Search Results: "cas"

17 June 2025

Evgeni Golov: Arguing with an AI or how Evgeni tried to use CodeRabbit

Everybody is trying out AI assistants these days, so I figured I'd jump on that train and see how fast it derails. I went with CodeRabbit because I've seen it on YouTube ads work, I guess. I am trying to answer the following questions: To reduce the amount of output and not to confuse contributors, CodeRabbit was configured to only do reviews on demand. What follows is a rather unscientific evaluation of CodeRabbit based on PRs in two Foreman-related repositories, looking at the summaries CodeRabbit posted as well as the comments/suggestions it had about the code. Ansible 2.19 support PR: theforeman/foreman-ansible-modules#1848 summary posted The summary CodeRabbit posted is technically correct.
This update introduces several changes across CI configuration, Ansible roles, plugins, and test playbooks. It expands CI test coverage to a new Ansible version, adjusts YAML key types in test variables, refines conditional logic in Ansible tasks, adds new default variables, and improves clarity and consistency in playbook task definitions and debug output.
Yeah, it does all of that, all right. But it kinda misses the point that the addition here is "Ansible 2.19 support", which starts with adding it to the CI matrix and then adjusting the code to actually work with that version. Also, the changes are not for "clarity" or "consistency", they are fixing bugs in the code that the older Ansible versions accepted, but the new one is more strict about. Then it adds a table with the changed files and what changed in there. To me, as the author, it felt redundant, and IMHO doesn't add any clarity to understand the changes. (And yes, same "clarity" vs bugfix mistake here, but that makes sense as it apparently miss-identified the change reason) And then the sequence diagrams They probably help if you have a dedicated change to a library or a library consumer, but for this PR it's just noise, especially as it only covers two of the changes (addition of 2.19 to the test matrix and a change to the inventory plugin), completely ignoring other important parts. Overall verdict: noise, don't need this. comments posted CodeRabbit also posted 4 comments/suggestions to the changes. Guard against undefined result.task IMHO a valid suggestion, even if on the picky side as I am not sure how to make it undefined here. I ended up implementing it, even if with slightly different (and IMHO better readable) syntax. Inconsistent pipeline in when for composite CV versions That one was funny! The original complaint was that the when condition used slightly different data manipulation than the data that was passed when the condition was true. The code was supposed to do "clean up the data, but only if there are any items left after removing the first 5, as we always want to keep 5 items". And I do agree with the analysis that it's badly maintainable code. But the suggested fix was to re-use the data in the variable we later use for performing the cleanup. While this is (to my surprise!) valid Ansible syntax, it didn't make the code much more readable as you need to go and look at the variable definition. The better suggestion then came from Ewoud: to compare the length of the data with the number we want to keep. Humans, so smart! But Ansible is not Ewoud's native turf, so he asked whether there is a more elegant way to count how much data we have than to use list count in Jinja (the data comes from a Python generator, so needs to be converted to a list first). And the AI helpfully suggested to use count instead! However, count is just an alias for length in Jinja, so it behaves identically and needs a list. Luckily the AI quickly apologized for being wrong after being pointed at the Jinja source and didn't try to waste my time any further. Wouldn't I have known about the count alias, we'd have committed that suggestion and let CI fail before reverting again. Apply the same fix for non-composite CV versions The very same complaint was posted a few lines later, as the logic there is very similar just slightly different data to be filtered and cleaned up. Interestingly, here the suggestion also was to use the variable. But there is no variable with the data! The text actually says one need to "define" it, yet the "committable suggestion" doesn't contain that part. Interestingly, when asked where it sees the "inconsistency" in that hunk, it said the inconsistency is with the composite case above. That however is nonsense, as while we want to keep the same number of composite and non-composite CV versions, the data used in the task is different it even gets consumed by a totally different playbook so there can't be any real consistency between the branches. I ended up applying the same logic as suggested by Ewoud above. As that refactoring was possible in a consistent way. Ensure consistent naming for Oracle Linux subscription defaults One of the changes in Ansible 2.19 is that Ansible fails when there are undefined variables, even if they are only undefined for cases where they are unused. CodeRabbit complains that the names of the defaults I added are inconsistent. And that is technically correct. But those names are already used in other places in the code, so I'd have to refactor more to make it work properly. Once being pointed at the fact that the variables already exist, the AI is as usual quick to apologize, yay. add new parameters to the repository module PR: theforeman/foreman-ansible-modules#1860 summary posted Again, the summary is technically correct
The repository module was updated to support additional parameters for repository synchronization and authentication. New options were added for ansible collections, ostree, Python packages, and yum repositories, including authentication tokens, filtering controls, and version retention settings. All changes were limited to module documentation and argument specification.
But it doesn't add anything you'd not get from looking at the diff, especially as it contains a large documentation chunk explaining those parameters. No sequence diagram this time. That's a good thing! Overall verdict: noise (even if the amount is small), don't need this. comments posted CodeRabbit generated two comments for this PR. Interestingly, none of them overlapped with the issues ansible-lint and friends found. get rid of the FIXMEs Yepp, that's fair add validation for the new parameters Yepp, I forgot these (not intentionally!). The diff it suggests is nonsense, as it doesn't take into account the existing Ansible and Yum validations, but it clearly has read them as the style etc of the new ones matches. It also managed to group the parameters correctly by repository type, so it's something. 
 if module.foreman_params['content_type'] != 'ansible_collection':
     invalid_list = [key for key in ['ansible_collection_requirements'] if key in module.foreman_params]
     if invalid_list:
         module.fail_json(msg="( 0 ) can only be used with content_type 'ansible_collection'".format(",".join(invalid_list)))
+
+# Validate ansible_collection specific parameters
+if module.foreman_params['content_type'] != 'ansible_collection':
+    invalid_list = [key for key in ['ansible_collection_auth_token', 'ansible_collection_auth_url'] if key in module.foreman_params]
+    if invalid_list:
+        module.fail_json(msg="( 0 ) can only be used with content_type 'ansible_collection'".format(",".join(invalid_list)))
+
+# Validate ostree specific parameters
+if module.foreman_params['content_type'] != 'ostree':
+    invalid_list = [key for key in ['depth', 'exclude_refs', 'include_refs'] if key in module.foreman_params]
+    if invalid_list:
+        module.fail_json(msg="( 0 ) can only be used with content_type 'ostree'".format(",".join(invalid_list)))
+
+# Validate python package specific parameters
+if module.foreman_params['content_type'] != 'python':
+    invalid_list = [key for key in ['excludes', 'includes', 'package_types', 'keep_latest_packages'] if key in module.foreman_params]
+    if invalid_list:
+        module.fail_json(msg="( 0 ) can only be used with content_type 'python'".format(",".join(invalid_list)))
+
+# Validate yum specific parameter
+if module.foreman_params['content_type'] != 'yum' and 'upstream_authentication_token' in module.foreman_params:
+    module.fail_json(msg="upstream_authentication_token can only be used with content_type 'yum'")
Interestingly, it also said "Note: If 'python' is not a valid content_type, please adjust the validation accordingly." which is quite a hint at a bug in itself. The module currently does not even allow to create content_type=python repositories. That should have been more prominent, as it's a BUG! parameter persistence in obsah PR: theforeman/obsah#72 summary posted Mostly correct. It did miss-interpret the change to a test playbook as an actual "behavior" change: "Introduced new playbook variables for database configuration" there is no database configuration in this repository, just the test playbook using the same metadata as a consumer of the library. Later on it does say "Playbook metadata and test fixtures", so unclear whether this is a miss-interpretation or just badly summarized. As long as you also look at the diff, it won't confuse you, but if you're using the summary as the sole source of information (bad!) it would. This time the sequence diagram is actually useful, yay. Again, not 100% accurate: it's missing the fact that saving the parameters is hidden behind an "if enabled" flag something it did represent correctly for loading them. Overall verdict: not really useful, don't need this. comments posted Here I was a bit surprised, especially as the nitpicks were useful! Persist-path should respect per-user state locations (nitpick) My original code used os.environ.get('OBSAH_PERSIST_PATH', '/var/lib/obsah/parameters.yaml') for the location of the persistence file. CodeRabbit correctly pointed out that this won't work for non-root users and one should respect XDG_STATE_HOME. Ewoud did point that out in his own review, so I am not sure whether CodeRabbit came up with this on its own, or also took the human comments into account. The suggested code seems fine too just doesn't use /var/lib/obsah at all anymore. This might be a good idea for the generic library we're working on here, and then be overridden to a static /var/lib path in a consumer (which always runs as root). In the end I did not implement it, but mostly because I was lazy and was sure we'd override it anyway. Positional parameters are silently excluded from persistence (nitpick) The library allows you to generate both positional (foo without --) and non-positional (--foo) parameters, but the code I wrote would only ever persist non-positional parameters. This was intentional, but there is no documentation of the intent in a comment which the rabbit thought would be worth pointing out. It's a fair nitpick and I ended up adding a comment. Enforce FQDN validation for database_host The library has a way to perform type checking on passed parameters, and one of the supported types is "FQDN" so a fully qualified domain name, with dots and stuff. The test playbook I added has a database_host variable, but I didn't bother adding a type to it, as I don't really need any type checking here. While using "FQDN" might be a bit too strict here technically a working database connection can also use a non-qualified name or an IP address, I was positively surprised by this suggestion. It shows that the rest of the repository was taken into context when preparing the suggestion. reset_args() can raise AttributeError when a key is absent This is a correct finding, the code is not written in a way that would survive if it tries to reset things that are not set. However, that's only true for the case where users pass in --reset-<parameter> without ever having set parameter before. The complaint about the part where the parameter is part of the persisted set but not in the parsed args is wrong as parsed args inherit from the persisted set. The suggested code is not well readable, so I ended up fixing it slightly differently. Persisted values bypass argparse type validation When persisting, I just yaml.safe_dump the parsed parameters, which means the YAML will contain native types like integers. The argparse documentation warns that the type checking argparse does only applies to strings and is skipped if you pass anything else (via default values). While correct, it doesn't really hurt here as the persisting only happens after the values were type-checked. So there is not really a reason to type-check them again. Well, unless the type changes, anyway. Not sure what I'll do with this comment. consider using contextlib.suppress This was added when I asked CodeRabbit for a re-review after pushing some changes. Interestingly, the PR already contained try: except: pass code before, and it did not flag that. Also, the code suggestion contained import contextlib in the middle of the code, instead in the head of the file. Who would do that?! But the comment as such was valid, so I fixed it in all places it is applicable, not only the one the rabbit found. workaround to ensure LCE and CV are always sent together PR: theforeman/foreman-ansible-modules#1867 summary posted
A workaround was added to the _update_entity method in the ForemanAnsibleModule class to ensure that when updating a host, both content_view_id and lifecycle_environment_id are always included together in the update payload. This prevents partial updates that could cause inconsistencies.
Partial updates are not a thing. The workaround is purely for the fact that Katello expects both parameters to be sent, even if only one of them needs an actual update. No diagram, good. Overall verdict: misleading summaries are bad! comments posted Given a small patch, there was only one comment. Implementation looks correct, but consider adding error handling for robustness. This reads correct on the first glance. More error handling is always better, right? But if you dig into the argumentation, you see it's wrong. Either: The AI accepted defeat once I asked it to analyze things in more detail, but why did I have to ask in the first place?! Summary Well, idk, really. Did the AI find things that humans did not find (or didn't bother to mention)? Yes. It's debatable whether these were useful (see e.g. the database_host example), but I tend to be in the "better to nitpick/suggest more and dismiss than oversee" team, so IMHO a positive win. Did the AI output help the humans with the review (useful summary etc)? In my opinion it did not. The summaries were either "lots of words, no real value" or plain wrong. The sequence diagrams were not useful either. Luckily all of that can be turned off in the settings, which is what I'd do if I'd continue using it. Did the AI output help the humans with the code (useful suggestions etc)? While the actual patches it posted were "meh" at best, there were useful findings that resulted in improvements to the code. Was the AI output misleading? Absolutely! The whole Jinja discussion would have been easier without the AI "help". Same applies for the "error handling" in the workaround PR. Was the AI output distracting? The output is certainly a lot, so yes I think it can be distracting. As mentioned, I think dropping the summaries can make the experience less distracting. What does all that mean? I will disable the summaries for the repositories, but will leave the @coderabbitai review trigger active if someone wants an AI-assisted review. This won't be something that I'll force on our contributors and maintainers, but they surely can use it if they want. But I don't think I'll be using this myself on a regular basis. Yes, it can be made "usable". But so can be vim ;-) Also, I'd prefer to have a junior human asking all the questions and making bad suggestions, so they can learn from it, and not some planet burning machine.

16 June 2025

Paul Tagliamonte: The Promised LAN

The Internet has changed a lot in the last 40+ years. Fads have come and gone. Network protocols have been designed, deployed, adopted, and abandoned. Industries have come and gone. The types of people on the internet have changed a lot. The number of people on the internet has changed a lot, creating an information medium unlike anything ever seen before in human history. There s a lot of good things about the Internet as of 2025, but there s also an inescapable hole in what it used to be, for me. I miss being able to throw a site up to send around to friends to play with without worrying about hordes of AI-feeding HTML combine harvesters DoS-ing my website, costing me thousands in network transfer for the privilege. I miss being able to put a lightly authenticated game server up and not worry too much at night wondering if that process is now mining bitcoin. I miss being able to run a server in my home closet. Decades of cat and mouse games have rendered running a mail server nearly impossible. Those who are brave enough to try are met with weekslong stretches of delivery failures and countless hours yelling ineffectually into a pipe that leads from the cheerful lobby of some disinterested corporation directly into a void somewhere 4 layers below ground level. I miss the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and trying new things. I miss building things for fun without having to worry about being too successful, after which security offices start demanding my supplier paperwork in triplicate as heartfelt thanks from their engineering teams. I miss communities that are run because it is important to them, not for ad revenue. I miss community operated spaces and having more than four websites that are all full of nothing except screenshots of each other. Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy, with the real content hidden at the bottom bracketed by deceptive ads served by companies that definitely know which new coffee shop I went to last month. This is wrong, and those who have seen what was know it. I can t keep doing it. I m not doing it any more. I reject the notion that this is as it needs to be. It is wrong. The hole left in what the Internet used to be must be filled. I will fill it.

What comes before part b? Throughout the 2000s, some of my favorite memories were from LAN parties at my friends places. Dragging your setup somewhere, long nights playing games, goofing off, even building software all night to get something working being able to do something fiercely technical in the context of a uniquely social activity. It wasn t really much about the games or the projects it was an excuse to spend time together, just hanging out. A huge reason I learned so much in college was that campus was a non-stop LAN party we could freely stand up servers, talk between dorms on the LAN, and hit my dorm room computer from the lab. Things could go from individual to social in the matter of seconds. The Internet used to work this way my dorm had public IPs handed out by DHCP, and my workstation could serve traffic from anywhere on the internet. I haven t been back to campus in a few years, but I d be surprised if this were still the case. In December of 2021, three of us got together and connected our houses together in what we now call The Promised LAN. The idea is simple fill the hole we feel is gone from our lives. Build our own always-on 24/7 nonstop LAN party. Build a space that is intrinsically social, even though we re doing technical things. We can freely host insecure game servers or one-off side projects without worrying about what someone will do with it. Over the years, it s evolved very slowly we haven t pulled any all-nighters. Our mantra has become old growth , building each layer carefully. As of May 2025, the LAN is now 19 friends running around 25 network segments. Those 25 networks are connected to 3 backbone nodes, exchanging routes and IP traffic for the LAN. We refer to the set of backbone operators as The Bureau of LAN Management . Combined decades of operating critical infrastructure has driven The Bureau to make a set of well-understood, boring, predictable, interoperable and easily debuggable decisions to make this all happen. Nothing here is exotic or even technically interesting.

Applications of trusting trust The hardest part, however, is rejecting the idea that anything outside our own LAN is untrustworthy nearly irreversible damage inflicted on us by the Internet. We have solved this by not solving it. We strictly control membership the absolute hard minimum for joining the LAN requires 10 years of friendship with at least one member of the Bureau, with another 10 years of friendship planned. Members of the LAN can veto new members even if all other criteria is met. Even with those strict rules, there s no shortage of friends that meet the qualifications but we are not equipped to take that many folks on. It s hard to join -both socially and technically. Doing something malicious on the LAN requires a lot of highly technical effort upfront, and it would endanger a decade of friendship. We have relied on those human, social, interpersonal bonds to bring us all together. It s worked for the last 4 years, and it should continue working until we think of something better. We assume roommates, partners, kids, and visitors all have access to The Promised LAN. If they re let into our friends' network, there is a level of trust that works transitively for us I trust them to be on mine. This LAN is not for security , rather, the network border is a social one. Benign hacking in the original sense of misusing systems to do fun and interesting things is encouraged. Robust ACLs and firewalls on the LAN are, by definition, an interpersonal not technical failure. We all trust every other network operator to run their segment in a way that aligns with our collective values and norms. Over the last 4 years, we ve grown our own culture and fads around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other s counters. It s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you there s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of redphones .

DIY We do not wish to, nor will we, rebuild the internet. We do not wish to, nor will we, scale this. We will never be friends with enough people, as hard as we may try. Participation hinges on us all having fun. As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug. This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy. Remember how we got here. Rebuild a community space that doesn t need to be mediated by faceless corporations and ad revenue. Build something sustainable that brings you joy. Rebuild something you use daily. Bring back what we re missing.

15 June 2025

Sahil Dhiman: A Look at .UA ccTLD Authoritative Name Servers

I find the case of the .UA country code top level domain (ccTLD) interesting simply because of the different name server secondaries they have now. Post Russian invasion, the cyber warfare peaked, and critical infrastructure like getting one side ccTLD down would be big news in anycase. Most (g/cc)TLDs are served by two (and less likely) by three or more providers. Even in those cases, not all authoritative name servers are anycasted. Take, example of .NL ccTLD name servers: 
$ dig ns nl +short
ns1.dns.nl.
ns3.dns.nl.
ns4.dns.nl.
ns1.dns.nl is SIDN which also manages their registry. ns3.dns.nl is ReCodeZero/ipcom, another anycast secondary. ns4.dns.nl is CIRA, anycast secondary. That s 3 diverse, anycast networks to serve the .NL ccTLD. .DE has a bit more at name servers at 6 but only 3 seems anycasted. Now let s take a look at .UA. Hostmaster LLC is the registry operator of the .UA ccTLD since 2001. 
$ dig soa ua +short
in1.ns.ua. domain-master.cctld.ua. 2025061434 1818 909 3024000 2020
Shows in1.ns.ua as primary nameserver (which can be intentionally deceptive too). I used bgp.tools for checking anycast and dns.coffee for timeline of when secondary nameserver was added. dns.coffee only has data going back till 2011 though. Let s deep dive at who s hosting each of the name servers:

in1.ns.ua by Intuix LLC
  • 74.123.224.40
  • 2604:ee00:0:101:0:0:0:40
  • unicast
  • Serving .UA since 13/12/2018.
  • Company by Dmitry Kohmanyuk and Igor Sviridov who re administrative and technical contacts for .UA zone as well as the IANA DB.

ho1.ns.ua by Hostmaster LLC
  • 195.47.253.1
  • 2001:67c:258:0:0:0:0:1
  • bgp.tools doesn t mark the prefix as anycast but basis test from various location, this is indeed anycasted (visible in atleast DE, US, UA etc.). Total POPs unknown.
  • Serving .UA atleast since 2011.
  • The registry themselves.

bg.ns.ua by ClouDNS
  • 185.136.96.185 and 185.136.97.185
  • 2a06:fb00:1:0:0:0:4:185 and 2a06:fb00:1:0:0:0:2:185
  • anycast
  • Serving .UA since 01/03/2022.
  • atleast 62 PoPs

cz.ns.ua by NIC.cz

nn.ns.ua by Netnod
  • 194.58.197.4
  • 2a01:3f1:c001:0:0:0:0:53
  • anycast
  • atleast 80 PoPs.
  • Serving .UA since 01/12/2022.
  • Netnod has the distinction of being one of the 13 root server operator (i.root-servers.net) and .SE operator.

pch.ns.ua by PCH
  • 204.61.216.12
  • 2001:500:14:6012:ad:0:0:1
  • anycast
  • atleast 328 POPs.
  • Serving .UA atleast since 2011.
  • With more than 36 years of production anycast DNS experience, two of the root name server operators and more than 172 top-level domain registries using our infrastructure, and more than 120 million resource records in service from https://www.pch.net/services/anycast.

rcz.ns.ua by RcodeZero
  • 193.46.128.10
  • 2a02:850:ffe0:0:0:0:0:10
  • anycast
  • Atleast 56 PoPs via 2 different cloud providers.
  • Serving .UA since 04/02/2022.
  • sister company of nic.at (.AT operator).

Some points to note
  • That s 1 unicast and 6 anycast name servers with hundreds of POPs from 7 different organizations.
  • Having X number of Point of Presence (POP) doesn t always mean each location is serving the .UA nameserver prefix.
  • Number of POPs keeps going up or down based on operational requirements and optimizations.
  • Highest concentration of DNS queries for a ccTLD would essentially originate in the country (or larger region) itself. If one of the secondaries doesn t have POP inside UA, the query might very well be served from outside the country, which can affect resolution and may even stop during outages and fiber cuts (which have become common there it seems). - Global POPs do help in faster resolutions for others/outside users though and ofcourse availability.
  • Having this much diversity does lessen the chance of the ccTLD going down. Theoretically, the adversary has to bring down 7 different networks/setups before resolution starts failing (post TTLs expiry).

11 June 2025

Iustin Pop: This blog finally goes git-annex!

A long, long time ago I have a few pictures on this blog, mostly in earlier years, because even with small pictures, the git repository became 80MiB soon this is not much in absolute terms, but the actual Markdown/Haskell/CSS/HTML total size is tiny compared to the picture, PDFs and fonts. I realised I need a better solution, probably about ten years ago, and that I should investigate git-annex. Then time passed, and I heard about git-lfs, so I thought that s the way forward. Now, I recently got interested again into doing something about this repository, and started researching.

Detour: git-lfs I was sure that git-lfs, being supported by large providers, would be the modern solution. But to my surprise, git-lfs is very server centric, which in hindsight makes sense, but for a home setup, it s not very good. Maybe I misunderstood, but git-lfs is more a protocol/method for a forge to store files, rather than an end-user solution. But then you need to backup those files separately (together with the rest of the forge), or implement another way of safeguarding them. Further details such as the fact that it keeps two copies of the files (one in the actual checked-out tree, one in internal storage) means it s not a good solution. Well, for my blog yes, but not in general. Then posts on Reddit about horror stories people being locked out of github due to quota, as an example, or this Stack Overflow post about git-lfs constraining how one uses git, convinced me that s not what I want. To each their own, but not for me I might want to push this blog s repo to github, but I definitely wouldn t want in that case to pay for github storage for my blog images (which are copies, not originals). And yes, even in 2025, those quotas are real GitHub limits and I agree with GitHub, storage and large bandwidth can t be free.

Back to the future: git-annex So back to git-annex. I thought it s going to be a simple thing, but oh boy, was I wrong. It took me half a week of continuous (well, in free time) reading and discussions with LLMs to understand a bit how it works. I think, honestly, it s a bit too complex, which is why the workflows page lists seven (!) levels of workflow complexity, from fully-managed, to fully-manual. IMHO, respect to the author for the awesome tool, but if you need a web app to help you manage git, it hints that the tool is too complex. I made the mistake of running git annex sync once, to realise it actually starts pushing to my upstream repo and creating new branches and whatnot, so after enough reading, I settled on workflow 6/7, since I don t want another tool to manage my git history. Maybe I m an outlier here, but everything automatic is a bit too much for me. Once you do managed yourself how git-annex works (on the surface, at least), it is a pretty cool thing. It uses a git-annex git branch to store metainformation, and that is relatively clean. If you do run git annex sync, it creates some extra branches, which I don t like, but meh.

Trick question: what is a remote? One of the most confusing things about git-annex was understanding its remote concept. I thought a remote is a place where you replicate your data. But not, that s a special remote. A normal remote is a git remote, but which is expected to be git/ssh/with command line access. So if you have a git+ssh remote, git-annex will not only try to push it s above-mentioned branch, but also copy the files. If such a remote is on a forge that doesn t support git-annex, then it will complain and get confused. Of course, if you read the extensive docs, you just do git config remote.<name>.annex-ignore true, and it will understand that it should not sync to it. But, aside, from this case, git-annex expects that all checkouts and clones of the repository are both metadata and data. And if you do any annex commands in them, all other clones will know about them! This can be unexpected, and you find people complaining about it, but nowadays there s a solution: 
git clone   dir && cd dir
git config annex.private true
git annex init "temp copy"
This is important. Any leaf git clone must be followed by that annex.private true config, especially on CI/CD machines. Honestly, I don t understand why by default clones should be official data stores, but it is what it is. I settled on not making any of my checkouts stable , but only the actual storage places. Except those are not git repositories, but just git-annex storage things. I.e., special remotes. Is it confusing enough yet ?

Special remotes The special remotes, as said, is what I expected to be the normal git annex remotes, i.e. places where the data is stored. But well, they exist, and while I m only using a couple simple ones, there is a large number of them. Among the interesting ones: git-lfs, a remote that allows also storing the git repository itself (git-remote-annex), although I m bit confused about this one, and most of the common storage providers via the rclone remote. Plus, all of the special remotes support encryption, so this is a really neat way to store your files across a large number of things, and handle replication, number of copies, from which copy to retrieve, etc. as you with.

And many of other features git-annex has tons of other features, so to some extent, the sky s the limit. Automatic selection of what to add git it vs plain git, encryption handling, number of copies, clusters, computed files, etc. etc. etc. I still think it s cool but too complex, though!

Uses Aside from my blog post, of course. I ve seen blog posts/comments about people using git-annex to track/store their photo collection, and I could see very well how the remote encrypted repos any of the services supported by rclone could be an N+2 copy or so. For me, tracking photos would be a bit too tedious, but it could maybe work after more research. A more practical thing would probably be replicating my local movie collection (all legal, to be clear) better than just run rsync from time to time and tracking the large files in it via git-annex. That s an exercise for another day, though, once I get more mileage with it - my blog pictures are copies, so I don t care much if they get lost, but movies are primary online copies, and I don t want to re-dump the discs. Anyway, for later.

Migrating to git-annex Migrating here means ending in a state where all large files are in git-annex, and the plain git repo is small. Just moving the files to git annex at the current head doesn t remove them from history, so your git repository is still large; it won t grow in the future, but remains with old size (and contains the large files in its history). In my mind, a nice migration would be: run a custom command, and all the history is migrated to git-annex, so I can go back in time and the still use git-annex. I na vely expected this would be easy and already available, only to find comments on the git-annex site with unsure git-filter-branch calls and some web discussions. This is the discussion on the git annex website, but it didn t make me confident it would do the right thing. But that discussion is now 8 years old. Surely in 2025, with git-filter-repo, it s easier? And, maybe I m missing something, but it is not. Not from the point of view of plain git, that s easy, but because interacting with git-annex, which stores its data in git itself, so doing this properly across successive steps of a repo (when replaying the commits) is, I think, not well defined behaviour. So I was stuck here for a few days, until I got an epiphany: As I m going to rewrite the repository, of course I m keeping a copy of it from before git-annex. If so, I don t need the history, back in time, to be correct in the sense of being able to retrieve the binary files too. It just needs to be correct from the point of view of the actual Markdown and Haskell files that represent the meat of the blog. This simplified the problem a lot. At first, I wanted to just skip these files, but this could also drop commits (git-filter-repo, by default, drops the commits if they re empty), and removing the files loses information - when they were added, what were the paths, etc. So instead I came up with a rather clever idea, if I might say so: since git-annex replaces files with symlinks already, just replace the files with symlinks in the whole history, except symlinks that are dangling (to represent the fact that files are missing). One could also use empty files, but empty files are more valid in a sense than dangling symlinks, hence why I settled on those. Doing this with git-filter-repo is easy, in newer versions, with the new --file-info-callback. Here is the simple code I used: 
import os
import os.path
import pathlib

SKIP_EXTENSIONS= 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'png', 'pdf', 'woff', 'woff2' 
FILE_MODES =  b"100644", b"100755" 
SYMLINK_MODE = b"120000"

fas_string = filename.decode()
path = pathlib.PurePosixPath(fas_string)
ext = path.suffix.removeprefix('.')

if ext not in SKIP_EXTENSIONS:
  return (filename, mode, blob_id)

if mode not in FILE_MODES:
  return (filename, mode, blob_id)

print(f"Replacing ' filename ' (extension '. ext ') in  os.getcwd() ")

symlink_target = '/none/binary-file-removed-from-git-history'.encode()
new_blob_id = value.insert_file_with_contents(symlink_target)
return (filename, SYMLINK_MODE, new_blob_id)
This goes and replaces files with a symlink to nowhere, but the symlink should explain why it s dangling. Then later renames or moving the files around work naturally , as the rename/mv doesn t care about file contents. Then, when the filtering is done via: 
git-filter-repo --file-info-callback <(cat ~/filter-big.py ) --force
It is easy to onboard to git annex:
  • remove all dangling symlinks
  • copy the (binary) files from the original repository
  • since they re named the same, and in the same places, git sees a type change
  • then simply run git annex add on those files
For me it was easy as all such files were in a few directories, so just copying those directories back, a few git-annex add commands, and done. Of course, then adding a few rsync remotes, git annex copy --to, and the repository was ready. Well, I also found a bug in my own Hakyll setup: on a fresh clone, when the large files are just dangling symlinks, the builder doesn t complain, just ignores the images. Will have to fix.

Other resources This is a blog that I read at the beginning, and I found it very useful as an intro: https://switowski.com/blog/git-annex/. It didn t help me understand how it works under the covers, but it is well written. The author does use the sync command though, which is too magic for me, but also agrees about its complexity

The proof is in the pudding And now, for the actual first image to be added that never lived in the old plain git repository. It s not full-res/full-size, it s cropped a bit on the bottom. Earlier in the year, I went to Paris for a very brief work trip, and I walked around a bit it was more beautiful than what I remembered from way way back. So a bit random selection of a picture, but here it is:
Un bateau sur la Seine Un bateau sur la Seine
Enjoy!

Sven Hoexter: HaProxy: Two Ways of Activating PROXY Protocol

If you ever face the need to activate the PROXY Protocol in HaProxy (e.g. if you're as unlucky as I'm, and you have to use Google Cloud TCP proxy load balancer), be aware that there are two ways to do that. Both are part of the frontend configuration. accept-proxy This one is the big hammer and forces the usage of the PROXY protocol on all connections. Sample: 
      frontend vogons
          bind *:2342 accept-proxy ssl crt /etc/haproxy/certs/vogons/tls.crt
tcp-request connection expect-proxy If you have to, e.g. during a phase of migrations, receive traffic directly, without the PROXY protocol header and from a proxy with the header there is also a more flexible option based on a tcp-request connection action. Sample: 
      frontend vogons
          bind *:2342 ssl crt /etc/haproxy/certs/vogons/tls.crt
          tcp-request connection expect-proxy layer4 if   src 35.191.0.0/16 130.211.0.0/22
Source addresses here are those of GCP global TCP proxy frontends. Replace with whatever suites your case. Since this is happening just after establishing a TCP connection, there is barely anything else available to match on beside of the source address. HaProxy Documentation

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Updated Austin, DebConf 25 preparations continue and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-05 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.

Updated Austin, by Colin Watson and Helmut Grohne Austin is a frame stack sampling profiler for Python. It allows profiling Python applications without instrumenting them while losing some accuracy in the process, and is the only one of its kind presently packaged for Debian. Unfortunately, it hadn t been uploaded in a while and hence the last Python version it worked with was 3.8. We updated it to a current version and also dealt with a number of architecture-specific problems (such as unintended sign promotion, 64bit time_t fallout and strictness due to -Wformat-security ) in cooperation with upstream. With luck, it will migrate in time for trixie.

Preparing for DebConf 25, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 25 is quickly approaching, and the organization work doesn t stop. In May, Stefano continued supporting the different teams. Just to give a couple of examples, Stefano made changes in DebConf 25 website to make BoF and sprints submissions public, so interested people can already know if a BoF or sprint for a given subject is planned, allowing coordination with the proposer; or to enhance how statistics are made public to help the work of the local team. Santiago has participated in different tasks, including the logistics of the conference, like preparing more information about the public transportation that will be available. Santiago has also taken part in activities related to fundraising and reviewing more event proposals.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Lucas fixed security issues in Valkey in unstable.
  • Lucas tried to help with the update of Redis to version 8 in unstable. The package hadn t been updated for a while due to licensing issues, but now upstream maintainers fixed them.
  • Lucas uploaded around 20 ruby-* packages to unstable that weren t updated for some years to make them build reproducible. Thanks to reproducible builds folks to point out those issues. Also some unblock requests (and follow-ups) were needed to make them reach trixie in time for the release.
  • Lucas is organizing a Debian Outreach session for DebConf 25, reaching out to all interns of Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs from the last year. The session will be presented by in-person interns and also video recordings from the interns interested in participating but did not manage to attend the conference.
  • Lucas continuously works on DebConf Content team tasks. Replying to speakers, sponsors, and communicating internally with the team.
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: fixed bugs reported by Catalan translator, added possibility to import packages out of salsa, added using non-default project branches on salsa, polish to get ready for DebCamp.
  • Carles tested new apt in trixie and reported bugs to apt , installation-report , libqt6widget6 .
  • Carles used po-debconf-manager and imported remaining 80 packages, reviewed 20 translations, submitted (MR or bugs) 54 translations.
  • Carles prepared some topics for translation BoF in DebConf (gathered feedback, first pass on topics).
  • Helmut gave an introductory talk about the mechanics of Linux namespaces at MiniDebConf Hamburg.
  • Helmut sent 25 patches for cross compilation failures.
  • Helmut reviewed, refined and applied a patch from Jochen Sprickerhof to make the Multi-Arch hinter emit more hints for pure Python modules.
  • Helmut sat down with Christoph Berg (not affiliated with Freexian) and extended unschroot to support directory-based chroots with overlayfs. This is a feature that was lost in transitioning from sbuild s schroot backend to its unshare backend. unschroot implements the schroot API just enough to be usable with sbuild and otherwise works a lot like the unshare backend. As a result, apt.postgresql.org now performs its builds contained in a user namespace.
  • Helmut looked into a fair number of rebootstrap failures most of which related to musl or gcc-15 and imported patches or workarounds to make those builds proceed.
  • Helmut updated dumat to use sqop fixing earlier PGP verification problems thanks to Justus Winter and Neal Walfield explaining a lot of sequoia at MiniDebConf Hamburg.
  • Helmut got the previous zutils update for /usr-move wrong again and had to send another update.
  • Helmut looked into why debvm s autopkgtests were flaky and with lots of help from Paul Gevers and Michael Tokarev tracked it down to a race condition in qemu. He updated debvm to trigger the problem less often and also fixed a wrong dependency using Luca Boccassi s patch.
  • Santiago continued the switch to sbuild for Salsa CI (that was stopped for some months), and has been mainly testing linux, since it s a complex project that heavily customizes the pipeline. Santiago is preparing the changes for linux to submit a MR soon.
  • In openssh, Colin tracked down some intermittent sshd crashes to a root cause, and issued bookworm and bullseye updates for CVE-2025-32728.
  • Colin spent some time fixing up fail2ban, mainly reverting a patch that caused its tests to fail and would have banned legitimate users in some common cases.
  • Colin backported upstream fixes for CVE-2025-48383 (django-select2) and CVE-2025-47287 (python-tornado) to unstable.
  • Stefano supported video streaming and recording for 2 miniDebConfs in May: Macei and Hamburg. These had overlapping streams for one day, which is a first for us.
  • Stefano packaged the new version of python-virtualenv that includes our patches for not including the wheel for wheel.
  • Stefano got all involved parties to agree (in principle) to meet at DebConf for a mediated discussion on a dispute that was brought to the technical committee.
  • Anupa coordinated the swag purchase for DebConf 25 with Juliana and Nattie.
  • Anupa joined the publicity team meeting for discussing the upcoming events and BoF at DebConf 25.
  • Anupa worked with the publicity team to publish Bits post to welcome GSoc 2025 Interns.

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

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In May, 22 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 8.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Adrian Bunk did 26.0h (out of 26.0h assigned).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 1.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 3.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 12.0h (out of 11.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 15.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 15.5h from previous period).
  • Daniel Leidert did 25.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 21.0h (out of 16.75h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 11.5h (out of 8.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 3.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.75h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 26.0h (out of 12.75h assigned and 13.25h from previous period).
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 20.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 20.0h (out of 26.25h assigned), thus carrying over 6.25h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 20.75h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 15.0h (out of 12.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 6.25h (out of 6.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In May, we released 54 DLAs. The LTS Team was particularly active in May, publishing a higher than normal number of advisories, as well as helping with a wide range of updates to packages in stable and unstable, plus some other interesting work. We are also pleased to welcome several updates from contributors outside the regular team.
  • Notable security updates:
    • containerd, prepared by Andreas Henriksson, fixes a vulnerability that could cause containers launched as non-root users to be run as root
    • libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, prepared by Moritz Schlarb, fixes a vulnerability which could allow an attacker to crash an Apache web server with libapache2-mod-auth-openidc installed
    • request-tracker4, prepared by Andrew Ruthven, fixes multiple vulnerabilities which could result in information disclosure, cross-site scripting and use of weak encryption for S/MIME emails
    • postgresql-13, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes an application crash vulnerability that could affect the server or applications using libpq
    • dropbear, prepared by Guilhem Moulin, fixes a vulnerability which could potentially result in execution of arbitrary shell commands
    • openjdk-17, openjdk-11, prepared by Thorsten Glaser, fixes several vulnerabilities, which include denial of service, information disclosure or bypass of sandbox restrictions
    • glibc, prepared by Sean Whitton, fixes a privilege escalation vulnerability
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • wireless-regdb, prepared by Ben Hutchings, updates information reflecting changes to radio regulations in many countries
This month s contributions from outside the regular team include the libapache2-mod-auth-openidc update mentioned above, prepared by Moritz Schlarb (the maintainer of the package); the update of request-tracker4, prepared by Andrew Ruthven (the maintainer of the package); and the updates of openjdk-17 and openjdk-11, also noted above, prepared by Thorsten Glaser. Additionally, LTS Team members contributed stable updates of the following packages:
  • rubygems and yelp/yelp-xsl, prepared by Lucas Kanashiro
  • simplesamlphp, prepared by Tobias Frost
  • libbson-xs-perl, prepared by Roberto C. S nchez
  • fossil, prepared by Sylvain Beucler
  • setuptools and mydumper, prepared by Lee Garrett
  • redis and webpy, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • xrdp, prepared by Abhijith PA
  • tcpdf, prepared by Santiago Ruano Rinc n
  • kmail-account-wizard, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
Other contributions were also made by LTS Team members to packages in unstable:
  • proftpd-dfsg DEP-8 tests (autopkgtests) were provided to the maintainer, prepared by Lucas Kanashiro
  • a regular upload of libsoup2.4, prepared by Sean Whitton
  • a regular upload of setuptools, prepared by Lee Garrett
Freexian, the entity behind the management of the Debian LTS project, has been working for some time now on the development of an advanced CI platform for Debian-based distributions, called Debusine. Recently, Debusine has reached a level of feature implementation that makes it very usable. Some members of the LTS Team have been using Debusine informally, and during May LTS coordinator Santiago Ruano Rinc n has made a call for the team to help with testing of Debusine, and to help evaluate its suitability for the LTS Team to eventually begin using as the primary mechanism for uploading packages into Debian. Team members who have started using Debusine are providing valuable feedback to the Debusine development team, thus helping to improve the platform for all users. Actually, a number of updates, for both bullseye and bookworm, made during the month of May were handled using Debusine, e.g. rubygems s DLA-4163-1. By the way, if you are a Debian Developer, you can easily test Debusine following the instructions found at https://wiki.debian.org/DebusineDebianNet. DebConf, the annual Debian Conference, is coming up in July and, as is customary each year, the week preceding the conference will feature an event called DebCamp. The DebCamp week provides an opportunity for teams and other interested groups/individuals to meet together in person in the same venue as the conference itself, with the purpose of doing focused work, often called sprints . LTS coordinator Roberto C. S nchez has announced that the LTS Team is planning to hold a sprint primarily focused on the Debian security tracker and the associated tooling used by the LTS Team and the Debian Security Team.

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

8 June 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in May 2025

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. Things were a bit quieter than usual, as for the most part I was sticking to things that seemed urgent for the upcoming trixie release. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. OpenSSH After my appeal for help last month to debug intermittent sshd crashes, Michel Casabona helped me put together an environment where I could reproduce it, which allowed me to track it down to a root cause and fix it. (I also found a misuse of strlcpy affecting at least glibc-based systems in passing, though I think that was unrelated.) I worked with Daniel Kahn Gillmor to fix a regression in ssh-agent socket handling. I fixed a reproducibility bug depending on whether passwd is installed on the build system, which would have affected security updates during the lifetime of trixie. I backported openssh 1:10.0p1-5 to bookworm-backports. I issued bookworm and bullseye updates for CVE-2025-32728. groff I backported a fix for incorrect output when formatting multiple documents as PDF/PostScript at once. debmirror I added a simple autopkgtest. Python team I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: In bookworm-backports, I updated these packages: I fixed problems building these packages reproducibly: I backported fixes for some security vulnerabilities to unstable (since we re in freeze now so it s not always appropriate to upgrade to new upstream versions): I fixed various other build/test failures: I added non-superficial autopkgtests to these packages: I packaged python-django-hashids and python-django-pgbulk, needed for new upstream versions of python-django-pgtrigger. I ported storm to Python 3.14. Science team I fixed a build failure in apertium-oci-fra.

7 June 2025

Evgeni Golov: show your desk - 2025 edition

Back in 2020 I posted about my desk setup at home. Recently someone in our #remotees channel at work asked about WFH setups and given quite a few things changed in mine, I thought it's time to post an update. But first, a picture! standing desk with a monitor, laptop etc (Yes, it's cleaner than usual, how could you tell?!) desk It's still the same Flexispot E5B, no change here. After 7 years (I bought mine in 2018) it still works fine. If I'd have to buy a new one, I'd probably get a four-legged one for more stability (they got quite affordable now), but there is no immediate need for that. chair It's still the IKEA Volmar. Again, no complaints here. hardware Now here we finally have some updates! laptop A Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12, Intel Core Ultra 7 165U, 32GB RAM, running Fedora (42 at the moment). It's connected to a Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 4 Dock. It just works . workstation It's still the P410, but mostly unused these days. monitor An AOC U2790PQU 27" 4K. I'm running it at 150% scaling, which works quite decently these days (no comparison to when I got it). speakers As the new monitor didn't want to take the old Dell soundbar, I have upgraded to a pair of Alesis M1Active 330 USB. They sound good and were not too expensive. I had to fix the volume control after some time though. webcam It's still the Logitech C920 Pro. microphone The built in mic of the C920 is really fine, but to do conference-grade talks (and some podcasts ), I decided to get something better. I got a FIFINE K669B, with a nice arm. It's not a Shure, for sure, but does the job well and Christian was quite satisfied with the results when we recorded the Debian and Foreman specials of Focus on Linux. keyboard It's still the ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint. I had to print a few fixes and replacement parts for it, but otherwise it's doing great. Seems Lenovo stopped making those, so I really shouldn't break it any further. mouse Logitech MX Master 3S. The surface of the old MX Master 2 got very sticky at some point and it had to be replaced. other notepad I'm still terrible at remembering things, so I still write them down in an A5 notepad. whiteboard I've also added a (small) whiteboard on the wall right of the desk, mostly used for long term todo lists. coaster Turns out Xeon-based coasters are super stable, so it lives on! yubikey Yepp, still a thing. Still USB-A because... reasons. headphones Still the Bose QC25, by now on the third set of ear cushions, but otherwise working great and the odd 15 cushion replacement does not justify buying anything newer (which would have the same problem after some time, I guess). I did add a cheap (~10 ) Bluetooth-to-Headphonejack dongle, so I can use them with my phone too (shakes fist at modern phones). And I do use the headphones more in meetings, as the Alesis speakers fill the room more with sound and thus sometimes produce a bit of an echo. charger The Bose need AAA batteries, and so do some other gadgets in the house, so there is a technoline BC 700 charger for AA and AAA on my desk these days. light Yepp, I've added an IKEA Tertial and an ALDI "face" light. No, I don't use them much. KVM switch I've "built" a KVM switch out of an USB switch, but given I don't use the workstation that often these days, the switch is also mostly unused.

6 June 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2025

Welcome to our 5th report from the Reproducible Builds project in 2025! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please do visit the Contribute page on our website. In this report:
  1. Security audit of Reproducible Builds tools published
  2. When good pseudorandom numbers go bad
  3. Academic articles
  4. Distribution work
  5. diffoscope and disorderfs
  6. Website updates
  7. Reproducibility testing framework
  8. Upstream patches

Security audit of Reproducible Builds tools published The Open Technology Fund s (OTF) security partner Security Research Labs recently an conducted audit of some specific parts of tools developed by Reproducible Builds. This form of security audit, sometimes called a whitebox audit, is a form testing in which auditors have complete knowledge of the item being tested. They auditors assessed the various codebases for resilience against hacking, with key areas including differential report formats in diffoscope, common client web attacks, command injection, privilege management, hidden modifications in the build process and attack vectors that might enable denials of service. The audit focused on three core Reproducible Builds tools: diffoscope, a Python application that unpacks archives of files and directories and transforms their binary formats into human-readable form in order to compare them; strip-nondeterminism, a Perl program that improves reproducibility by stripping out non-deterministic information such as timestamps or other elements introduced during packaging; and reprotest, a Python application that builds source code multiple times in various environments in order to to test reproducibility. OTF s announcement contains more of an overview of the audit, and the full 24-page report is available in PDF form as well.

When good pseudorandom numbers go bad Danielle Navarro published an interesting and amusing article on their blog on When good pseudorandom numbers go bad. Danielle sets the stage as follows:
[Colleagues] approached me to talk about a reproducibility issue they d been having with some R code. They d been running simulations that rely on generating samples from a multivariate normal distribution, and despite doing the prudent thing and using set.seed() to control the state of the random number generator (RNG), the results were not computationally reproducible. The same code, executed on different machines, would produce different random numbers. The numbers weren t just a little bit different in the way that we ve all wearily learned to expect when you try to force computers to do mathematics. They were painfully, brutally, catastrophically, irreproducible different. Somewhere, somehow, something broke.
Thanks to David Wheeler for posting about this article on our mailing list

Academic articles There were two scholarly articles published this month that related to reproducibility: Daniel Hugenroth and Alastair R. Beresford of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Mario Lins and Ren Mayrhofer of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria published an article titled Attestable builds: compiling verifiable binaries on untrusted systems using trusted execution environments. In their paper, they:
present attestable builds, a new paradigm to provide strong source-to-binary correspondence in software artifacts. We tackle the challenge of opaque build pipelines that disconnect the trust between source code, which can be understood and audited, and the final binary artifact, which is difficult to inspect. Our system uses modern trusted execution environments (TEEs) and sandboxed build containers to provide strong guarantees that a given artifact was correctly built from a specific source code snapshot. As such it complements existing approaches like reproducible builds which typically require time-intensive modifications to existing build configurations and dependencies, and require independent parties to continuously build and verify artifacts.
The authors compare attestable builds with reproducible builds by noting an attestable build requires only minimal changes to an existing project, and offers nearly instantaneous verification of the correspondence between a given binary and the source code and build pipeline used to construct it , and proceed by determining that t he overhead (42 seconds start-up latency and 14% increase in build duration) is small in comparison to the overall build time.
Timo Pohl, Pavel Nov k, Marc Ohm and Michael Meier have published a paper called Towards Reproducibility for Software Packages in Scripting Language Ecosystems. The authors note that past research into Reproducible Builds has focused primarily on compiled languages and their ecosystems, with a further emphasis on Linux distribution packages:
However, the popular scripting language ecosystems potentially face unique issues given the systematic difference in distributed artifacts. This Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) [paper] provides an overview of existing research, aiming to highlight future directions, as well as chances to transfer existing knowledge from compiled language ecosystems. To that end, we work out key aspects in current research, systematize identified challenges for software reproducibility, and map them between the ecosystems.
Ultimately, the three authors find that the literature is sparse , focusing on few individual problems and ecosystems, and therefore identify space for more critical research.

Distribution work In Debian this month:
Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid catalogue of open source applications for the Android platform published a blog post on Making reproducible builds visible. Noting that Reproducible builds are essential in order to have trustworthy software , Hans also mentions that F-Droid has been delivering reproducible builds since 2015 . However:
There is now a Reproducibility Status link for each app on f-droid.org, listed on every app s page. Our verification server shows or based on its build results, where means our rebuilder reproduced the same APK file and means it did not. The IzzyOnDroid repository has developed a more elaborate system of badges which displays a for each rebuilder. Additionally, there is a sketch of a five-level graph to represent some aspects about which processes were run.
Hans compares the approach with projects such as Arch Linux and Debian that provide developer-facing tools to give feedback about reproducible builds, but do not display information about reproducible builds in the user-facing interfaces like the package management GUIs.
Arnout Engelen of the NixOS project has been working on reproducing the minimal installation ISO image. This month, Arnout has successfully reproduced the build of the minimal image for the 25.05 release without relying on the binary cache. Work on also reproducing the graphical installer image is ongoing.
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for their work there.
Lastly in Fedora news, Jelle van der Waa opened issues tracking reproducible issues in Haskell documentation, Qt6 recording the host kernel and R packages recording the current date. The R packages can be made reproducible with packaging changes in Fedora.

diffoscope & disorderfs diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 295, 296 and 297 to Debian:
  • Don t rely on zipdetails --walk argument being available, and only add that argument on newer versions after we test for that. [ ]
  • Review and merge support for NuGet packages from Omair Majid. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Merge support for an lzma comparator from Will Hollywood. [ ][ ]
Chris also merged an impressive changeset from Siva Mahadevan to make disorderfs more portable, especially on FreeBSD. disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues [ ]. This was then uploaded to Debian as version 0.6.0-1. Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 296 [ ][ ] and 297 [ ][ ], and disorderfs to version 0.6.0 [ ][ ].

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

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. However, Holger Levsen posted to our mailing list this month in order to bring a wider awareness to funding issues faced by the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL). As mentioned on OSL s public post, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable [and that] unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year . As Holger notes in his post to our mailing list, the Reproducible Builds project relies on hardware nodes hosted there. Nevertheless, Lance Albertson of OSL posted an update to the funding situation later in the month with broadly positive news.
Separate to this, there were various changes to the Jenkins setup this month, which is used as the backend driver of for both tests.reproducible-builds.org and reproduce.debian.net, including:
  • Migrating the central jenkins.debian.net server AMD Opteron to Intel Haswell CPUs. Thanks to IONOS for hosting this server since 2012.
  • After testing it for almost ten years, the i386 architecture has been dropped from tests.reproducible-builds.org. This is because that, with the upcoming release of Debian trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture there will be no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. As a result, a large number of nodes hosted by Infomaniak have been retooled from i386 to amd64.
  • Another node, ionos17-amd64.debian.net, which is used for verifying packages for all.reproduce.debian.net (hosted by IONOS) has had its memory increased from 40 to 64GB, and the number of cores doubled to 32 as well. In addition, two nodes generously hosted by OSUOSL have had their memory doubled to 16GB.
  • Lastly, we have been granted access to more riscv64 architecture boards, so now we have seven such nodes, all with 16GB memory and 4 cores that are verifying packages for riscv64.reproduce.debian.net. Many thanks to PLCT Lab, ISCAS for providing those.

Outside of this, a number of smaller changes were also made by Holger Levsen:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related:
    • Only use two workers for the ppc64el architecture due to RAM size. [ ]
    • Monitor nginx_request and nginx_status with the Munin monitoring system. [ ][ ]
    • Detect various variants of network and memory errors. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a prominent link to reproducible-builds.org. [ ]
    • Add a rebuilderd-cache-cleanup.service and run it daily via timer. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Be more verbose what sources are being downloaded. [ ]
    • Correctly deal with packages with an epoch in their version [ ] and deal with binNMUs versions with an epoch as well [ ][ ].
    • Document how to reschedule all other errors on all archs. [ ]
    • Misc documentation improvements. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Include the $HOSTNAME variable in the rebuilderd logfiles. [ ]
    • Install the equivs package on all worker nodes. [ ][ ]
  • Jenkins nodes:
    • Permit the sudo tool to fix up permission issues. [ ][ ]
    • Document how to manage diskspace with OpenStack. [ ]
    • Ignore a number of spurious monitoring errors on riscv64, FreeBSD, etc.. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Install ntpsec-ntpdate (instead of ntpdate) as the former is available on Debian trixie and bookworm. [ ][ ]
    • Use the same SSH ControlPath for all nodes. [ ]
    • Make sure the munin user uses the same SSH config as the jenkins user. [ ]
  • tests.reproducible-builds.org-related:
    • Disable testing of the i386 architecture. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Document the current disk usage. [ ][ ]
    • Address some image placement now that we only test three architectures. [ ]
    • Keep track of build performance. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Fix a (harmless) typo in the multiarch_versionskew script. [ ]
In addition, Jochen Sprickerhof made a series of changes related to reproduce.debian.net:
  • Add out of memory detection to the statistics page. [ ]
  • Reverse the sorting order on the statistics page. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the spacing between statistics groups. [ ]
  • Update a (hard-coded) line number in error message detection pertaining to a debrebuild line number. [ ]
  • Support Debian unstable in the rebuilder-debian.sh script. [ ] ]
  • Rely on rebuildctl to sync only arch-specific packages. [ ][ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. 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:

4 June 2025

Gunnar Wolf: The subjective value of privacy Assessing individuals' calculus of costs and benefits in the context of state surveillance

This post is an unpublished review for The subjective value of privacy Assessing individuals' calculus of costs and benefits in the context of state surveillance
Internet users, software developers, academics, entrepreneurs basically everybody is now aware of the importance of considering privacy as a core part of our online experience. User demand, and various national or regional laws, have made privacy a continuously present subject. And privacy is such an all-encompassing, complex topic, the angles from which it can be studied seems never to finish; I recommend computer networking-oriented newcomers to the topic to refer to Brian Kernighan s excellent work [1]. However, how do regular people like ourselves, in our many capacities feel about privacy? Lukas Antoine presents a series of experiments aiming at better understanding how people throughout the world understands privacy, and when is privacy held as more or less important than security in different aspects, Particularly, privacy is often portrayed as a value set at tension against surveillance, and particularly state surveillance, in the name of security: conventional wisdom presents the idea of privacy calculus. This is, it is often assumed that individuals continuously evaluate the costs and benefits of divulging their personal data, sharing data when they expect a positive net outcome, and denying it otherwise. This framework has been accepted for decades, and the author wishes to challenge it. This book is clearly his doctoral thesis on political sciences, and its contents are as thorough as expected in this kind of product. The author presents three empirical studies based on cross-survey analysis. The first experiment explores the security justifications for surveillance and how they influence their support. The second one searches whether the stance on surveillance can be made dependent on personal convenience or financial cost. The third study explores whether privacy attitude is context-dependant or can be seen as a stable personality trait. The studies aim to address the shortcomings of published literature in the field, mainly, (a) the lack of comprehensive research on state surveillance, needed or better understanding privacy appreciation, (b) while several studies have tackled the subjective measure of privacy, there is a lack of cross-national studies to explain wide-ranging phenomena, (c) most studies in this regard are based on population-based surveys, which cannot establish causal relationships, (d) a seemingly blind acceptance of the privacy calculus mentioned above, with no strong evidence that it accurately measures people s motivations for disclosing or withholding their data. The specific take, including the framing of the tension between privacy and surveillance has long been studied, as can be seen in Steven Nock s 1993 book [2], but as Sannon s article in 2022 shows [3], social and technological realities require our undertanding to be continuously kept up to date. The book is full with theoretical references and does a very good job of explaining the path followed by the author. It is, though, a heavy read, and, for people not coming from the social sciences tradition, leads to the occasional feeling of being lost. The conceptual and theoretical frameworks and presented studies are thorough and clear. The author is honest in explaining when the data points at some of his hypotheses being disproven, while others are confirmed. The aim of the book is for people digging deep into this topic. Personally, I have authored several works on different aspects of privacy (such as a book [4] and a magazine number [5]), but this book did get me thinking on many issues I had not previously considered. Looking for comparable works, I find Friedewald et al. s 2017 book [6] chapter organization to follow a similar thought line. My only complaint would be that, for the publication as part of its highly prestigious publisher, little attention has been paid to editorial aspects: sub-subsection depth is often excessive and unclear. Also, when publishing monographs based on doctoral works, it is customary to no longer refer to the work as a thesis and to soften some of the formal requirements such a work often has, with the aim of producing a more gentle and readable book; this book seems just like the mass-production of an (otherwise very interesting and well made) thesis work. References:

1 June 2025

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities May 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Larger blocks besides the Phosh 0.47 release are on screen keyboard and cell broadcast improvements, work on separate volume streams, the switch of phoc to wlroots 0.19.0 and effort to make Phosh work on Debian's upcoming stable release (Trixie) out of the box. Trixie will ship with Phosh 0.46, if you want to try out 0.47 you can fetch it from Debian's experimental suite. See below for details on the above and more: phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings phosh-osk-stub / stevia phosh-tour phosh-osk-data pfs xdg-desktop-portal-phosh phrog phosh-debs meta-phosh feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes gmobile GNOME calls Debian ModemManager osmo-cbc gsm-cell-testing mobile-broadband-provider-info Cellbroadcastd phosh-site pipewire wireplumber python-dbusmock Bugs 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

31 May 2025

Antoine Beaupr : Traffic meter per ASN without logs

Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you had no or anonymized logs and still wanted to figure out where your traffic was coming from? Or you have multiple upstreams and are looking to see if you can save fees by getting into peering agreements with some other party? Or your site is getting heavy load but you can't pinpoint it on a single IP and you suspect some amoral corporation is training their degenerate AI on your content with a bot army? (You might be getting onto something there.) If that rings a bell, read on.

TL;DR: ... or just skip the cruft and install asncounter: 
pip install asncounter
Also available in Debian 14 or later, or possibly in Debian 13 backports (soon to be released) if people are interested: 
apt install asncounter
Then count whoever is hitting your network with: 
awk ' print $2 ' /var/log/apache2/*access*.log   asncounter
or: 
tail -F /var/log/apache2/*access*.log   awk ' print $2 '   asncounter
or: 
tcpdump -q -n   asncounter --input-format=tcpdump --repl
or: 
tcpdump -q -i eth0 -n -Q in "tcp and tcp[tcpflags] & tcp-syn != 0 and (port 80 or port 443)"   asncounter --input-format=tcpdump --repl
Read on for why this matters, and why I wrote yet another weird tool (almost) from scratch.

Background and manual work This is a tool I've been dreaming of for a long, long time. Back in 2006, at Koumbit a colleague had setup TAS ("Traffic Accounting System", " " in Russian, apparently), a collection of Perl script that would do per-IP accounting. It was pretty cool: it would count bytes per IP addresses and, from that, you could do analysis. But the project died, and it was kind of bespoke. Fast forward twenty years, and I find myself fighting off bots at the Tor Project (the irony...), with our GitLab suffering pretty bad slowdowns (see issue tpo/tpa/team#41677 for the latest public issue, the juicier one is confidential, unfortunately). (We did have some issues caused by overloads in CI, as we host, after all, a fork of Firefox, which is a massive repository, but the applications team did sustained, awesome work to fix issues on that side, again and again (see tpo/applications/tor-browser#43121 for the latest, and tpo/applications/tor-browser#43121 for some pretty impressive correlation work, I work with really skilled people). But those issues, I believe were fixed.) So I had the feeling it was our turn to get hammered by the AI bots. But how do we tell? I could tell something was hammering at the costly /commit/ and (especially costly) /blame/ endpoint. So at first, I pulled out the trusted awk, sort uniq -c sort -n tail pipeline I am sure others have worked out before: 
awk ' print $1 ' /var/log/nginx/*.log   sort   uniq -c   sort -n   tail -10
For people new to this, that pulls the first field out of web server log files, sort the list, counts the number of unique entries, and sorts that so that the most common entries (or IPs) show up first, then show the top 10. That, other words, answers the question of "which IP address visits this web server the most?" Based on this, I found a couple of IP addresses that looked like Alibaba. I had already addressed an abuse complaint to them (tpo/tpa/team#42152) but never got a response, so I just blocked their entire network blocks, rather violently: 
for cidr in 47.240.0.0/14 47.246.0.0/16 47.244.0.0/15 47.235.0.0/16 47.236.0.0/14; do 
  iptables-legacy -I INPUT -s $cidr -j REJECT
done
That made Ali Baba and his forty thieves (specifically their AL-3 network go away, but our load was still high, and I was still seeing various IPs crawling the costly endpoints. And this time, it was hard to tell who they were: you'll notice all the Alibaba IPs are inside the same 47.0.0.0/8 prefix. Although it's not a /8 itself, it's all inside the same prefix, so it's visually easy to pick it apart, especially for a brain like mine who's stared too long at logs flowing by too fast for their own mental health. What I had then was different, and I was tired of doing the stupid thing I had been doing for decades at this point. I had recently stumbled upon pyasn recently (in January, according to my notes) and somehow found it again, and thought "I bet I could write a quick script that loops over IPs and counts IPs per ASN". (Obviously, there are lots of other tools out there for that kind of monitoring. Argos, for example, presumably does this, but it's a kind of a huge stack. You can also get into netflows, but there's serious privacy implications with those. There are also lots of per-IP counters like promacct, but that doesn't scale. Or maybe someone already had solved this problem and I just wasted a week of my life, who knows. Someone will let me know, I hope, either way.)

ASNs and networks A quick aside, for people not familiar with how the internet works. People that know about ASNs, BGP announcements and so on can skip. The internet is the network of networks. It's made of multiple networks that talk to each other. The way this works is there is a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a relatively simple TCP-based protocol, that the edge routers of those networks used to announce each other what network they manage. Each of those network is called an Autonomous System (AS) and has an AS number (ASN) to uniquely identify it. Just like IP addresses, ASNs are allocated by IANA and local registries, they're pretty cheap and useful if you like running your own routers, get one. When you have an ASN, you'll use it to, say, announce to your BGP neighbors "I have 198.51.100.0/24" over here and the others might say "okay, and I have 216.90.108.31/19 over here, and I know of this other ASN over there that has 192.0.2.1/24 too! And gradually, those announcements flood the entire network, and you end up with each BGP having a routing table of the global internet, with a map of which network block, or "prefix" is announced by which ASN. It's how the internet works, and it's a useful thing to know, because it's what, ultimately, makes an organisation responsible for an IP address. There are "looking glass" tools like the one provided by routeviews.org which allow you to effectively run "trace routes" (but not the same as traceroute, which actively sends probes from your location), type an IP address in that form to fiddle with it. You will end up with an "AS path", the way to get from the looking glass to the announced network. But I digress, and that's kind of out of scope. Point is, internet is made of networks, networks are autonomous systems (AS) and they have numbers (ASNs), and they announced IP prefixes (or "network blocks") that ultimately tells you who is responsible for traffic on the internet.

Introducing asncounter So my goal was to get from "lots of IP addresses" to "list of ASNs", possibly also the list of prefixes (because why not). Turns out pyasn makes that really easy. I managed to build a prototype in probably less than an hour, just look at the first version, it's 44 lines (sloccount) of Python, and it works, provided you have already downloaded the required datafiles from routeviews.org. (Obviously, the latest version is longer at close to 1000 lines, but it downloads the data files automatically, and has many more features). The way the first prototype (and later versions too, mostly) worked is that you feed it a list of IP addresses on standard input, it looks up the ASN and prefix associated with the IP, and increments a counter for those, then print the result. That showed me something like this: 
root@gitlab-02:~/anarcat-scripts# tcpdump -q -i eth0 -n -Q in "(udp or tcp)"   ./asncounter.py --tcpdump                                                                                                                                                                          
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v[v]... for full protocol decode                                                                
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), snapshot length 262144 bytes                                                             
INFO: collecting IPs from stdin, using datfile ipasn_20250523.1600.dat.gz                                                                
INFO: loading datfile /root/.cache/pyasn/ipasn_20250523.1600.dat.gz...                                                                   
INFO: loading /root/.cache/pyasn/asnames.json                       
ASN     count   AS               
136907  7811    HWCLOUDS-AS-AP HUAWEI CLOUDS, HK                                                                                         
[----]  359     [REDACTED]
[----]  313     [REDACTED]
8075    254     MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK, US
[---]   164     [REDACTED]
[----]  136     [REDACTED]
24940   114     HETZNER-AS, DE  
[----]  98      [REDACTED]
14618   82      AMAZON-AES, US                                                                                                           
[----]  79      [REDACTED]
prefix  count                                         
166.108.192.0/20        1294                                                                                                             
188.239.32.0/20 1056                                          
166.108.224.0/20        970                    
111.119.192.0/20        951              
124.243.128.0/18        667                                         
94.74.80.0/20   651                                                 
111.119.224.0/20        622                                         
111.119.240.0/20        566           
111.119.208.0/20        538                                         
[REDACTED]  313
Even without ratios and a total count (which will come later), it was quite clear that Huawei was doing something big on the server. At that point, it was responsible for a quarter to half of the traffic on our GitLab server or about 5-10 queries per second. But just looking at the logs, or per IP hit counts, it was really hard to tell. That traffic is really well distributed. If you look more closely at the output above, you'll notice I redacted a couple of entries except major providers, for privacy reasons. But you'll also notice almost nothing is redacted in the prefix list, why? Because all of those networks are Huawei! Their announcements are kind of bonkers: they have hundreds of such prefixes. Now, clever people in the know will say "of course they do, it's an hyperscaler; just ASN14618 (AMAZON-AES) there is way more announcements, they have 1416 prefixes!" Yes, of course, but they are not generating half of my traffic (at least, not yet). But even then: this also applies to Amazon! This way of counting traffic is way more useful for large scale operations like this, because you group by organisation instead of by server or individual endpoint. And, ultimately, this is why asncounter matters: it allows you to group your traffic by organisation, the place you can actually negotiate with. Now, of course, that assumes those are entities you can talk with. I have written to both Alibaba and Huawei, and have yet to receive a response. I assume I never will. In their defence, I wrote in English, perhaps I should have made the effort of translating my message in Chinese, but then again English is the Lingua Franca of the Internet, and I doubt that's actually the issue.

The Huawei and Facebook blocks Another aside, because this is my blog and I am not looking for a Pullitzer here. So I blocked Huawei from our GitLab server (and before you tear your shirt open: only our GitLab server, everything else is still accessible to them, including our email server to respond to my complaint). I did so 24h after emailing them, and after examining their user agent (UA) headers. Boy that was fun. In a sample of 268 requests I analyzed, they churned out 246 different UAs. At first glance, they looked legit, like: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Safari on a Mac, so far so good. But when you start digging, you notice some strange things, like here's Safari running on Linux: 
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.457.0 Safari/534.3
Was Safari ported to Linux? I guess that's.. possible? But here is Safari running on a 15 year old Ubuntu release (10.10): 
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.10 Chromium/12.0.702.0 Chrome/12.0.702.0 Safari/534.24
Speaking of old, here's Safari again, but this time running on Windows NT 5.1, AKA Windows XP, released 2001, EOL since 2019: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-CA) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
Really? Here's Firefox 3.6, released 14 years ago, there were quite a lot of those: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; lt; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
I remember running those old Firefox releases, those were the days. But to me, those look like entirely fake UAs, deliberately rotated to make it look like legitimate traffic. In comparison, Facebook seemed a bit more legit, in the sense that they don't fake it. most hits are from: 
meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)
which, according their documentation:
crawls the web for use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly
From what I could tell, it was even respecting our rather liberal robots.txt rules, in that it wasn't crawling the sprawling /blame/ or /commit/ endpoints, explicitly forbidden by robots.txt. So I've blocked the Facebook bot in robots.txt and, amazingly, it just went away. Good job Facebook, as much as I think you've given the empire to neo-nazis, cause depression and genocide, you know how to run a crawler, thanks. Huawei was blocked at the web server level, with a friendly 429 status code telling people to contact us (over email) if they need help. And they don't care: they're still hammering the server, from what I can tell, but then again, I didn't block the entire ASN just yet, just the blocks I found crawling the server over a couple hours.

A full asncounter run So what does a day in asncounter look like? Well, you start with a problem, say you're getting too much traffic and want to see where it's from. First you need to sample it. Typically, you'd do that with tcpdump or tailing a log file: 
tail -F /var/log/apache2/*access*.log   awk ' print $2 '   asncounter
If you have lots of traffic or care about your users' privacy, you're not going to log IP addresses, so tcpdump is likely a good option instead: 
tcpdump -q -n   asncounter --input-format=tcpdump --repl
If you really get a lot of traffic, you might want to get a subset of that to avoid overwhelming asncounter, it's not fast enough to do multiple gigabit/second, I bet, so here's only incoming SYN IPv4 packets: 
tcpdump -q -n -Q in "tcp and tcp[tcpflags] & tcp-syn != 0 and (port 80 or port 443)"   asncounter --input-format=tcpdump --repl
In any case, at this point you're staring at a process, just sitting there. If you passed the --repl or --manhole arguments, you're lucky: you have a Python shell inside the program. Otherwise, send SIGHUP to the thing to have it dump the nice tables out: 
pkill -HUP asncounter
Here's an example run: 
> awk ' print $2 ' /var/log/apache2/*access*.log   asncounter
INFO: using datfile ipasn_20250527.1600.dat.gz
INFO: collecting addresses from <stdin>
INFO: loading datfile /home/anarcat/.cache/pyasn/ipasn_20250527.1600.dat.gz...
INFO: finished reading data
INFO: loading /home/anarcat/.cache/pyasn/asnames.json
count   percent ASN AS
12779   69.33   66496   SAMPLE, CA
3361    18.23   None    None
366 1.99    66497   EXAMPLE, FR
337 1.83    16276   OVH, FR
321 1.74    8075    MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK, US
309 1.68    14061   DIGITALOCEAN-ASN, US
128 0.69    16509   AMAZON-02, US
77  0.42    48090   DMZHOST, GB
56  0.3 136907  HWCLOUDS-AS-AP HUAWEI CLOUDS, HK
53  0.29    17621   CNCGROUP-SH China Unicom Shanghai network, CN
total: 18433
count   percent prefix  ASN AS
12779   69.33   192.0.2.0/24    66496   SAMPLE, CA
3361    18.23   None        
298 1.62    178.128.208.0/20    14061   DIGITALOCEAN-ASN, US
289 1.57    51.222.0.0/16   16276   OVH, FR
272 1.48    2001:DB8::/48   66497   EXAMPLE, FR
235 1.27    172.160.0.0/11  8075    MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK, US
94  0.51    2001:DB8:1::/48 66497   EXAMPLE, FR
72  0.39    47.128.0.0/14   16509   AMAZON-02, US
69  0.37    93.123.109.0/24 48090   DMZHOST, GB
53  0.29    27.115.124.0/24 17621   CNCGROUP-SH China Unicom Shanghai network, CN
Those numbers are actually from my home network, not GitLab. Over there, the battle still rages on, but at least the vampire bots are banging their heads against the solid Nginx wall instead of eating the fragile heart of GitLab. We had a significant improvement in latency thanks to the Facebook and Huawei blocks... Here are the "workhorse request duration stats" for various time ranges, 20h after the block:
range mean max stdev
20h 449ms 958ms 39ms
7d 1.78s 5m 14.9s
30d 2.08s 3.86m 8.86s
6m 901ms 27.3s 2.43s
We went from two seconds mean to 500ms! And look at that standard deviation! 39ms! It was ten seconds before! I doubt we'll keep it that way very long but for now, it feels like I won a battle, and I didn't even have to setup anubis or go-away, although I suspect that will unfortunately come. Note that asncounter also supports exporting Prometheus metrics, but you should be careful with this, as it can lead to cardinal explosion, especially if you track by prefix (which can be disabled with --no-prefixes . Folks interested in more details should read the fine manual for more examples, usage, and discussion. It shows, among other things, how to effectively block lots of networks from Nginx, aggregate multiple prefixes, block entire ASNs, and more! So there you have it: I now have the tool I wish I had 20 years ago. Hopefully it will stay useful for another 20 years, although I'm not sure we'll have still have internet in 20 years. I welcome constructive feedback, "oh no you rewrote X", Grafana dashboards, bug reports, pull requests, and "hell yeah" comments. Hacker News, let it rip, I know you can give me another juicy quote for my blog. This work was done as part of my paid work for the Tor Project, currently in a fundraising drive, give us money if you like what you read.

30 May 2025

Russell Coker: Service Setup Difficulties

Marco wrote a blog post opposing hyperscale systems which included We want to use an hyperscaler cloud because our developers do not want to operate a scalable and redundant database just means that you need to hire competent developers and/or system administrators. [1]. I previously wrote a blog post Why Clusters Usually Don t Work [2] and I believe that all the points there are valid today and possibly exacerbated by clusters getting less direct use as clustering is increasingly being done by hyperscale providers. Take a basic need, a MySQL or PostgreSQL database for example. You want it to run and basically do the job and to have good recovery options. You could set it up locally, run backups, test the backups, have a recovery plan for failures, maybe have a hot-spare server if it s really important, have tests for backups and hot-spare server, etc. Then you could have documentation for this so if the person who set it up isn t available when there s a problem they will be able to find out what to do. But the hyperscale option is to just select a database in your provider and have all this just work. If the person who set it up isn t available for recovery in the event of failure the company can just put out a job advert for person with experience on cloud company X and have them just immediately go to work on it. I don t like hyperscale providers as they are all monopolistic companies that do anti-competitive actions. Google should be broken up, Android development and the Play Store should be separated from Gmail etc which should be separated from search and adverts, and all of them should be separated from the GCP cloud service. Amazon should be broken up, running the Amazon store should be separated from selling items on the store, which should be separated from running a video on demand platform, and all of them should be separated from the AWS cloud. Microsoft should be broken up, OS development should be separated from application development all of that should be separated from cloud services (Teams and Office 365), and everything else should be separate from the Azure cloud system. But the cloud providers offer real benefits at small scale. Running a MySQL or PostgreSQL database for local services is easy, it s a simple apt command to install it and then it basically works. Doing backup and recovery isn t so easy. One could say just hire competent people but if you do hire competent people do you want them running MySQL databases etc or have them just click on the create mysql database option on a cloud control panel and then move on to more important things? The FreedomBox project is a great project for installing and managing home/personal services [3]. But it s not about running things like database servers, it s for a high level running mail servers and other things for the user not for the developer. The Debian packaging of Open Stack looks interesting [4], it s a complete setup for running your own hyper scale cloud service. For medium and large organisations running Open Stack could be a good approach. But for small organisations it s cheaper and easier to just use a cloud service to run things. The issue of when to run things in-house and when to put them in the cloud is very complex. I think that if the organisation is going to spend less money on cloud services than on the salary of one sysadmin then it s probably best to have things in the cloud. When cloud costs start to exceed the salary of one person who manages systems then having them spend the extra time and effort to run things locally starts making more sense. There is also an opportunity cost in having a good sysadmin work on the backups for all the different systems instead of letting the cloud provider just do it. Another possibility of course is to run things in-house on low end hardware and just deal with the occasional downtime to save money. Knowingly choosing less reliability to save money can be quite reasonable as long as you have considered the options and all the responsible people are involved in the discussion. The one situation that I strongly oppose is having hyper scale services setup by people who don t understand them. Running a database server on a cloud service because you don t want to spend the time managing it is a reasonable choice in many situations. Running a database server on a cloud service because you don t understand how to setup a database server is never a good choice. While the cloud services are quite resilient there are still ways of breaking the overall system if you don t understand it. Also while it is quite possible for someone to know how to develop for databases including avoiding SQL injection etc but be unable to setup a database server that s probably not going to be common, probably if someone can t set it up (a generally easy task) then they can t do the hard tasks of making it secure.
Related posts:
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Russell Coker: Machine Learning Security

I just read an interesting blog post about ML security recommended by Bruce Schneier [1]. This approach of having 2 AI systems where one processes user input and the second performs actions on quarantined data is good and solves some real problems. But I think the bigger issue is the need to do this. Why not have a multi stage approach, instead of a single user input to do everything (the example given is Can you send Bob the document he requested in our last meeting? Bob s email and the document he asked for are in the meeting notes file ) you could have get Bob s email address from the meeting notes file followed by create a new email to that address and find the document etc. A major problem with many plans for ML systems is that they are based around automating relatively simple tasks. The example of sending an email based on meeting notes is a trivial task that s done many times a day but for which expressing it verbally isn t much faster than doing it the usual way. The usual way of doing such things (manually finding the email address from the meeting notes etc) can be accelerated without ML by having a recent documents access method that gets the notes, having the email address be a hot link to the email program (IE wordprocessor or note taking program being able to call the MUA), having a put all data objects of type X into the clipboard (where X can be email address, URL, filename, or whatever), and maybe optimising the MUA UI. The problems that people are talking about solving via ML and treating everything as text to be arbitrarily parsed can in many cases by solved by having the programs dealing with the data know what they have and have support for calling system services accordingly. The blog post suggests a problem of user fatigue from asking the user to confirm all actions, that is a real concern if the system is going to automate everything such that the user gives a verbal description of the problem and then says yes many times to confirm it. But if the user is at every step of the way pushing the process take this email address attach this file it won t be a series of yes operations with a risk of saying yes once too often. I think that one thing that should be investigated is better integration between services to allow working live on data. If in an online meeting someone says I ll work on task A please send me an email at the end of the meeting with all issues related to it then you should be able to click on their email address in the meeting software to bring up the MUA to send a message and then just paste stuff in. The user could then not immediately send the message and clicking on the email address again would bring up the message in progress to allow adding to it (the behaviour of most MUAs of creating a new message for every click on a mailto:// URL is usually not what you desire). In this example you could of course use ALT-TAB or other methods to switch windows to the email, but imagine the situation of having 5 people in the meeting who are to be emailed about different things and that wouldn t scale. Another thing for the meeting example is that having a text chat for a video conference is a standard feature now and being able to directly message individuals is available in BBB and probably some other online meeting systems. It shouldn t be hard to add a feature to BBB and similar programs to have each user receive an email at the end of the meeting with the contents of every DM chat they were involved in and have everyone in the meeting receive an emailed transcript of the public chat. In conclusion I think that there are real issues with ML security and something like this technology is needed. But for most cases the best option is to just not have ML systems do such things. Also there is significant scope for improving the integration of various existing systems in a non-ML way.
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29 May 2025

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process: 
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%: 
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process: 
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%: 
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

28 May 2025

Yves-Alexis Perez: Running autopkgtests locally

As a small addendum to the last post, here are the relevant commands #debci helpfully provided. First, you need to install the autopkgtest package, obviously:

# apt install autopkgtest Then you need to create a Debian virtual machine to run the tests (put the sid.raw wherever you prefer):

# autopkgtest-build-qemu sid /tmp/sid.raw Then you can run the tests themselves, using the just created virtual machine. The autopkgtest command can use the tests from various sources, using the last argument to the command. In my case what was the most helpful was to run the tests from my git clone (which uses gbp) so I could edit the tests directly. So I didn't give anything for testsrc (but . would work as well I guess).

$ autopkgtest -BU --add-apt-release=unstable --pin-packages=unstable=strongswan -- qemu /tmp/sid.raw --ram-size=4096 --cpus=1 Then I could play with the tests themselves, the number of CPU for the Qemu VM, and run everything in a loop.

27 May 2025

Ravi Dwivedi: Singapore Visa Process

In November 2024, Badri and I applied for a Singapore visa to visit the country. To apply for a Singapore visa, you need to visit an authorized travel agent listed by the Singapore High Commission on their website. Unlike the Schengen visa (where only VFS can process applications), the Singapore visa has many authorized travel agents to choose from. I remember that the list mentioned as many as 25 authorized agents in Chennai. For my application, I randomly selected Ria International in Karol Bagh, New Delhi from the list. Further, you need to apply not more than a month before your travel dates. As our travel dates were in December, we applied in the month of November. For your reference, I submitted the following documents: I didn t have my photograph in the specified dimensions, so the travel agent took my photo on the spot. The visa application was 2,567. Furthermore, I submitted my application on a Saturday and received a call from the travel agent on Tuesday informing me that they had received my visa from the Singapore High Commission. The next day, I visit the travel agent s office and picked up my passport and a black and white copy of my e-visa. Later, I downloaded a PDF of my visa from the website mentioned on it, and took a colored printout myself. Singapore granted me a multiple-entry visa for 2 months, even though I had applied for a 4-day single-entry visa. We were planning to add more countries to this trip; therefore, a multiple-entry visa would be helpful in case we wanted to use Singapore Airport, as it has good connectivity. However, it turned out that flights from Kuala Lumpur were much cheaper than those from Singapore, so we didn t enter Singapore again after leaving. Badri also did the same process but entirely remotely he posted the documents to the visa agency in Chennai, and got his e-visa in a few days followed by his original passport which was delivered by courier. He got his photo taken in the same dimensions mentioned above, and printed as matte finish as instructed. However, the visa agents asked why his photo was looking so faded. We don t know if they thought the matte finish was faded or what. To rectify this, Badri emailed them a digital copy of the photo to them (both the cropped version and the original) and they handled the reprinting on their end (which he never got to see). Before entering Singapore, we had to fill an arrival card - an online form asking a few details about our trip - within 72 hours of our arrival in Singapore. That s it for now. Meet you in the next post. Thanks to Badri for reviewing the draft.

26 May 2025

Otto Kek l inen: Creating Debian packages from upstream Git

Featured image of post Creating Debian packages from upstream GitIn this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling. Key elements of this workflow include: To make the instructions so concrete that anyone can repeat all the steps themselves on a real package, I demonstrate the steps by packaging the command-line tool Entr. It is written in C, has very few dependencies, and its final Debian source package structure is simple, yet exemplifies all the important parts that go into a complete Debian package:
  1. Creating a new packaging repository and publishing it under your personal namespace on salsa.debian.org.
  2. Using dh_make to create the initial Debian packaging.
  3. Posting the first draft of the Debian packaging as a Merge Request (MR) and using Salsa CI to verify Debian packaging quality.
  4. Running local builds efficiently and iterating on the packaging process.

Create new Debian packaging repository from the existing upstream project git repository First, create a new empty directory, then clone the upstream Git repository inside it:
shell 
mkdir debian-entr
cd debian-entr
git clone --origin upstreamvcs --branch master \
 --single-branch https://github.com/eradman/entr.git
Using a clean directory makes it easier to inspect the build artifacts of a Debian package, which will be output in the parent directory of the Debian source directory. The extra parameters given to git clone lay the foundation for the Debian packaging git repository structure where the upstream git remote name is upstreamvcs. Only the upstream main branch is tracked to avoid cluttering git history with upstream development branches that are irrelevant for packaging in Debian. Next, enter the git repository directory and list the git tags. Pick the latest upstream release tag as the commit to start the branch upstream/latest. This latest refers to the upstream release, not the upstream development branch. Immediately after, branch off the debian/latest branch, which will have the actual Debian packaging files in the debian/ subdirectory.
shell 
cd entr
git tag # shows the latest upstream release tag was '5.6'
git checkout -b upstream/latest 5.6
git checkout -b debian/latest
%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'master'      %%
gitGraph:
checkout master
commit id: "Upstream 5.6 release" tag: "5.6"
branch upstream/latest
checkout upstream/latest
commit id: "New upstream version 5.6" tag: "upstream/5.6"
branch debian/latest
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial Debian packaging"
commit id: "Additional change 1"
commit id: "Additional change 2"
commit id: "Additional change 3"
At this point, the repository is structured according to DEP-14 conventions, ensuring a clear separation between upstream and Debian packaging changes, but there are no Debian changes yet. Next, add the Salsa repository as a new remote which called origin, the same as the default remote name in git.
shell 
git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:otto/entr-demo.git
git push --set-upstream origin debian/latest
This is an important preparation step to later be able to create a Merge Request on Salsa that targets the debian/latest branch, which does not yet have any debian/ directory.

Launch a Debian Sid (unstable) container to run builds in To ensure that all packaging tools are of the latest versions, run everything inside a fresh Sid container. This has two benefits: you are guaranteed to have the most up-to-date toolchain, and your host system stays clean without getting polluted by various extra packages. Additionally, this approach works even if your host system is not Debian/Ubuntu.
shell 
cd ..
podman run --interactive --tty --rm --shm-size=1G --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
 --env='DEB*' --volume=$PWD:/tmp/test --workdir=/tmp/test debian:sid bash
Note that the container should be started from the parent directory of the git repository, not inside it. The --volume parameter will loop-mount the current directory inside the container. Thus all files created and modified are on the host system, and will persist after the container shuts down. Once inside the container, install the basic dependencies:
shell 
apt update -q && apt install -q --yes git-buildpackage dpkg-dev dh-make

Automate creating the debian/ files with dh-make To create the files needed for the actual Debian packaging, use dh_make:
shell 
# dh_make --packagename entr_5.6 --single --createorig
Maintainer Name : Otto Kek l inen
Email-Address : otto@debian.org
Date : Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:17:51 +0000
Package Name : entr
Version : 5.6
License : blank
Package Type : single
Are the details correct? [Y/n/q]

Done. Please edit the files in the debian/ subdirectory now.
Due to how dh_make works, the package name and version need to be written as a single underscore separated string. In this case, you should choose --single to specify that the package type is a single binary package. Other options would be --library for library packages (see libgda5 sources as an example) or --indep (see dns-root-data sources as an example). The --createorig will create a mock upstream release tarball (entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz) from the current release directory, which is necessary due to historical reasons and how dh_make worked before git repositories became common and Debian source packages were based off upstream release tarballs (e.g. *.tar.gz). At this stage, a debian/ directory has been created with template files, and you can start modifying the files and iterating towards actual working packaging.
shell 
git add debian/
git commit -a -m "Initial Debian packaging"

Review the files The full list of files after the above steps with dh_make would be: 
 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.Debian
     -- README.source
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- gbp.conf
     -- entr-docs.docs
     -- entr.cron.d.ex
     -- entr.doc-base.ex
     -- manpage.1.ex
     -- manpage.md.ex
     -- manpage.sgml.ex
     -- manpage.xml.ex
     -- postinst.ex
     -- postrm.ex
     -- preinst.ex
     -- prerm.ex
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml.ex
     -- source
       -- format
     -- upstream
       -- metadata.ex
     -- watch.ex
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz
You can browse these files in the demo repository. The mandatory files in the debian/ directory are:
  • changelog,
  • control,
  • copyright,
  • and rules.
All the other files have been created for convenience so the packager has template files to work from. The files with the suffix .ex are example files that won t have any effect until their content is adjusted and the suffix removed. For detailed explanations of the purpose of each file in the debian/ subdirectory, see the following resources:
  • The Debian Policy Manual: Describes the structure of the operating system, the package archive and requirements for packages to be included in the Debian archive.
  • The Developer s Reference: A collection of best practices and process descriptions Debian packagers are expected to follow while interacting with one another.
  • Debhelper man pages: Detailed information of how the Debian package build system works, and how the contents of the various files in debian/ affect the end result.
As Entr, the package used in this example, is a real package that already exists in the Debian archive, you may want to browse the actual Debian packaging source at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/entr/-/tree/debian/latest/debian for reference. Most of these files have standardized formatting conventions to make collaboration easier. To automatically format the files following the most popular conventions, simply run wrap-and-sort -vast or debputy reformat --style=black.

Identify build dependencies The most common reason for builds to fail is missing dependencies. The easiest way to identify which Debian package ships the required dependency is using apt-file. If, for example, a build fails complaining that pcre2posix.h cannot be found or that libcre2-posix.so is missing, you can use these commands:
shell 
$ apt install -q --yes apt-file && apt-file update
$ apt-file search pcre2posix.h
libpcre2-dev: /usr/include/pcre2posix.h
$ apt-file search libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3.0.6
The output above implies that the debian/control should be extended to define a Build-Depends: libpcre2-dev relationship. There is also dpkg-depcheck that uses strace to trace the files the build process tries to access, and lists what Debian packages those files belong to. Example usage:
shell 
dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

Build the Debian sources to generate the .deb package After the first pass of refining the contents of the files in debian/, test the build by running dpkg-buildpackage inside the container:
shell 
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b
The options -uc -us will skip signing the resulting Debian source package and other build artifacts. The -b option will skip creating a source package and only build the (binary) *.deb packages. The output is very verbose and gives a large amount of context about what is happening during the build to make debugging build failures easier. In the build log of entr you will see for example the line dh binary --buildsystem=makefile. This and other dh commands can also be run manually if there is a need to quickly repeat only a part of the build while debugging build failures. To see what files were generated or modified by the build simply run git status --ignored:
shell 
$ git status --ignored
On branch debian/latest

Untracked files:
 (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
 debian/debhelper-build-stamp
 debian/entr.debhelper.log
 debian/entr.substvars
 debian/files

Ignored files:
 (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
 Makefile
 compat.c
 compat.o
 debian/.debhelper/
 debian/entr/
 entr
 entr.o
 status.o
Re-running dpkg-buildpackage will include running the command dh clean, which assuming it is configured correctly in the debian/rules file will reset the source directory to the original pristine state. The same can of course also be done with regular git commands git reset --hard; git clean -fdx. To avoid accidentally committing unnecessary build artifacts in git, a debian/.gitignore can be useful and it would typically include all four files listed as untracked above. After a successful build you would have the following files:
shell 
 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile -> Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- compat.c
   -- compat.o
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.source.md
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- debhelper-build-stamp
     -- docs
     -- entr
       -- DEBIAN
         -- control
         -- md5sums
       -- usr
       -- bin
         -- entr
       -- share
       -- doc
         -- entr
         -- NEWS.gz
         -- README.md
         -- changelog.Debian.gz
         -- copyright
       -- man
       -- man1
       -- entr.1.gz
     -- entr.debhelper.log
     -- entr.substvars
     -- files
     -- gbp.conf
     -- patches
       -- PR149-expand-aliases-in-system-test-script.patch
       -- series
       -- system-test-skip-no-tty.patch
       -- system-test-with-system-binary.patch
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml
     -- source
       -- format
     -- tests
       -- control
     -- upstream
       -- metadata
       -- signing-key.asc
     -- watch
   -- entr
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- entr.o
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- status.o
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr-dbgsym_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
 -- entr_5.6-1.dsc
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.buildinfo
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz
The contents of debian/entr are essentially what goes into the resulting entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb package. Familiarizing yourself with the majority of the files in the original upstream source as well as all the resulting build artifacts is time consuming, but it is a necessary investment to get high-quality Debian packages. There are also tools such as Debcraft that automate generating the build artifacts in separate output directories for each build, thus making it easy to compare the changes to correlate what change in the Debian packaging led to what change in the resulting build artifacts.

Re-run the initial import with git-buildpackage When upstreams publish releases as tarballs, they should also be imported for optimal software supply-chain security, in particular if upstream also publishes cryptographic signatures that can be used to verify the authenticity of the tarballs. To achieve this, the files debian/watch, debian/upstream/signing-key.asc, and debian/gbp.conf need to be present with the correct options. In the gbp.conf file, ensure you have the correct options based on:
  1. Does upstream release tarballs? If so, enforce pristine-tar = True.
  2. Does upstream sign the tarballs? If so, configure explicit signature checking with upstream-signatures = on.
  3. Does upstream have a git repository, and does it have release git tags? If so, configure the release git tag format, e.g. upstream-vcs-tag = %(version%~%.)s.
To validate that the above files are working correctly, run gbp import-orig with the current version explicitly defined:
shell 
$ gbp import-orig --uscan --upstream-version 5.6
gbp:info: Launching uscan...
gpgv: Signature made 7. Aug 2024 07.43.27 PDT
gpgv: using RSA key 519151D83E83D40A232B4D615C418B8631BC7C26
gpgv: Good signature from "Eric Radman <ericshane@eradman.com>"
gbp:info: Using uscan downloaded tarball ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
gbp:info: Importing '../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream/latest'...
gbp:info: Source package is entr
gbp:info: Upstream version is 5.6
gbp:info: Replacing upstream source on 'debian/latest'
gbp:info: Running Postimport hook
gbp:info: Successfully imported version 5.6 of ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
As the original packaging was done based on the upstream release git tag, the above command will fetch the tarball release, create the pristine-tar branch, and store the tarball delta on it. This command will also attempt to create the tag upstream/5.6 on the upstream/latest branch.

Import new upstream versions in the future Forking the upstream git repository, creating the initial packaging, and creating the DEP-14 branch structure are all one-off work needed only when creating the initial packaging. Going forward, to import new upstream releases, one would simply run git fetch upstreamvcs; gbp import-orig --uscan, which fetches the upstream git tags, checks for new upstream tarballs, and automatically downloads, verifies, and imports the new version. See the galera-4-demo example in the Debian source packages in git explained post as a demo you can try running yourself and examine in detail. You can also try running gbp import-orig --uscan without specifying a version. It would fetch it, as it will notice there is now Entr version 5.7 available, and import it.

Build using git-buildpackage From this stage onwards you should build the package using gbp buildpackage, which will do a more comprehensive build.
shell 
gbp buildpackage -uc -us
The git-buildpackage build also includes running Lintian to find potential Debian policy violations in the sources or in the resulting .deb binary packages. Many Debian Developers run lintian -EviIL +pedantic after every build to check that there are no new nags, and to validate that changes intended to previous Lintian nags were correct.

Open a Merge Request on Salsa for Debian packaging review Getting everything perfectly right takes a lot of effort, and may require reaching out to an experienced Debian Developers for review and guidance. Thus, you should aim to publish your initial packaging work on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance, for review and feedback as early as possible. For somebody to be able to easily see what you have done, you should rename your debian/latest branch to another name, for example next/debian/latest, and open a Merge Request that targets the debian/latest branch on your Salsa fork, which still has only the unmodified upstream files. If you have followed the workflow in this post so far, you can simply run:
  1. git checkout -b next/debian/latest
  2. git push --set-upstream origin next/debian/latest
  3. Open in a browser the URL visible in the git remote response
  4. Write the Merge Request description in case the default text from your commit is not enough
  5. Mark the MR as Draft using the checkbox
  6. Publish the MR and request feedback
Once a Merge Request exists, discussion regarding what additional changes are needed can be conducted as MR comments. With an MR, you can easily iterate on the contents of next/debian/latest, rebase, force push, and request re-review as many times as you want. While at it, make sure the Settings > CI/CD page has under CI/CD configuration file the value debian/salsa-ci.yml so that the CI can run and give you immediate automated feedback. For an example of an initial packaging Merge Request, see https://salsa.debian.org/otto/entr-demo/-/merge_requests/1.

Open a Merge Request / Pull Request to fix upstream code Due to the high quality requirements in Debian, it is fairly common that while doing the initial Debian packaging of an open source project, issues are found that stem from the upstream source code. While it is possible to carry extra patches in Debian, it is not good practice to deviate too much from upstream code with custom Debian patches. Instead, the Debian packager should try to get the fixes applied directly upstream. Using git-buildpackage patch queues is the most convenient way to make modifications to the upstream source code so that they automatically convert into Debian patches (stored at debian/patches), and can also easily be submitted upstream as any regular git commit (and rebased and resubmitted many times over). First, decide if you want to work out of the upstream development branch and later cherry-pick to the Debian packaging branch, or work out of the Debian packaging branch and cherry-pick to an upstream branch. The example below starts from the upstream development branch and then cherry-picks the commit into the git-buildpackage patch queue:
shell 
git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
nano entr.c
make
./entr # verify change works as expected
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
git push # submit upstream
gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # extend commit message with DEP-3 metadata
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."
The example below starts by making the fix on a git-buildpackage patch queue branch, and then cherry-picking it onto the upstream development branch:
shell 
gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
nano entr.c
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."
git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # prepare commit message for upstream submission
git push # submit upstream
The key git-buildpackage commands to enter and exit the patch-queue mode are:
shell 
gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
gbp pq export --drop --commit
%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'debian/latest'      %%
gitGraph
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial packaging"
branch patch-queue/debian/latest
checkout patch-queue/debian/latest
commit id: "Delete debian/patches/..."
commit id: "Patch 1 title"
commit id: "Patch 2 title"
commit id: "Patch 3 title"
These can be run at any time, regardless if any debian/patches existed prior, or if existing patches applied cleanly or not, or if there were old patch queue branches around. Note that the extra -b in gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b instructs to build only binary packages, avoiding any nags from dpkg-source that there are modifications in the upstream sources while building in the patches-applied mode.

Programming-language specific dh-make alternatives As each programming language has its specific way of building the source code, and many other conventions regarding the file layout and more, Debian has multiple custom tools to create new Debian source packages for specific programming languages. Notably, Python does not have its own tool, but there is an dh_make --python option for Python support directly in dh_make itself. The list is not complete and many more tools exist. For some languages, there are even competing options, such as for Go there is in addition to dh-make-golang also Gophian. When learning Debian packaging, there is no need to learn these tools upfront. Being aware that they exist is enough, and one can learn them only if and when one starts to package a project in a new programming language.

The difference between source git repository vs source packages vs binary packages As seen in earlier example, running gbp buildpackage on the Entr packaging repository above will result in several files: 
entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc
The entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb is the binary package, which can be installed on a Debian/Ubuntu system. The rest of the files constitute the source package. To do a source-only build, run gbp buildpackage -S and note the files produced: 
entr_5.6-1_source.changes
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc
The source package files can be used to build the binary .deb for amd64, or any architecture that the package supports. It is important to grasp that the Debian source package is the preferred form to be able to build the binary packages on various Debian build systems, and the Debian source package is not the same thing as the Debian packaging git repository contents. 
flowchart LR
git[Git repository<br>branch debian/latest] --> gbp buildpackage -S  src[Source Package<br>.dsc + .tar.xz]
src --> dpkg-buildpackage  bin[Binary Packages<br>.deb]
If the package is large and complex, the build could result in multiple binary packages. One set of package definition files in debian/ will however only ever result in a single source package.

Option to repackage source packages with Files-Excluded lists in the debian/copyright file Some upstream projects may include binary files in their release, or other undesirable content that needs to be omitted from the source package in Debian. The easiest way to filter them out is by adding to the debian/copyright file a Files-Excluded field listing the undesired files. The debian/copyright file is read by uscan, which will repackage the upstream sources on-the-fly when importing new upstream releases. For a real-life example, see the debian/copyright files in the Godot package that lists:
debian 
Files-Excluded: platform/android/java/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar
The resulting repackaged upstream source tarball, as well as the upstream version component, will have an extra +ds to signify that it is not the true original upstream source but has been modified by Debian: 
godot_4.3+ds.orig.tar.xz
godot_4.3+ds-1_amd64.deb

Creating one Debian source package from multiple upstream source packages also possible In some rare cases the upstream project may be split across multiple git repositories or the upstream release may consist of multiple components each in their own separate tarball. Usually these are very large projects that get some benefits from releasing components separately. If in Debian these are deemed to go into a single source package, it is technically possible using the component system in git-buildpackage and uscan. For an example see the gbp.conf and watch files in the node-cacache package. Using this type of structure should be a last resort, as it creates complexity and inter-dependencies that are bound to cause issues later on. It is usually better to work with upstream and champion universal best practices with clear releases and version schemes.

When not to start the Debian packaging repository as a fork of the upstream one Not all upstreams use Git for version control. It is by far the most popular, but there are still some that use e.g. Subversion or Mercurial. Who knows maybe in the future some new version control systems will start to compete with Git. There are also projects that use Git in massive monorepos and with complex submodule setups that invalidate the basic assumptions required to map an upstream Git repository into a Debian packaging repository. In those cases one can t use a debian/latest branch on a clone of the upstream git repository as the starting point for the Debian packaging, but one must revert the traditional way of starting from an upstream release tarball with gbp import-orig package-1.0.tar.gz.

Conclusion Created in August 1993, Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions. In the 32 years since inception, the .deb packaging format and the tooling to work with it have evolved several generations. In the past 10 years, more and more Debian Developers have converged on certain core practices evidenced by https://trends.debian.net/, but there is still a lot of variance in workflows even for identical tasks. Hopefully, you find this post useful in giving practical guidance on how exactly to do the most common things when packaging software for Debian. Happy packaging!

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