the Toki Pona Wikipedia, last month. Unlike most other wikis which start their lives in the Wikimedia Incubator before the full wiki is created, in this case the community had been using a completely external MediaWiki site to build the wiki before it was approved as a "proper" Wikipedia wiki,1 and now that external wiki needed to be imported to the newly created Wikimedia-hosted wiki. (As far as I'm aware, the last and previously only time an external wiki has been imported to a Wikimedia project was in 2013 when Wikitravel was forked as Wikivoyage.) Creating a Wikimedia wiki these days is actually pretty straightforward, at least when compared to what it used to be like a couple of years ago. Today the process mostly involves using a script to generate two configuration changes, one to add the basic configuration for a wiki to operate and an another to add the wiki to the list of all wikis that exist, and then running a script to create the wiki database in between of deploying those two configuration changes. And then you wait half an hour while the script to tell all Wikidata client wikis about the new wiki runs on one wiki at a time. The primary technical challenge in importing a third-party wiki is that there's no SUL making sure that a single username maps to the same account on both wikis. This means that the usual strategy of using the functionality I wrote in CentralAuth to manually create local accounts can't be used as is, and so we needed to come up with a new way of matching everyone's contributions to their existing Wikimedia accounts. (Side note: While the user-facing interface tries to present a single "global" user account that can be used on all public Wikimedia wikis, in reality the account management layer in CentralAuth is mostly just a glue layer to link together individual "local" accounts on each wiki that the user has ever visited. These local accounts have independent user ID numbers for example I am user #35938993 on the English Wikipedia but #4 on the new Toki Pona Wikipedia and are what most of MediaWiki code interacts with except for a few features specifically designed with cross-wiki usage in mind. This distinction is also still very much present and visible in the various administrative and anti-abuse workflows.) The approach we ended up choosing was to re-write the dump file before importing, so that a hypothetical account called $Name would be turned $Name~wikipesija.org after the import.2 We also created empty user accounts that would take ownership of the edits to be imported so that we could use the standard account management tools on them later on. MediaWiki supports importing contributions without a local account to attribute them to, but it doesn't seem to be possible to convert an imported actor3 to a regular user later on which we wanted to keep as a possibility, even with the minor downside of creating a few hundred users that'll likely never get touched again later. We also made specific decisions to add the username suffix to everyone, not to just those names that'd conflicted with existing SUL accounts, and to deal with renaming users that wanted their contributions linked to an existing SUL account only after the import. This both reduced complexity and thus risk from the import phase, which already had much more unknowns compared to the rest of the process, but also were much better options ethically as well: suffixing all names meant we would not imply that those people chose to be Wikimedians with those specific usernames (when in reality it was us choosing to import those edits to the Wikimedia universe), and doing renames using the standard MediaWiki account management tooling meant that it produced the normal public log entries that all other MediaWiki administrative actions create. With all of the edits imported, the only major thing remaining was doing those merges I mentioned earlier to attribute imported edits to people's existing SUL accounts. Thankfully, the local account -based system makes it actually pretty simple. Usually CentralAuth prevents renaming individual local accounts that are attached to a global account, but that check can be bypassed with a maintenance script or a privileged enough account. Renaming the user automatically detached it from the previous global account, after which an another maintenance script could be used to attach the user to the correct global account.
  1. That external site was a fork of a fork of the original Toki Pona Wikipedia that was closed in 2005. And because cool URIs don't change, we made the the URLs that the old Wikipedia was using work again. Try it: https://art-tokipona.wikipedia.org.
  2. wikipesija.org was the domain where the old third-party wiki was hosted on, and ~ was used as a separator character in usernames during the SUL finalization in the early 2010s so using it here felt appropriate as well.
  3. An actor is a MediaWiki term and a database table referring to anything that can do edits or logged actions. Usually an actor is a user account or an IP address, but an imported user name in a specific format can also be represented as an actor.

4 December 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in November 2025

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. I had a bit less time than usual, because Freexian collaborators gathered in Marseille this month for our yearly sprint, doing some planning for next year. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. OpenSSH I began preparing for the second stage of the GSS-API key exchange package split (some details have changed since that message). It seems that we ll need to wait until Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, but that s close enough that it s worth making sure we re ready. This month I just did some packaging cleanups that would otherwise have been annoying to copy, such as removing support for direct upgrades from pre-bookworm. I m considering some other package rearrangements to make the split easier to manage, but haven t made any decisions here yet. This also led me to start on a long-overdue bug triage pass, mainly consisting of applying usertags to lots of our open bugs to sort them by which program they apply to, and also closing a few that have been fixed, since some bugs will eventually need to be reassigned to GSS-API packages and it would be helpful to make them easier to find. At the time of writing, about 30% of the bug list remains to be categorized this way. Python packaging I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I packaged django-pgtransaction and backported it to trixie, since we plan to use it in Debusine; and I adopted python-certifi for the Python team. I fixed or helped to fix several other build/test failures: I fixed a couple of other bugs: Other bits and pieces Code reviews

3 December 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2025

Welcome to the report for November 2025 from the Reproducible Builds project! These monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please see the Contribute page on our website. In this report:

  1. 10 years of Reproducible Build at SeaGL
  2. Distribution work
  3. Tool development
  4. Website updates
  5. Miscellaneous news
  6. Software Supply Chain Security of Web3
  7. Upstream patches

10 years of Reproducible Builds at SeaGL 2025 On Friday 8th November, Chris Lamb gave a talk called 10 years of Reproducible Builds at SeaGL in Seattle, WA. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. Chris talk:
[ ] introduces the concept of reproducible builds, its technical underpinnings and its potentially transformative impact on software security and transparency. It is aimed at developers, security professionals and policy-makers who are concerned with enhancing trust and accountability in our software. It also provides a history of the Reproducible Builds project, which is approximately ten years old. How are we getting on? What have we got left to do? Aren t all the builds reproducible now?

Distribution work In Debian this month, Jochen Sprickerhof created a merge request to replace the use of reprotest in Debian s Salsa Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline with debrebuild. Jochen cites the advantages as being threefold: firstly, that only one extra build needed ; it uses the same sbuild and ccache tooling as the normal build ; and works for any Debian release . The merge request was merged by Emmanuel Arias and is now active. kpcyrd posted to our mailing list announcing the initial release of repro-threshold, which implements an APT transport that defines a threshold of at least X of my N trusted rebuilders need to confirm they reproduced the binary before installing Debian packages. Configuration can be done through a config file, or through a curses-like user interface. Holger then merged two commits by Jochen Sprickerhof in order to address a fakeroot-related reproducibility issue in the debian-installer, and J rg Jaspert deployed a patch by Ivo De Decker for a bug originally filed by Holger in February 2025 related to some Debian packages not being archived on snapshot.debian.org. Elsewhere, Roland Clobus performed some analysis on the live Debian trixie images, which he determined were not reproducible. However, in a follow-up post, Roland happily reports that the issues have been handled. In addition, 145 reviews of Debian packages were added, 12 were updated and 15 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Lastly, Jochen Sprickerhof filed a bug announcing their intention to binary NMU a very large number of the R programming language after a reproducibility-related toolchain bug was fixed.
Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another openSUSE monthly update for their work there.
Julien Malka and Arnout Engelen launched the new hash collection server for NixOS. Aside from improved reporting to help focus reproducible builds efforts within NixOS, it collects build hashes as individually-signed attestations from independent builders, laying the groundwork for further tooling.

Tool development diffoscope version 307 was uploaded to Debian unstable (as well as version 309). These changes included further attempts to automatically attempt to deploy to PyPI by liaising with the PyPI developers/maintainers (with this experimental feature). [ ][ ][ ] In addition, reprotest versions 0.7.31 and 0.7.32 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen, who also made the following changes:
  • Do not vary the architecture personality if the kernel is not varied. (Thanks to Ra l Cumplido). [ ]
  • Drop the debian/watch file, as Lintian now flags this as error for native Debian packages. [ ][ ]
  • Bump Standards-Version to 4.7.2, with no changes needed. [ ]
  • Drop the Rules-Requires-Root header as it is no longer required.. [ ]
In addition, however, Vagrant Cascadian fixed a build failure by removing some extra whitespace from an older changelog entry. [ ]

Website updates Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month including:

Miscellaneous news

Software Supply Chain Security of Web3 Via our mailing list, Martin Monperrus let us know about their recently-published page on the Software Supply Chain Security of Web3. The abstract of their paper is as follows:
Web3 applications, built on blockchain technology, manage billions of dollars in digital assets through decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. These systems rely on complex, software supply chains that introduce significant security vulnerabilities. This paper examines the software supply chain security challenges unique to the Web3 ecosystem, where traditional Web2 software supply chain problems intersect with the immutable and high-stakes nature of blockchain technology. We analyze the threat landscape and propose mitigation strategies to strengthen the security posture of Web3 systems.
Their paper lists reproducible builds as one of the mitigating strategies. A PDF of the full text is available to download.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

1 December 2025

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities November 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Hand holding the release machinery for Phosh 0.51.0 but there's more: See below for details on the above and more: phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings stevia xdg-desktop-portal-phosh pfs Phrog gmobile feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes libcall-ui wirepumber Chatty mobile-broadband-povider-info Debian Mobian wlroots libqrtr-glib libadwaits-rs phosh-site bengalos-debs gtk Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

30 November 2025

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Soul Among Wolves

Review: The Last Soul Among Wolves, by Melissa Caruso
Series: The Echo Archives #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: August 2025
ISBN: 0-316-30404-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 355
The Last Soul Among Wolves is urban high fantasy with strong mystery vibes. It is a direct sequel to The Last Hour Between Worlds. You need the previous book for some character setup (and this book would spoil it badly), but you don't have to remember the first book in detail. Only the main plot outcomes are directly relevant and the characters will remind you of those. Kembrel Thorne is a Hound, the equivalent of a police detective in the medieval-inspired city setting of this series, but this book does not open with an official assignment. Instead, she has been dragged by her childhood friend Jaycel Morningrey as company for a reading of the will of old lady Lovegrace, reclusive owner of a gothic mansion on an island connected to the city by an intermittent sandbar. A surprise reunion with her gang of childhood friends ensues, followed by the revelation that they are all in serious trouble. Shortly after Kem left the group to become a Hound, the remaining four, plus several other apparently random people, got entangled with a powerful Echo artifact. Now that Lovegrace has died, one of them will inherit the artifact and the ability to make a wish, but only one. The rest will be killed at decreasing intervals until only the winner is left alive. The Last Hour Between Worlds was fae fantasy built around a problem that was more of a puzzle than a mystery. The Last Soul Among Wolves is closer to a classic mystery: A cast of characters are brought together and semi-isolated in a rural house, they start dying, and it's up to the detective to solve the mystery of their death before it's too late. In this case, the initial mechanism of death is supernatural and not in doubt the challenge instead is how to stop it from happening again but Kem's problems quickly become more complicated. As mystery plots go, this is more thriller than classical despite the setting. There are a few scenes of analyzing clues, but Kem is more likely to use the time-honored protagonist technique of throwing herself into danger and learning what's going on via the villain monologues. As readers of the previous book would expect, Rika Nonesuch is here too, hired by another of Kem's old friends, and the two navigate their personal feelings and the rivalry between their guilds in much the way that they did in the Last Hour Between Worlds. As in the first book, there is a sapphic romance subplot, but it's a very slow burn asexual romance. The best part of this series continues to be the world-building. The previous book introduced the idea of the Echoes and sent the characters exploring into stranger and stranger depths. This book fleshes out the rules in more detail, creating something that feels partly like a fae realm and partly like high fantasy involving gods, but diverges from both into a logic of its own. The ending satisfyingly passes my test of fantasy mysteries: Resolving the mystery requires understanding and applying the rules of the setting, which are sufficiently strange to create interesting outcomes but coherent enough that the reader doesn't feel like the author is cheating. There are some hissable villains here, but my favorite part of this book was the way Caruso added a lot of nuance and poignancy to the Echoes rather than showing them only as an uncanny threat. That choice made the world feel deeper and richer. It's not yet clear whether that element is setup for a longer-term series plot, but I hope Caruso will develop the story in that direction. It felt to me like Caruso is aiming for an ongoing series rather than a multi-volume story with a definite ending. She avoids a full episodic reset Rika, in particular, gets considerable character development and new complications that bode well for future volumes but it doesn't feel like the series is building towards an imminent climax. This is not a complaint. I enjoy these characters and this world and will happily keep devouring each new series entry. If you liked The Last Hour Between Worlds, I think you will like this. It doesn't have the same delight of initial discovery of the great world-building, but the plot is satisfying and a bit more complex and the supporting characters are even better than those in the first book. Once again, Caruso kept me turning the pages, and I'm now looking forward to a third volume. Recommended. The third book in the series has not yet been announced, but there are indications on social media that it is coming. Rating: 7 out of 10

Otto Kek l inen: DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian

Featured image of post DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in DebianI am a huge fan of Git, as I have witnessed how it has made software development so much more productive compared to the pre-2010s era. I wish all Debian source code were in Git to reap the full benefits. Git is not perfect, as it requires significant effort to learn properly, and the ecosystem is complex with even more things to learn ranging from cryptographic signatures and commit hooks to Git-assisted code review best practices, forge websites, and CI systems. Sure, there is still room to optimize its use, but Git certainly has proven itself and is now the industry standard. Thus, some readers might be surprised to learn that Debian development in 2025 is not actually based on Git. In Debian, the version control is done by the Debian archive itself. Each commit is a new upload to the archive, and the commit message is the debian/changelog entry. The commit log is available at snapshots.debian.org. In practice, most Debian Developers (people who have the credentials to upload to the Debian archive) do use Git and host their packaging source code on salsa.debian.org the GitLab instance of Debian. This is, however, based on each DD s personal preferences. The Debian project does not have any policy requiring that packages be hosted on salsa.debian.org or be in version control at all.

Is collaborative software development possible without git and version control software? Debian, however, has some peculiarities that may be surprising to people who have grown accustomed to GitHub, GitLab or various company-internal code review systems. In Debian:
  • The source code of the next upload is not public but resides only on the developer s laptop.
  • Code contributions are plain patch files, based on the latest revision released in the Debian archive (where the unstable area is equivalent to the main development branch).
  • These patches are submitted by email to a bug tracker that does no validation or testing whatsoever.
  • Developers applying these patches typically have elaborate Mutt or Emacs setups to facilitate fetching patches from email.
  • There is no public staging area, no concept of rebasing patches or withdrawing a patch and replacing it with a better version.
  • The submitter won t see any progress information until a notification email arrives after a new version has been uploaded to the Debian archive.
This system has served Debian for three decades. It is not broken, but using the package archive just feels well, archaic. There is a more efficient way, and indeed the majority of Debian packages have a metadata field Vcs-Git that advertises which version control repository the maintainer uses. However, newcomers to Debian are surprised to notice that not all packages are hosted on salsa.debian.org but at various random places with their own account and code submission systems, and there is nothing enforcing or even warning if the code there is out of sync with what was uploaded to Debian. Any Debian Developer can at any time upload a new package with whatever changes, bypassing the Git repository, even when the package advertised a Git repository. All PGP signed commits, Git tags and other information in the Git repository are just extras currently, as the Debian archive does not enforce or validate anything about them. This also makes contributing to multiple packages in parallel hard. One can t just go on salsa.debian.org and fork a bunch of repositories and submit Merge Requests. Currently, the only reliable way is to download source packages from Debian unstable, develop patches on top of them, and send the final version as a plain patch file by email to the Debian bug tracker. To my knowledge, no system exists to facilitate working with the patches in the bug tracker, such as rebasing patches 6 months later to detect if they or equivalent changes were applied or if sending refreshed versions is needed. To newcomers in Debian, it is even more surprising that there are packages that are on salsa.debian.org but have the Merge Requests feature disabled. This is often because the maintainer does not want to receive notification emails about new Merge Requests, but rather just emails from bugs.debian.org. This may sound arrogant, but keep in mind that these developers put in the effort to set up their Mutt/Emacs workflow for the existing Debian process, and extending it to work with GitLab notifications is not trivial. There are also purists who want to do everything via the command-line (without having to open a browser, run JavaScript and maintain a live Internet connection), and tools like glab are not convenient enough for the full workflow.

Inefficient ways of working prevent Debian from flourishing I would claim, based on my personal experiences from the past 10+ years as a Debian Developer, that the lack of high-quality and productive tooling is seriously harming Debian. The current methods of collaboration are cumbersome for aspiring contributors to learn and suboptimal to use for both new and seasoned contributors. There are no exit interviews for contributors who left Debian, no comprehensive data on reasons to contribute or stop contributing, nor are there any metrics tracking how many people tried but failed to contribute to Debian. Some data points to support my concerns do exist:
  • The contributor database shows that the number of contributors is growing slower than Debian s popularity.
  • Most packages are maintained by one person working alone (just pick any package at random and look at the upload history).

Debian should embrace git, but decision-making is slow Debian is all about community and collaboration. One would assume that Debian prioritized above all making collaboration tools and processes simpler, faster and less error-prone, as it would help both current and future package maintainers. Yet, it isn t so, due to some reasons unique to Debian. There is no single company or entity running Debian, and it has managed to operate as a pure meritocracy and do-cracy for over 30 years. This is impressive and admirable. Unfortunately, some of the infrastructure and technical processes are also nearly 30 years old and very difficult to change for the same reason: the nature of Debian s distributed decision-making process. As a software developer and manager with 25+ years of experience, I strongly feel that developing software collaboratively using Git is a major step forward that Debian needs to take, in one form or another, and I hope to see other DDs voice their support if they agree.

Debian Enhancement Proposal 18 Following how consensus is achieved in Debian, I started drafting DEP-18 in 2024, and it is currently awaiting enough thumbs up at https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/21 to get into CANDIDATE status next. In summary, the DEP-18 proposes that everyone keen on collaborating should:
  1. Maintain Debian packaging sources in Git on Salsa.
  2. Use Merge Requests to show your work and to get reviews.
  3. Run Salsa CI before upload.
The principles above are not novel. According to stats at e.g. trends.debian.net, and UDD, ~93% of all Debian source packages are already hosted on salsa.debian.org. As of June 1st, 2025, only 1640 source packages remain that are not hosted on Salsa. The purpose of DEP-18 is to state in writing what Debian is currently doing for most packages, and thus express what among others new contributors should be learning and doing, so basic collaboration is smooth and free from structural obstacles. Most packages are also already allowing Merge Requests and using Salsa CI, but there hasn t been any written recommendation anywhere in Debian to do so. The Debian Policy (v.4.7.2) does not even mention the word Salsa a single time. The current process documentation on how to do non-maintainer uploads or salvaging packages are all based on uploading packages to the archive, without any consideration of using git-based collaboration such as posting a Merge Request first. Personally I feel posting a Merge Request would be a better approach, as it would invite collaborators to discuss and provide code reviews. If there are no responses, the submitter can proceed to merge, but compared to direct uploads to the Debian archive, the Merge Request practice at least tries to offer a time and place for discussions and reviews to happen. It could very well be that in the future somebody comes up with a new packaging format that makes upstream source package management easier, or a monorepo with all packages, or some other future structures or processes. Having a DEP to state how to do things now does not prevent people from experimenting and innovating if they intentionally want to do that. The DEP is merely an expression of the minimal common denominators in the packaging workflow that maintainers and contributors should follow, unless they know better.

Transparency and collaboration Among the DEP-18 recommendations is:
The recommended first step in contributing to a package is to use the built-in Fork feature on Salsa. This serves two purposes. Primarily, it allows any contributor to publish their Git branches and submit them as Merge Requests. Additionally, the mere existence of a list of Forks enables contributors to discover each other, and in rare cases when the original package is not accepting improvements, collaboration could arise among the contributors and potentially lead to permanent forks in the general meaning. Forking is a fundamental part of the dynamics in open source that helps drive quality and agreement. The ability to fork ultimately serves as the last line of defense of users rights. Git supports this by making both temporary and permanent forks easy to create and maintain.
Further, it states:
Debian packaging work should be reasonably transparent and public to allow contributors to participate. A maintainer should push their pending changes to Salsa at regular intervals, so that a potential contributor can discover if a particular change has already been made or a bug has been fixed in version control, and thus avoid duplicate work. Debian maintainers should make reasonable efforts to publish planned changes as Merge Requests on Salsa and solicit feedback and reviews. While pushing changes directly on the main Git branch is the fastest workflow, second only to uploading all changes directly to Debian repositories, it is not an inclusive way to develop software. Even packages that are maintained by a single maintainer should at least occasionally publish Merge Requests to allow new contributors to step up and participate.
I think these are key aspects leading to transparency and true open source collaboration. Even though this talks about Salsa which is based on GitLab the concepts are universal and will work also on other forges, like Forgejo or GitHub. The point is that sharing work-in-progress on a real-time platform, with CI and other supporting features, empowers and motivates people to iterate on code collaboratively. As an example of an anti-pattern, Oracle MySQL publishes the source code for all their releases and is license-compliant, but as they don t publish their Git commits in real-time, it does not feel like a real open source project. Non-Oracle employees are not motivated to participate as second-class developers who are kept in the dark. Debian should embrace git and sharing work in real-time, embodying a true open source spirit.

Recommend, not force Note that the Debian Enhancement Proposals are not binding. Only the Debian Policy and Technical Committee decisions carry that weight. The nature of collaboration is voluntary anyway, so the DEP does not need to force anything on people who don t want to use salsa.debian.org. The DEP-18 is also not a guide for package maintainers. I have my own views and have written detailed guides in blog articles if you want to read more on, for example, how to do code reviews efficiently. Within DEP-18, there is plenty of room to work in many different ways, and it does not try to force one single workflow. The goal here is to simply have agreed-upon minimal common denominators among those who are keen to collaborate using salsa.debian.org, not to dictate a complete code submission workflow. Once we reach this, there will hopefully be less friction in the most basic and recurring collaboration tasks, giving DDs more energy to improve other processes or just invest in having more and newer packages for Debian users to enjoy.

Next steps In addition to lengthy online discussions on mailing lists and DEP reviews, I also presented on this topic at DebConf 2025 in Brest, France. Unfortunately the recording is not yet up on Peertube. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. However, there are a few loud and very negative voices that cannot be ignored. Maintaining a Linux distribution at the scale and complexity of Debian requires extraordinary talent and dedication, and people doing this kind of work often have strong views, most of the time for good reasons. We do not want to alienate existing key contributors with new processes, so maximum consensus is desirable. We also need more data on what the 1000+ current Debian Developers view as a good process to avoid being skewed by a loud minority. If you are a current or aspiring Debian Developer, please add a thumbs up if you think I should continue with this effort (or a thumbs down if not) on the Merge Request that would make DEP-18 have candidate status. There is also technical work to do. Increased Git use will obviously lead to growing adoption of the new tag2upload feature, which will need to get full git-buildpackage support so it can integrate into salsa.debian.org without turning off Debian packaging security features. The git-buildpackage tool itself also needs various improvements, such as making contributing to multiple different packages with various levels of diligence in debian/gbp.conf maintenance less error-prone. Eventually, if it starts looking like all Debian packages might get hosted on salsa.debian.org, I would also start building a review.debian.org website to facilitate code review aspects that are unique to Debian, such as tracking Merge Requests across GitLab projects in ways GitLab can t do, highlighting which submissions need review most urgently, feeding code reviews and approvals into the contributors.debian.org database for better attribution, and so forth. Details on this vision will be in a later blog post, so subscribe to updates!

29 November 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2025 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for October.

Activity summary During the month of October, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 37 DLAs fixing 893 CVEs. The team has continued in its usual rhythm, preparing and uploading security updates targeting LTS and ELTS, as well as helping with updates to oldstable, stable, testing, and unstable. Additionally, the team received several contributions of LTS uploads from Debian Developers outside the standing LTS Team. Notable security updates:
  • https-everywhere, prepared by Markus Koschany, deals with a problem created by ownership of the https-rulesets.org domain passing to a malware operator
  • openjdk-17 and openjdk-11, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes XML external entity and certificate validation vulnerabilities
  • intel-microcode, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixes a variety of privilege escalation and denial of service vulnerabilities
Notable non-security updates:
  • distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, updates information concerning current and upcoming Debian and Ubuntu releases
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
  • Lukas M rdian, a Debian Developer, provided an update of log4cxx
  • Andrew Ruthven, one of the request-tracker4 maintainers, provided an update of request-tracker4
  • Christoph Goehre, co-maintainer of thunderbird, provided an update of thunderbird
Beyond the typical LTS updates, the team also helped the Debian community more broadly:
  • Guilhem Moulin prepared oldstable/stable updates of libxml2, and an unstable update of libxml2.9
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared oldstable/stable updates of imagemagick
  • Daniel Leidert prepared an oldstable update of python-authlib, oldstable update of libcommons-lang-java and stable update of libcommons-lang3-java
  • Utkarsh Gupta prepared oldstable/stable/testing/unstable updates of ruby-rack
The LTS Team is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to making LTS a high quality for sponsors and users. We are also particularly grateful for the collaboration from others outside the time; their contributions are important to the success of the LTS effort.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

22 November 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.2.2-1 on CRAN: Upstream Update, OpenMP Updates

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1286 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 42.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 659 times according to Google Scholar. This versions updates to the 15.2.2 upstream Armadillo release made two days ago. It brings a few changes over the RcppArmadillo 15.2.0 release made only to GitHub (and described in this post), and of course even more changes relative to the last CRAN release described in this earlier post. As described previously, and due to both the upstream transition to C++14 coupled with the CRAN move away from C++11, the package offers a transition by allowing packages to remain with the older, pre-15.0.0 legacy Armadillo yet offering the current version as the default. During the transition we did not make any releases to CRAN allowing both the upload cadence to settle back to the desired about six in six months that the CRAN Policy asks for, and for packages to adjust to any potential changes. Most affected packages have done so (as can be seen in the GitHub issues #489 and #491) which is good to see. We appreciate all the work done by the respective package maintainers. A number of packages are still under a (now formally expired) deadline at CRAN and may get removed. Our offer to help where we can still stands, so please get in touch if we can be of assistance. As a reminder, the meta-issue #475 regroups all the resources for the transition. With respect to changes in the package, we once more overhauled the OpenMP detection and setup, following the approach take by package data.table but sticking with an autoconf-based configure. The detailed changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.2-1 (2025-11-21)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.2 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
    • Improved reproducibility of random number generation when using OpenMP
  • Skip a unit test file under macOS as complex algebra seems to fail under newer macOS LAPACK setting
  • Further OpenMP detection rework for macOS (Dirk in #497, #499)
  • Define ARMA_CRIPPLED_LAPACK on Windows only if 'LEGACY' Armadillo selected

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.1-0 (2025-10-28) (GitHub Only)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.1 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
    • Faster handling of submatrices with one row
  • Improve OpenMP detection (Dirk in #495 fixing #493)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.0-0 (2025-10-20) (GitHub Only)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.0 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
    • Added rande() for generating matrices with elements from exponential distributions
    • shift() has been deprecated in favour of circshift(), for consistency with Matlab/Octave
    • Reworked detection of aliasing, leading to more efficient compiled code
  • OpenMP detection in configure has been simplified

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

21 November 2025

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Transferring Signal on Android

Transferring a Signal account between two Android devices I spent far too much time recently trying to get a Signal Private Messenger account to transfer from one device to another. What I eventually found worked was a very finicky path to enable functioning "Wi-Fi Direct", which I go into below. I also offer some troubleshooting and recovery-from-failure guidance. All of this blogpost uses "original device" to refer to the Android pocket supercomputer that already has Signal installed and set up, and "new device" to mean the Android device that doesn't yet have Signal on it.

Why Transfer? Signal Private Messenger is designed with the expectation that the user has a "primary device", which is either an iPhone or an Android pocket supercomputer. If you have an existing Signal account, and try to change your primary device by backing up and restoring from backup, it looks to me like Signal will cause your long-term identity keys to be changed. This in turn causes your peers to see a message like "Your safety number with Alice has changed." These warning messages are the same messages that they would get if an adversary were to take over your account. So it's a good idea to minimize them when there isn't an account takeover false alarms train people to ignore real alarms. You can avoid "safety number changed" warnings by using signal's "account transfer" process during setup, at least if you're transferring between two Android devices. However, my experience was that the transfer between two Android devices was very difficult to get to happen at all. I ran into many errors trying to do this, until I finally found a path that worked.

Dealing with Failure After each failed attempt at a transfer, my original device's Signal installation would need to be re-registered. Having set a PIN meant that i could re-register the device without needing to receive a text message or phone call. Set a PIN before you transfer! Also, after a failure, you need to re-link any "linked device" (i.e. any Signal Desktop or iPad installation). If any message came in during the aborted transfer, the linked device won't get a copy of that message. Finally, after a failed transfer, i recommend completely uninstalling Signal from the new device, and starting over with a fresh install on the new device.

Permissions My understanding is that Signal on Android uses Wi-Fi Direct to accomplish the transfer. But to use Wi-Fi Direct, Signal needs to have the right permissions. On each device:
  • Entirely stop the Signal app
  • Go to Settings Apps Signal Permissions
  • Ensure that the following permissions are all enabled whenever the app is running:
  • Location
  • Nearby Devices
  • Network

Preparing for Wi-Fi Direct The transfer process depends on "Wi-Fi Direct", which is a bit of a disaster on its own. I found that if i couldn't get Wi-Fi Direct to work between the two devices, then the Signal transfer was guaranteed to fail. So, for clearer debugging, i first tried to establish a Wi-Fi Direct link on Android, without Signal being involved at all. Setting up a Wi-Fi Direct connection directly failed, multiple times, until i found the following combination of steps, to be done on each device:
  • Turn off Bluetooth
  • Ensure Wi-Fi is enabled
  • Disconnect from any Wi-Fi network you are connected to (go to the "Internet" or "Wi-Fi" settings page, long-press on the currently connected network, and choose "Disconnect"). If your device knows how to connect to multiple local Wi-Fi networks, disconnct from each of them in turn until you are in a stable state where Wi-Fi is enabled, but no network is connected.
  • Close to the bottom of the "Inteernet" or "Wi-Fi" settings page, choose "Network Preferences" and then "Wi-Fi Direct"
  • if there are any entries listed under "Remembered groups", tap them and choose to "Forget this group"
  • If there are Peer devices that say "Invited", tap them and choose to "Cancel invitation"
I found that this configuration is the most likely to enable a successful Wi-Fi Direct connection, where clicking "invite" on one device would pop up an alert on the other asking to accept the connection, and result in a "Connected" state between the two devices.

Actually Transferring Start with both devices fully powered up and physically close to one another (on the same desk should be fine). On the new device:
  • Reboot the device, and log into the profile you want to use
  • Enable Internet access via Wi-Fi.
  • Remove any old version of Signal.
  • Install Signal, but DO NOT OPEN IT!
  • Set up the permissions for the Signal app as described above
  • Open Signal, and choose "restore or transfer" -- you still need to be connected to the network at this point.
  • The new device should display a QR code.
On the original device:
  • Reboot the device, and log into the profile that has the Signal account you're looking to transfer
  • Enable Internet access via Wi-Fi, using the same network that the old device is using.
  • Make sure the permissions for Signal are set up as described above
  • Open Signal, and tap the camera button
  • Point the camera at the new device's QR code
Now tap the "continue" choices on both devices until they both display a message that they are searching for each other. You might see the location indicator (a green dot) turn on during this process. If you see an immediate warning of failure on either device, you probably don't have the permissions set up right. You might see an alert (a "toast") on one of the devices that the other one is trying to connect. You should click OK on that alert. In my experience, both devices are likely to get stuck "searching" for each other. Wait for both devices to show Signal's warning that the search has timed out. At this point, leave Signal open on both devices, and go through all the steps described above to prepare for Wi-Fi Direct. Your Internet access will be disabled. Now, tap "Try again" in Signal on both devices, pressing the buttons within a few seconds of each other. You should see another alert that one device is trying to connect to the other. Press OK there. At this point, the transfer should start happening! The old device will indicate what percentag has been transferred, and the new device will indicate how many messages hav been transferred. When this is all done, re-connect to Wi-Fi on the new device.

Temporal gap for Linked Devices Note that during this process, if new messages are arriving, they will be queuing up for you. When you reconnect to wi-fi, the queued messages will flow to your new device. But the process of transferring automatically unlinks any linked devices. So if you want to keep your instance of Signal Desktop with as short a gap as possible, you should re-link that installation promptly after the transfer completes.

Clean-up After all this is done successfully, you probably want to go into the Permissions settings and turn off the Location and Nearby Devices permissions for Signal on both devices. I recommend also going into Wi-Fi Direct and removing any connected devices and forgetting any existing connections.

Conclusion This is an abysmally clunky user experience, and I'm glad I don't have to do it often. It would have been much simpler to make a backup and restore from it, but I didn't want to freak out my contacts with a safety number change. By contrast, when i wanted extend a DeltaChat account across two devices, the transfer was prompt and entirely painless -- i just had to make sure the devices were on the same network, and then scanned a QR code from one to the other. And there was no temporal gap for any other deviees. And i could use Delta on both devices simultaneously until i was convinced that it would work on the new device -- Delta doesn't have the concept of a primary account. I wish Signal made it that easy! Until it's that easy, i hope the processes described here are useful to someone.

19 November 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.39 on CRAN: Micro Update

Release 0.6.39 of the digest package arrived at CRAN today and has also been uploaded to Debian. digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3,crc32c, xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and widely-used package (with 86.8 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects. As noted last week in the 0.6.38 release note, hours after it was admitted to CRAN, I heard from the ever-so-tireless Brian Ripley about an SAN issue on arm64 only (and apparently non-reproducible elsewhere). He kindly provided a fix; it needed a cast. Checking this on amd64 against our Rocker-based ASAN and UBSAN containers (where is remains impossible to replicate, this issue is apparently known for some arm64 issues) another micro-issue (of a missing final argument NULL missing in one .Call()) was detected. Both issues were fixed the same day, and constitute the only change here. I merely waited a week to avoid a mechanical nag triggered when release happen within a week. My CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. For documentation (including the changelog) see the documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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