Debian Contributions: 2024-11 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Transition management, by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort Emilio has been helping finish the mpi-defaults switch to mpich on 32-bit architectures, and the openmpi transitions. This involves filing bugs for the reverse dependencies, doing NMUs, and requesting removals for outdated (Not Built from Source) binaries on 32-bit architectures where openmpi is no longer available. Those transitions got entangled with a few others, such as the petsc stack, and were blocking many packages from migrating to testing. These transitions were completed in early December.

cPython 3.12.7+ update uploads, by Stefano Rivera Python 3.12 had failed to build on mips64el, due to an obscure dh_strip failure. The mips64el porters never figured it out, but the missing build on mips64el was blocking migration to Debian testing. After waiting a month, enough changes had accumulated in the upstream 3.12 maintenance git branch that we could apply them in the hope of changing the output enough to avoid breaking dh_strip. This worked. Of course there were other things to deal with too. A test started failing due to a Debian-specific patch we carry for python3.x-minimal, and it needed to be reworked. And Stefano forgot to strip the trailing + from PY_VERSION, which confuses some python libraries. This always requires another patch when applying git updates from the maintenance branch. Stefano added a build-time check to catch this mistake in the future. Python 3.12.7 migrated.

Python 3.13 Transition, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson During November the Python 3.13-add transition started. This is the first stage of supporting a new version of Python in Debian archive (after preparatory work), adding it as a new supported but non-default version. All packages with compiled Python extensions need to be re-built to add support for the new version. We have covered the lead-up to this transition in the past. Due to preparation, many of the failures we hit were expected and we had patches waiting in the bug tracker. These could be NMUed to get the transition moving. Others had been known about but hadn t been worked on, yet. Some other packages ran into new issues, as we got further into the transition than we d been able to in preparation. The whole Debian Python team has been helping with this work. The rebuild stage of the 3.13-add transition is now over, but many packages need work before britney will let python3-defaults migrate to testing.

Limiting build concurrency based on available RAM, by Helmut Grohne In recent years, the concurrency of CPUs has been increasing as has the demand for RAM by linkers. What has not been increasing as quickly is the RAM supply in typical machines. As a result, we more frequently run into situations where the package builds exhaust memory when building at full concurrency. Helmut initiated a discussion about generalizing an approach to this in Debian packages. Researching existing code that limits concurrency as well as providing possible extensions to debhelper and dpkg to provide concurrency limits based on available system RAM. Thus far there is consensus on the need for a more general solution, but ideas are still being collected for the precise solution.

MiniDebConf Toulouse at Capitole du Libre The whole Freexian Collaborator team attended MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the Capitole du Libre event. Several members of the team gave talks:

• Santiago spoke on Linux Live Patching in Debian, presenting an update on the idea since DebConf 24. This includes the initial requirements for the livepatch package format, that would be used to distribute the livepatches.
• Stefano, Colin, Enrico, and Carles spoke on Using Debusine to Automate QA.
• Santiago and Roberto spoke on How LTS Goes Beyond LTS.
• Helmut spoke on Cross Building.
• Carles gave a lightning talk on po-debconf-manager.

Stefano and Anupa worked as part of the video team, streaming and recording the event s talks.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano looked into packaging the latest upstream python-falcon version in Debian, in support of the Python 3.13 transition. This appeared to break python-hug, which is sadly looking neglected upstream, and the best course of action is probably its removal from Debian.
• Stefano uploaded videos from various 2024 Debian events to PeerTube and YouTube.
• Stefano and Santiago visited the site for DebConf 2025 in Brest, after the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, to meet with the local team and scout out the venue. The on-going DebConf 25 organization work of last month also included handling the logo and artwork call for proposals.
• Stefano helped the press team to edit a post for bits.debian.org on OpenStreetMap s migration to Debian.
• Carles implemented multiple language support on po-debconf-manager and tested it using Portuguese-Brazilian during MiniDebConf Toulouse. The system was also tested and improved by reviewing more than 20 translations to Catalan, creating merge requests for those packages, and providing user support to new users. Additionally, Carles implemented better status transitions, configuration keys management and other small improvements.
• Helmut sent 32 patches for cross build failures. The wireplumber one was an interactive collaboration with Dylan A ssi.
• Helmut continued to monitor the /usr-move, sent a patch for lib64readline8 and continued several older patch conversations. lintian now reports some aliasing issues in unstable.
• Helmut initiated a discussion on the semantics of *-for-host packages. More feedback is welcome.
• Helmut improved the crossqa.debian.net infrastructure to fail running lintian less often in larger packages.
• Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap mostly dropping applied patches and continuing discussions of submitted patches.
• Helmut prepared a non-maintainer upload of gzip for several long-standing bugs.
• Colin came up with a plan for resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, and began work on converting reverse-dependencies.
• Colin upgraded 42 Python packages to new upstream versions. Some were complex: python-catalogue had some upstream version confusion, pydantic and rpds-py involved several Rust package upgrades as prerequisites, and python-urllib3 involved first packaging python-quart-trio and then vendoring an unpackaged test-dependency.
• Colin contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream.
• Lucas set up a machine to do a rebuild of all ruby reverse dependencies to check what will be broken by adding ruby 3.3 as an alternative interpreter. The tool used for this is mass-rebuild and the initial rebuilds have already started. The ruby interpreter maintainers are planning to experiment with debusine next time.
• Lucas is organizing a Debian Ruby sprint towards the end of January in Paris. The plan of the team is to finish any missing bits of Ruby 3.3 transition at the time, try to push Rails 7 transition and fix RC bugs affecting the ruby ecosystem in Debian.
• Anupa attended a Debian Publicity team meeting in-person during MiniDebCamp Toulouse.
• Anupa moderated and posted in the Debian Administrator group in LinkedIn.

Changes in pinp version 0.0.11 (2024-12-08)

• Standard package maintenance for continuous integration, URL updates, and packaging conventions
• Correct two minor nags in the Rd file

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

The new Firebuild release contains plenty of small fixes and a few notable improvements.

Experimental macOS support The most frequently asked question from people getting to know Firebuild was if it worked on their Mac and the answer sadly used to be that well, it did, but only in a Linux VM. This was far from what they were looking for. Linux and macOS have common UNIX roots, but porting Firebuild to macOS included bigger challenges, like ensuring that dyld(1), macOS s dynamic loader initializes the preloaded interceptor library early enough to catch all interesting calls, and avoid using anything that uses malloc() or thread local variables which are not yet set up then. Preloading libraries on Linux is really easy, running LD_PRELOAD=my_lib.so ls just works if the library exports the symbols to be interposed, while macOS employs multiple lines of defense to prevent applications from using unknown libraries. Firebuild s guide for making DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES honored on Macs can be helpful with other projects as well that rely on injecting libraries. Since GitHub s Arm64 macOS runners don t allow intercepting binaries with arm64e ABI yet, Firebuild s Apple Silicon tests are run at Bitrise, who are proud to be first to provide the latest Xcode stacks and were also quick to make the needed changes to their infrastructure to support Firebuild (thanks! ). Firebuild on macOS can already accelerate simple projects and rebuild itself with Xcode. Since Xcode introduces a lot of nondeterminism to the build, Firebuild can t shine in acceleration with Xcode yet, but can provide nice reports to show which part of the build is the most time consuming and how each sub-command is called. If you would like to try Firebuild on macOS please compile it from the GitHub repository for now. Precompiled binaries will be distributed on the Mac App Store and via CI providers. Contact us to get notified when those channels become available.

Dealing with the Epochalypse Glibc s API provides many functions with time parameters and some of those functions are intercepted by Firebuild. Time parameters used to be passed as 32-bit values on 32-bit systems, preventing them to accurately represent timestamps after year 2038, which is known as the Y2038 problem or the Epochalypse. To deal with the problem glibc 2.34 started providing new function symbol variants with 64-bit time parameters, e.g clock_gettime64() in addition to clock_gettime(). The new 64-bit variants are used when compiling consumers of the API with _TIME_BITS=64 defined. Processes intercepted by Firebuild may have been compiled with or without _TIME_BITS=64, thus libfirebuild now provides both variants on affected systems running glibc >= 34 to work safely with binaries using 64-bit and 32-bit time representation. Many Linux distributions already stopped supporting 32-bit architectures, but Debian and Ubuntu still supports armhf, for example, where the Y2038 problem still applies. Both Debian and Ubuntu performed a transition rebuilding every library (and their reverse dependencies) with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 set where the libraries exported symbols that changed when switching to 64-bit time representation (thanks to Steve Langasek for driving this!) . Thanks to the transition most programs are ready for 2038, but interposer libraries are trickier to fix and if you maintain one it might be a good idea to check if it works well both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries. Faketime, for example is not fixed yet, see #1064555.

Select passed through environment variables with regular expressions Firebuild filters out most of the environment variables set when starting a build to make the build more reproducible and achieve higher cache hit rate. Extra environment variables to pass through can be specified on the command line one by one, but with many similarly named variables this may become hard to maintain. With regular expressions this just became easier:

firebuild -o 'env_vars.pass_through += "MY_VARS_.*"' my_build_command

If you are not interested in acceleration just would like to explore what the build does by generating a report you can simply pass all variables:

firebuild -r -o 'env_vars.pass_through += ".*"' my_build_command

Other highlights from the 0.8.3 release

• Fixed and nicer report in Chrome and other WebKit based browsers
• Support GLibc 2.39 by intercepting pidfd_spawn() and pidfd_spawnp()
• Even faster Rust build acceleration

For all the changes please check out the release page on GitHub! (This post is also published on The Firebuild blog.)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.2-1 (2024-12-05)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.2 (Smooth Caffeine)
  • Workarounds for regressions in pre-release versions of GCC 15
  • More selective detection of symmetric/hermitian matrices by various functions

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.1-1 (2024-11-24) (GitHub Only)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.1 (Smooth Caffeine)
  • Fix for index_min() and index_max() to ensure that the first index of equal extremum values is found

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

1. Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar
2. Introducing reproduce.debian.net
3. New landing page design
4. SBOMs for Python packages
5. Debian updates
6. Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4
7. PyPI now supports digital attestations
8. Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries
9. Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible
10. Website updates
11. Upstream patches
12. Misc development news
13. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar The Reproducible Builds community sadly announced it has lost its founding member, Lunar. J r my Bobbio aka Lunar passed away on Friday November 8th in palliative care in Rennes, France. Lunar was instrumental in starting the Reproducible Builds project in 2013 as a loose initiative within the Debian project. He was the author of our earliest status reports and many of our key tools in use today are based on his design. Lunar s creativity, insight and kindness were often noted. You can view our full tribute elsewhere on our website. He will be greatly missed.

Introducing reproduce.debian.net In happier news, this month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. In November, reproduce.debian.net began rebuilding Debian unstable on the amd64 architecture, but throughout the MiniDebConf, it had attempted to rebuild 66% of the official archive. From this, it could be determined that it is currently possible to bit-for-bit reproduce and corroborate approximately 78% of the actual binaries distributed by Debian that is, using the .buildinfo files hosted by Debian itself. reproduce.debian.net also contains instructions how to setup one s own rebuilderd instance, and we very much invite everyone with a machine to spare to setup their own version and to share the results. Whilst rebuilderd is still in development, it has been used to reproduce Arch Linux since 2019. We are especially looking for installations targeting Debian architectures other than i386 and amd64.

New landing page design As part of a very productive partnership with the Sovereign Tech Fund and Neighbourhoodie, we are pleased to unveil our new homepage/landing page. We are very happy with our collaboration with both STF and Neighbourhoodie (including many changes not directly related to the website), and look forward to working with them in the future.

SBOMs for Python packages The Python Software Foundation has announced a new cross-functional project for SBOMs and Python packages . Seth Michael Larson writes that the project is specifically looking to solve these issues :

• Enable Python users that require SBOM documents (likely due to regulations like CRA or SSDF) to self-serve using existing SBOM generation tools.
• Solve the phantom dependency problem, where non-Python software is bundled in Python packages but not recorded in any metadata. This makes the job of software composition analysis (SCA) tools difficult or impossible.
• Make the adoption work by relevant projects such as build backends, auditwheel-esque tools, as minimal as possible. Empower users who are interested in having better SBOM data for the Python projects they are using to be able to contribute engineering time towards that goal.

A GitHub repository for the initiative is available, and there are a number of queries, comments and remarks on Seth s Discourse forum post.

Debian updates There was significant development within Debian this month. Firstly, at the recent MiniDebConf in Toulouse, France, Holger Levsen gave a Debian-specific talk on rebuilding packages distributed from ftp.debian.org that is to say, how to reproduce the results from the official Debian build servers: Holger described the talk as follows:

For more than ten years, the Reproducible Builds project has worked towards reproducible builds of many projects, and for ten years now we have build Debian packages twice with maximal variations applied to see if they can be build reproducible still. Since about a month, we ve also been rebuilding trying to exactly match the builds being distributed via ftp.debian.org. This talk will describe the setup and the lessons learned so far, and why the results currently are what they are (spoiler: they are less than 30% reproducible), and what we can do to fix that.

The Debian Project Leader, Andreas Tille, was present at the talk and remarked later in his Bits from the DPL update that:

It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I d like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar s contributions and legacy. Personally, I ve encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.

Holger s slides and video in .webm format are available.
Next, rebuilderd is the server to monitor package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results. This month, version 0.21.0 released, most notably with improved support for binNMUs by Jochen Sprickerhof and updating the rebuilderd-debian.sh integration to the latest debrebuild version by Holger Levsen. There has also been significant work to get the rebuilderd package into the Debian archive, in particular, both rust-rebuilderd-common version 0.20.0-1 and rust-rust-lzma version 0.6.0-1 were packaged by kpcyrd and uploaded by Holger Levsen. Related to this, Holger Levsen submitted three additional issues against rebuilderd as well:

• rebuildctl should be more verbose when encountering issues. [ ]
• Please add an option to used randomised queues. [ ]
• Scheduling and re-scheduling multiple packages at once. [ ]

and lastly, Jochen Sprickerhof submitted one an issue requested that rebuilderd downloads the source package in addition to the .buildinfo file [ ] and kpcyrd also submitted and fixed an issue surrounding dependencies and clarifying the license [ ]
Separate to this, back in 2018, Chris Lamb filed a bug report against the sphinx-gallery package as it generates unreproducible content in various ways. This month, however, Dmitry Shachnev finally closed the bug, listing the multiple sub-issues that were part of the problem and how they were resolved.
Elsewhere, Roland Clobus posted to our mailing list this month, asking for input on a bug in Debian s ca-certificates-java package. The issue is that the Java key management tools embed timestamps in its output, and this output ends up in the /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts file on the generated ISO images. A discussion resulted from Roland s post suggesting some short- and medium-term solutions to the problem.
Holger Levsen uploaded some packages with reproducibility-related changes:

• devscripts versions 2.24.3, 2.24.4 and 2.24.5 were uploaded, including several fixes for the debrebuild and debootsnap and scripts.
• cdbs version 0.4.167 uploaded in order to drop dh_buildinfo support, as dpkg has generated .buildinfo files since 2016 and the results of dh_buildinfo are typically unreproducible. Related to this a mass bug filing by Helmut Grohne intended to remove the obsolete and deprecated dh-buildinfo package from the archive. At the time of writing, this still affects 311 packages in Debian unstable.

Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 5 were updated and 21 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues in Debian.

Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4 On our mailing list this month, Herv Boutemy reported the latest release of Maven (4.0.0-beta-5) has reproducible builds enabled by default. In his mailing list post, Herv mentions that this story started during our Reproducible Builds summit in Hamburg , where he created the upstream issue that builds on a multi-year effort to have Maven builds configured for reproducibility.

PyPI now supports digital attestations Elsewhere in the Python ecosystem and as reported on LWN and elsewhere, the Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalised support for PEP 740 ( Index support for digital attestations ). Trail of Bits, who performed much of the development work, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone:

One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [ ] This isn t an acceptable end state (cryptographic attestations have defensive properties only insofar as they re actually verified), so we re looking into ways to bring verification to individual installing clients. In particular, we re currently working on a plugin architecture for pip that will enable users to load verification logic directly into their pip install flows.

There was an in-depth discussion on LWN s announcement page, as well as on Hacker News.

Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries At BENEVOL, the Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution workshop in Namur, Belgium, Tom Mens and Alexandre Decan presented their paper, An Overview and Catalogue of Dependency Challenges in Open Source Software Package Registries . The abstract of their paper is as follows:

While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a catalogue of dependency-related challenges that come with relying on OSS packages or libraries. The catalogue is based on the scientific literature on empirical research that has been conducted to understand, quantify and overcome these challenges. [ ]

A PDF of the paper is available online.

Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible Motiejus Jak ty posted an interesting and practical blog post on his successful attempt to reproduce the Zig programming language without using the pre-compiled binaries checked into the repository, and despite the circular dependency inherent in its bootstrapping process. As a summary, Motiejus concludes that:

I can now confidently say (and you can also check, you don t need to trust me) that there is nothing hiding in zig1.wasm [the checked-in binary] that hasn t been checked-in as a source file.

The full post is full of practical details, and includes a few open questions.

Website updates Notwithstanding the significant change to the landing page (screenshot above), there were an enormous number of changes made to our website this month. This included:

• Alex Feyerke and Mariano Gim nez:
  • Dramatically overhaul the website s landing page with new benefit cards tailored to the expected visitors to our website and a reworking of the visual hierarchy and design. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • Update the System images page to document the e2fsprogs approach. [ ]
• Chris Lamb:
  • Cachebust every CSS file per-release. [ ]
  • Replace some inline markdown with HTML. [ ]
  • Use spaces on the Publications page. [ ]
  • Add a news article about the passing of Lunar. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Add a black memorial band to the top of the page. [ ]
• FC (Fay) Stegerman:
  • Replace more inline markdown with HTML on the Success stories page. [ ]
  • Add some links, fix some other links and correct some spelling errors on the Tools page. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add a historical presentation ( Reproducible builds everywhere eg. in Debian, OpenWrt and LEDE ) from October 2016. [ ]
  • Add jochensp and Oejet to the list of known contributors. [ ][ ]
• Julia Kr ger:
  • Add a new Stripping of unreproducible information page to the documentation. [ ]
• Ninette Adhikari & hulkoba:
  • Add/rework the list of success stories into a new page that clearly shows milestones in Reproducible Builds. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Philip Rinn:
  • Import 47 historical weekly reports. [ ]
• hulkoba:
  • Add alt text to almost all images (!). [ ][ ]
  • Fix a number of links on the Talks . [ ][ ]
  • Avoid so-called ghost buttons by not using <button> elements as links, as the affordance of a <button> implies an action with (potentially) a side effect. [ ][ ]
  • Center the sponsor logos on the homepage. [ ]
  • Move publications and generate them instead from a data.yml file with an improved layout. [ ][ ]
  • Make a large number of small but impactful stylisting changes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Expand the Tools to include a number of missing tools, fix some styling issues and fix a number of stale/broken links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • clisp (fix contributed by Bruno Haible)
  • conky (date-related issue)
  • emacs-auctex (date-related gzip issue)
  • javadoc (filesystem ordering issue)
  • jboss-websocket-1.0-api (embeds uname -r)
  • lcms2 (CPU issue)
  • LiE (ASLR-related issue)
  • make_ext4fs (toolchain-related issue for for VM images)
  • obs-build (issue when running builds with certain CPU types or core numbers)
  • perl-Time-modules (fails to build far in the future)
  • python-bson (fails to build far in the future)
  • python-exiv2 (fails to build far in the future)
  • python-moto (date-related gzip issue)
  • python-pyhanko-certvalidator (fails to build far in the future)
  • python-python-gvm (concurrency-related issue)
  • python310 (fails to build far in the future)
  • python313 (fails to build far in the future)
  • reproducible-faketools (toolchain for emacs)
  • shadowsocks-rust (date-related issue)
  • swipl (fails to build far in the future)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1087330 filed against python-pydash.
  • #1087485 filed against fritzconnection.
  • #1087486 filed against tracy.
  • #1088238 filed against rust-broot.
  • #1088353 filed against python-aiovlc.
  • #1088742 filed against python-aiohomekit.
• James Addison:
  • #1088144 filed against cdbs.

Misc development news

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for the openSUSE distribution.
• Martin Abente Lahaye updated diffoscope to fix a crash when objdump is missing. [ ]
• On our mailing list, Jan-Benedict Glaw announced the publication of the fifth NetBSD Reproducibility Report

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. In November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

• reproduce.debian.net-related changes:
  • Create and introduce a new reproduce.debian.net service and subdomain [ ]
  • Make a large number of documentation changes relevant to rebuilderd. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Explain a temporary workaround for a specific issue in rebuilderd. [ ]
  • Setup another rebuilderd instance on the o4 node and update installation documentation to match. [ ][ ]
  • Make a number of helpful/cosmetic changes to the interface, such as clarifying terms and adding links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deploy configuration to the /opt and /var directories. [ ][ ]
  • Add an infancy (or alpha ) disclaimer. [ ][ ]
  • Add more notes to the temporary rebuilderd documentation. [ ]
  • Commit an nginx configuration file for reproduce.debian.net s Stats page. [ ]
  • Commit a rebuilder-worker.conf configuration for the o5 node. [ ]
• Debian-related changes:
  • Grant jspricke and jochensp access to the o5 node. [ ][ ]
  • Build the qemu package with the nocheck build flag. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Adapt the update_jdn.sh script for new Debian trixie systems. [ ]
  • Stop installing the PostgreSQL database engine on the o4 and o5 nodes. [ ]
  • Prevent accidental reboots of the o4 node because of a long-running job owned by josch. [ ][ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo addressed a number of issues with reproduce.debian.net [ ][ ][ ][ ]. And lastly, both Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ] performed node maintenance.
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:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Changes in anytime version 0.3.10 (2024-12-02)

• A new documentation site was added.
• Continuous Integration now uses run.sh from r-ci with bspm
• Logical input vectors are now recognised as an error (#121)
• Additional dot-separated format '%Y.%m.%d' is supported
• Other small updates were made throughout the package
• No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package
• Switch Rcpp include file to Rcpp/Lightest
• We recommend ~/.R/Makevars compiler flag options -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-nonnull -Wno-parentheses
• The tinytest runner was simplified
• NA values from conversion now trigger a warning

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

• import QtQuick3DPrivate qt6-multimedia - no Private QML module QTBUG-131753.
• import QtQuickPrivate qt6-graphs - no Private QML module QTBUG-131754.
• import QtQuickTimeline qt6-quicktimeline - the correct QML name is QtQuick.Timeline QTBUG-131755.
• import QtQuickControls2 qt6-webengine - looks like a porting bug as the QML6 modules name is QtQuick.Controls QTBUG-131756.
• import QtGraphicalEffects kquickimageeditor - the correct name is for QML6 is qt5compat.graphicaleffects, properly as it is an example nobody checks it kquickimageeditor!7.

• mount the root filesystem in /mnt
• btrfs filesystem resize 6G /mnt
• umount the root filesystem
• lvresize -L 7G vgname/lvname
• pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize /dev/mapper/pvname 8G
• cryptsetup resize --device-size 9G name

• cryptsetup resize name
• pvresize /dev/mapper/pvname
• lvresize -L 100% vgname/lvname
• mount the root filesystem in /mnt
• btrfs filesystem resize max /mnt
• umount the root filesystem

gsettings list-recursively

gsettings set <schema> <key> <value>

gsettings reset <schema> <key>

gsettings set <schema>:<path> <key> <value>

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key ''

• In gnome-shell settings, keyboard, shortcuts, windows, set "Raise window if covered, otherwise lower it" to "Super+Escape"
• In gnome-tweak-tool, Windows, set "Focus on Hover"

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides focus-change-on-pointer-rest false

for i in  seq 1 9 ; do gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-$i '[]'; done

• Multitasking:
  • disable hot corner
  • disable active edges
  • set a fixed number of workspaces
  • workspaces on all displays
  • switching includes apps from current workspace only
• Sound:
  • disable system sounds
• Keyboard
  • Compose Key set to Caps Lock
  • View and Customize Shortcuts:
    • Launchers
      • launch help browser: remove
    • Navigation
      • move to workspace on the left: Super+Left
      • move to workspace on the right: Super+Right
      • move window one monitor : remove
      • move window one workspace to the left: Shift+Super+Left
      • move window one workspace to the right: Shift+Super+Right
      • move window to : remove
      • switch system : remove
      • switch to : remove
      • switch windows : disabled
    • Screenshots
      • Record a screenshot interactively: Super+Print
      • Take a screenshot interactively: Print
      • Disable everything else
    • System
      • Focus the active notification: remove
      • Open the applcation menu: remove
      • Restore the keyboard shortctus: remove
      • Show all applications: remove
      • Show the notification list: remove
      • Show the overvire: remove
      • Show the run command prompt: remove (the default Gnome launcher is not for me) Super+F2 (or remove to leave it to the terminal)
    • Windows
      • Close window: remove
      • Hide window: remove
      • Maximize window: remove
      • Move window: remove
      • Raise window if covered, otherwise lower it: Super+Escape
      • Resize window: remove
      • Restore window: remove
      • Toggle maximization state: remove
  • Custom shortcuts
    • xfrun4, launching xfrun4, bound to Super+F2
• Accessibility:
  • disable "Enable animations"

• Keyboard & Mouse
  • Overview shortcut: Right Super. This cannot be disabled, but since my keyboard doesn't have a Right Super button, that's good enough for me. Oddly, I cannot find this in gsettings.
• Window titlebars
  • Double-Click: Toggle-Maximize
  • Middle-Click: Lower
  • Secondary-Click: Menu
• Windows
  • Resize with secondary click

• Shortcuts
  • New tab: Super+T
  • New window: Super+N
  • Close tab: disabled
  • Close window: disabled
  • Copy: Super+C
  • Paste: Super+V
  • Search: all disabled
  • Previous tab: Super+Page Up
  • Next tab: Super+Page Down
  • Move tab : Disabled
  • Switch to tab N: Super+Fn (only available after disabling overview)
  • Switch to tab N with Alt+Fn cannot be configured in the UI: Alt+Fn is detected as simply Fn. It can however be set with gsettings: sh for i in seq 1 12 ; do gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings:/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/keybindings/ switch-to-tab-$i "<Alt>F$i"; done
• Profile
  • Text
    • Sound: disable terminal bell

for n in  seq 1 12 ; do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland.keybindings switch-to-session-$n '[]'; done
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-down '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-up '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface menubar-accel '[]'

$ gsettings list-recursively grep F10
org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings switch-to-tab-10 '<Alt>F10'

• Appearance:
  • dark mode

• Fonts
  • Antialiasing: Subpixel
• Top Bar
  • Clock/Weekday: enable (why is this not a default?)

• General
  • Theme variant: Dark (somehow it wasn't picked by up from the system settings)
• Profile
  • Colors
    • Background: #000

• Search
  • disable application search
• Removable media
  • set everything to "ask what to do"
• Default applications
  • Web: Chromium
  • Mail: mutt
  • Calendar: khal is not sadly an option
  • Video: mpv
  • Photos: Geequie

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-delay 30

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.apps-menu apps-menu-toggle-menu '[]'

• Removable Drive Menu: why is this not on by default?
• Workspace Indicator
• Ubuntu Appindicators (apt install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator and restart Gnome)

gsettings list-recursively grep custom-key
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings ['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/']

• fuzzel does not start
• gmrun is gtk2, last updated in 2016, but works fine
• kupfer segfaults as I type
• rofi shows, but can't get keboard input
• shellex shows a white bar at top of the screen and lots of errors on stderr
• superkb wants to grab the screen for hotkeys
• synapse searched news on the internet as I typed, which is a big no for me
• trabucco crashes on startup
• wofi works but looks like very much an acquired taste, though it has some completion that makes it more useful than Gnome's run dialog
• xfrun4 (package xfce4-appfinder) struggles on wayland, being unable to center its window and with the pulldown appearing elsewhere in the screen, but it otherwise works

• Figure out what is still binding F10 to menu, and what I can do about it
• Figure out how to reduce the size of window titlebars, which to my taste should be unobtrusive and not take 2.7% of vertical screen size each. There's a minwaita theme which isn't packaged in Debian. There's a User Theme extension, and then the whole theming can of worms to open. For another day.
• Figure out if Gnome can be convinced to resize popup windows? Take the Gnome Terminal shortcut preferences for example: it takes of the vertical screen and can only display of all available shortcuts, and I cannot find a valid reason why I shouldn't be allowed to enlarge it vertically.
• Figure out if I can place shortcut launcher icons in the top panel, and how

Changes in version 0.0.10 (2024-11-29)

• Package maintenance updating continuous integration script versions as well as coverage link from README, and switching to Authors@R
• C++ compilation standards updated to C++17 to comply with libapt-pkg

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

$ sudo apt install sublist3r

$ sublist3r -d example.com -o subdomains-example.com.txt
                 ____        _     _ _     _   _____
                / ___  _   _   __   (_)___   _ ___ / _ __
                \___ \        &apos_ \    / __  __   _ \  &apos__ 
                 ___)    _     _)     \__ \  _ ___)    
                 ____/ \__,_ _.__/ _ _ ___/\__ ____/ _ 
                # Coded By Ahmed Aboul-Ela - @aboul3la
[-] Enumerating subdomains now for example.com
[-] Searching now in Baidu..
[-] Searching now in Yahoo..
[-] Searching now in Google..
[-] Searching now in Bing..
[-] Searching now in Ask..
[-] Searching now in Netcraft..
[-] Searching now in DNSdumpster..
[-] Searching now in Virustotal..
[-] Searching now in ThreatCrowd..
[-] Searching now in SSL Certificates..
[-] Searching now in PassiveDNS..
Process DNSdumpster-8:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/multiprocessing/process.py", line 314, in _bootstrap
    self.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sublist3r.py", line 269, in run
    domain_list = self.enumerate()
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sublist3r.py", line 649, in enumerate
    token = self.get_csrftoken(resp)
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sublist3r.py", line 644, in get_csrftoken
    token = csrf_regex.findall(resp)[0]
            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^
IndexError: list index out of range
[!] Error: Google probably now is blocking our requests
[~] Finished now the Google Enumeration ...
[!] Error: Virustotal probably now is blocking our requests
[-] Saving results to file: subdomains-example.com.txt
[-] Total Unique Subdomains Found: 7
AS207960 Test Intermediate - example.com
www.example.com
dev.example.com
m.example.com
products.example.com
support.example.com
m.testexample.com

About Tryton 7.0 LTS Lately Mathias has been busy packaging Tryton 7.0 LTS. As the LTS tag implies, this release is recommended for production deployments since it will be supported until November 2028. This release brings numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and various new features. As part of this work, 41 new Tryton modules and 3 dependency packages have been added to Debian, significantly broadening the options available to Debian users and improving integration with Tryton systems.

Running different versions of Tryton on different Debian releases To provide extended compatibility, a dedicated Tryton mirror is being managed and is available at https://debian.m9s.biz/debian/. This mirror hosts backports for all supported Tryton series, ensuring availability for a variety of Debian releases and deployment scenarios. These initiatives highlight MBSolutions technical contributions to the Tryton community, made possible by Freexian s financial backing. Together, we are advancing the Tryton ecosystem for Debian users.

• If you search for a bus ride and enter the correct name for the bus stop, it will still add some walk from and to the station. The issue here is that we use different backends and not all backends share the same geo coordinate. That's why Itinerary needs to add some heuristics to delete those paths.
• Instead of displaying just a small station map of one bus stop in the inner city, it showed complete W rzburg inner city, as there is one big park around the inner city (named "Ringpark").
• W rzburg has a quite big bus station but the platform information were missing in the map, so we tweaked the CSS to display the platform. To be sure, that we don't fix only W rzburg, we also looked at Greifswald and Aix-en-Provence if they are following the same name scheme.

1. Create an annotated git tag, where the name of the tag is the software version I m releasing, and the annotation is the release notes for that version.
2. Run git release in the repository.
3. There is no step 3.

Sidebar: annotated what-now?!? The annotated tag is one git s best-kept secrets. They ve been available in git for practically forever (I ve been using them since at least 2014, which is practically forever in software development), yet almost everyone I mention them to has never heard of them. A tag , in git parlance, is a repository-unique named label that points to a single commit (as identified by the commit s SHA1 hash). Annotating a tag is simply associating a block of free-form text with that tag. Creating an annotated tag is simple-sauce: git tag -a tagname will open up an editor window where you can enter your annotation, and git tag -a -m "some annotation" tagname will create the tag with the annotation some annotation . Retrieving the annotation for a tag is straightforward, too: git show tagname will display the annotation along with all the other tag-related information. Now that we know all about annotated tags, let s talk about how to use them to make software releases freaking awesome.

Step 1: Create the Annotated Git Tag As I just mentioned, creating an annotated git tag is pretty simple: just add a -a (or --annotate, if you enjoy typing) to your git tag command, and WHAM! annotation achieved. Releases, though, typically have unique and ever-increasing version numbers, which we want to encode in the tag name. Rather than having to look at the existing tags and figure out the next version number ourselves, we can have software do the hard work for us. Enter: git-version-bump. This straightforward program takes one mandatory argument: major, minor, or patch, and bumps the corresponding version number component in line with Semantic Versioning principles. If you pass it -n, it opens an editor for you to enter the release notes, and when you save out, the tag is automagically created with the appropriate name. Because the program is called git-version-bump, you can call it as a git command: git version-bump. Also, because version-bump is long and unwieldy, I have it aliased to vb, with the following entry in my ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
    vb = version-bump -n

Of course, you don t have to use git-version-bump if you don t want to (although why wouldn t you?). The important thing is that the only step you take to go from here is our current codebase in main to everything as of this commit is version X.Y.Z of this software , is the creation of an annotated tag that records the version number being released, and the metadata that goes along with that release.

Step 2: Run git release As I said earlier, I ve been using this release process for over a decade now. So long, in fact, that when I started, GitHub Actions didn t exist, and so a lot of the things you d delegate to a CI runner these days had to be done locally, or in a more ad-hoc manner on a server somewhere. This is why step 2 in the release process is run git release . It s because historically, you can t do everything in a CI run. Nowadays, most of my repositories have this in the .git/config:

[alias]
    release = push --tags

Older repositories which, for one reason or another, haven t been updated to the new hawtness, have various other aliases defined, which run more specialised scripts (usually just rake release, for Ruby libraries), but they re slowly dying out. The reason why I still have this alias, though, is that it standardises the release process. Whether it s a Ruby gem, a Rust crate, a bunch of protobuf definitions, or whatever else, I run the same command to trigger a release going out. It means I don t have to think about how I do it for this project, because every project does it exactly the same way.

The Wiring Behind the Button

It wasn t the button that was the problem. It was the miles of wiring, the hundreds of miles of cables, the circuits, the relays, the machinery. The engine was a massive, sprawling, complex, mind-bending nightmare of levers and dials and buttons and switches. You couldn t just slap a button on the wall and expect it to work. But there should be a button. A big, fat button that you could press and everything would be fine again. Just press it, and everything would be back to normal.

• Red Dwarf: Better Than Life

Once you ve accepted that your release process should be as simple as creating an annotated tag and running one command, you do need to consider what happens afterwards. These days, with the near-universal availability of CI runners that can do anything you need in an isolated, reproducible environment, the work required to go from annotated tag to release artifacts can be scripted up and left to do its thing. What that looks like, of course, will probably vary greatly depending on what you re releasing. I can t really give universally-applicable guidance, since I don t know your situation. All I can do is provide some of my open source work as inspirational examples. For starters, let s look at a simple Rust crate I ve written, called strong-box. It s a straightforward crate, that provides ergonomic and secure cryptographic functionality inspired by the likes of NaCl. As it s just a crate, its release script is very straightforward. Most of the complexity is working around Cargo s inelegant mandate that crate version numbers are specified in a TOML file. Apart from that, it s just a matter of building and uploading the crate. Easy! Slightly more complicated is action-validator. This is a Rust CLI tool which validates GitHub Actions and Workflows (how very meta) against a published JSON schema, to make sure you haven t got any syntax or structural errors. As not everyone has a Rust toolchain on their local box, the release process helpfully build binaries for several common OSes and CPU architectures that people can download if they choose. The release process in this case is somewhat larger, but not particularly complicated. Almost half of it is actually scaffolding to build an experimental WASM/NPM build of the code, because someone seemed rather keen on that. Moving away from Rust, and stepping up the meta another notch, we can take a look at the release process for git-version-bump itself, my Ruby library and associated CLI tool which started me down the Just Tag It Already rabbit hole many years ago. In this case, since gemspecs are very amenable to programmatic definition, the release process is practically trivial. Remove the boilerplate and workarounds for GitHub Actions bugs, and you re left with about three lines of actual commands. These approaches can certainly scale to larger, more complicated processes. I ve recently implemented annotated-tag-based releases in a proprietary software product, that produces Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat, and Windows packages, as well as Docker images, and it takes all of the information it needs from the annotated tag. I m confident that this approach will successfully serve them as they expand out to build AMIs, GCP machine images, and whatever else they need in their release processes in the future.

Objection, Your Honour! I can hear the howl of the but, actuallys coming over the horizon even as I type. People have a lot of Big Feelings about why this release process won t work for them. Rather than overload this article with them, I ve created a companion article that enumerates the objections I ve come across, and answers them. I m also available for consulting if you d like a personalised, professional opinion on your specific circumstances.

DVD Bonus Feature: Pre-releases Unless you re addicted to surprises, it s good to get early feedback about new features and bugfixes before they make it into an official, general-purpose release. For this, you can t go past the pre-release. The major blocker to widespread use of pre-releases is that cutting a release is usually a pain in the behind. If you ve got to edit changelogs, and modify version numbers in a dozen places, then you re entirely justified in thinking that cutting a pre-release for a customer to test that bugfix that only occurs in their environment is too much of a hassle. The thing is, once you ve got releases building from annotated tags, making pre-releases on every push to main becomes practically trivial. This is mostly due to another fantastic and underused Git command: git describe. How git describe works is, basically, that it finds the most recent commit that has an associated annotated tag, and then generates a string that contains that tag s name, plus the number of commits between that tag and the current commit, with the current commit s hash included, as a bonus. That is, imagine that three commits ago, you created an annotated release tag named v4.2.0. If you run git describe now, it will print out v4.2.0-3-g04f5a6f (assuming that the current commit s SHA starts with 04f5a6f). You might be starting to see where this is going. With a bit of light massaging (essentially, removing the leading v and replacing the -s with .s), that string can be converted into a version number which, in most sane environments, is considered newer than the official 4.2.0 release, but will be superceded by the next actual release (say, 4.2.1 or 4.3.0). If you re already injecting version numbers into the release build process, injecting a slightly different version number is no work at all. Then, you can easily build release artifacts for every commit to main, and make them available somewhere they won t get in the way of the official releases. For example, in the proprietary product I mentioned previously, this involves uploading the Debian packages to a separate component (prerelease instead of main), so that users that want to opt-in to the prerelease channel simply modify their sources.list to change main to prerelease. Management have been extremely pleased with the easy availability of pre-release packages; they ve been gleefully installing them willy-nilly for testing purposes since I rolled them out. In fact, even while I ve been writing this article, I was asked to add some debug logging to help track down a particularly pernicious bug. I added the few lines of code, committed, pushed, and went back to writing. A few minutes later (next week s job is to cut that in-process time by at least half), the person who asked for the extra logging ran apt update; apt upgrade, which installed the newly-built package, and was able to progress in their debugging adventure. Continuous Delivery: It s Not Just For Hipsters.

+1, Informative Hopefully, this has spurred you to commit your immortal soul to the Church of the Annotated Tag. You may tithe by buying me a refreshing beverage. Alternately, if you re really keen to adopt more streamlined release management processes, I m available for consulting engagements.

1. Create an annotated Git tag;
2. Run a single command to trigger the release pipeline.

But I automatically generate my release notes from commit messages! This one is really easy to solve: have the release note generation tool feed directly into the annotation. Boom! Headshot.

But all these files need to be edited to make a release! No, they absolutely don t. But I can see why you might think you do, given how inflexible some packaging environments can seem, and since that s how we ve always done it .

Language Packages Most languages require you to encode the version of the library or binary in a file that you want to revision control. This is teh suck, but I m yet to encounter a situation that can t be worked around some way or another. In Ruby, for instance, gemspec files are actually executable Ruby code, so I call code (that s part of git-version-bump, as an aside) to calculate the version number from the git tags. The Rust build tool, Cargo, uses a TOML file, which isn t as easy, but a small amount of release automation is used to take care of that.

Distribution Packages If you re building Linux distribution packages, you can easily apply similar automation faffery. For example, Debian packages take their metadata from the debian/changelog file in the build directory. Don t keep that file in revision control, though: build it at release time. Everything you need to construct a Debian (or RPM) changelog is in the tag version numbers, dates, times, authors, release notes. Use it for much good.

The Dreaded Changelog Finally, there s the CHANGELOG file. If it s maintained during the development process, it typically has an archive of all the release notes, under version numbers, with an Unreleased heading at the top. It s one more place to remember to have to edit when making that preparing release X.Y.Z commit, and it is a gift to the Demon of Spurious Merge Conflicts if you follow the policy of every commit must add a changelog entry . My solution: just burn it to the ground. Add a line to the top with a link to wherever the contents of annotated tags get published (such as GitHub Releases, if that s your bag) and never open it ever again.

But I need to know other things about my release, too! For some reason, you might think you need some other metadata about your releases. You re probably wrong it s amazing how much information you can obtain or derive from the humble tag so think creatively about your situation before you start making unnecessary complexity for yourself. But, on the off chance you re in a situation that legitimately needs some extra release-related information, here s the secret: structured annotation. The annotation on a tag can be literally any sequence of octets you like. How that data is interpreted is up to you. So, require that annotations on release tags use some sort of structured data format (say YAML or TOML or even XML if you hate your release manager), and mandate that it contain whatever information you need. You can make sure that the annotation has a valid structure and contains all the information you need with an update hook, which can reject the tag push if it doesn t meet the requirements, and you re sorted.

But I have multiple packages in my repo, with different release cadences and versions! This one is common enough that I just refer to it as the monorepo drama . Personally, I m not a huge fan of monorepos, but you do you, boo. Annotated tags can still handle it just fine. The trick is to include the package name being released in the tag name. So rather than a release tag being named vX.Y.Z, you use foo/vX.Y.Z, bar/vX.Y.Z, and baz/vX.Y.Z. The release automation for each package just triggers on tags that match the pattern for that particular package, and limits itself to those tags when figuring out what the version number is.

But we don t semver our releases! Oh, that s easy. The tag pattern that marks a release doesn t have to be vX.Y.Z. It can be anything you want. Relatedly, there is a (rare, but existent) need for packages that don t really have a conception of releases in the traditional sense. The example I ve hit most often is automatically generated bindings packages, such as protobuf definitions. The source of truth for these is a bunch of .proto files, but to be useful, they need to be packaged into code for the various language(s) you re using. But those packages need versions, and while someone could manually make releases, the best option is to build new per-language packages automatically every time any of those definitions change. The versions of those packages, then, can be datestamps (I like something like YYYY.MM.DD.N, where N starts at 0 each day and increments if there are multiple releases in a single day). This process allows all the code that needs the definitions to declare the minimum version of the definitions that it relies on, and everything is kept in sync and tracked almost like magic.

Th-th-th-th-that s all, folks! I hope you ve enjoyed this bit of mild debunking. Show your gratitude by buying me a refreshing beverage, or purchase my professional expertise and I ll answer all of your questions and write all your CI jobs.

Hi. My name is Ian Jackson. I write as a Rust contributor and as a Debian Developer with first-hand experience of Debian s approach to trademarks. (But I am not a member of the Debian Rust Packaging Team.) Your form invites me to state any blocking concerns. I m afraid I have one: PROBLEM The policy on distributing modified versions of Rust (page 4, 8th bullet) is far too restrictive. PROBLEM - ASPECT 1 On its face the policy forbids making a clone of the Rust repositories on a git forge, and pushing a modified branch there. That is publicly distributing a modified version of Rust. I.e., the current policy forbids the Rust s community s own development workflow! PROBLEM - ASPECT 2 The policy also does not meet the needs of Software-Freedom-respecting downstreams, including community Linux distributions such as Debian. There are two scenarios (fuzzy, and overlapping) which provide a convenient framing to discuss this: Firstly, in practical terms, Debian may need to backport bugfixes, or sometimes other changes. Sometimes Debian will want to pre-apply bugfixes or changes that have been contributed by users, and are intended eventually to go upstream, but are not included upstream in official Rust yet. This is a routine activity for a distribution. The policy, however, forbids it. Secondly, Debian, as a point of principle, requires the ability to diverge from upstream if and when Debian decides that this is the right choice for Debian s users. The freedom to modify is a key principle of Free Software. This includes making changes that the upstream project disapproves of. Some examples of this, where Debian has made changes, that upstream do not approve of, have included things like: removing user-tracking code, or disabling obsolescence timebombs that stop a particular version working after a certain date. Overall, while alignment in values between Debian and Rust seems to be very good right now, modifiability it is a matter of non-negotiable principle for Debian. The 8th bullet point on page 4 of the PDF does not give Debian (and Debian s users) these freedoms. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Other formulations, or an additional permission, seem like they would be able to meet the needs of both Debian and Rust. The first thing to recognise is that forbidding modified versions is probably not necessary to prevent language ecosystem fragmentation. Many other programming languages are distributed under fully Free Software licences without such restrictive trademark policies. (For example, Python; I m sure a thorough survey would find many others.) The scenario that would be most worrying for Rust would be embrace - extend - extinguish . In projects with a copyleft licence, this is not a concern, but Rust is permissively licenced. However, one way to address this would be to add an additional permission for modification that permits distribution of modified versions without permission, but if the modified source code is also provided, under the original Rust licence. I suggest therefore adding the following 2nd sub-bullet point to the 8th bullet on page 4:

• changes which are shared, in source code form, with all recipients of the modified software, and publicly licenced under the same licence as the official materials.

This means that downstreams who fear copyleft have the option of taking Rust s permissive copyright licence at face value, but are limited in the modifications they may make, unless they rename. Conversely downstreams such as Debian who wish to operate as part of the Free Software ecosystem can freely make modifications. It also, obviously, covers the Rust Community s own development work. NON-SOLUTIONS Some upstreams, faced with this problem, have offered Debian a special permission: ie, said that it would be OK for Debian to make modifications that Debian wants to. But Debian will not accept any Debian-specific permissions. Debian could of course rename their Rust compiler. Debian has chosen to rename in the past: infamously, a similar policy by Mozilla resulted in Debian distributing Firefox under the name Iceweasel for many years. This is a PR problem for everyone involved, and results in a good deal of technical inconvenience and makework. Debian could seek approval for changes, and the Rust Foundation would grant that approval quickly . This is unworkable on a practical level - requests for permission do not fit into Debian s workflow, and the resulting delays would be unacceptable. But, more fundamentally, Debian rightly insists that it must have the freedom to make changes that the Foundation do not approve of. (For example, if a future Rust shipped with telemetry features Debian objected to.) Debian and Rust could compromise . However, Debian is an ideological as well as technological project. The principles I have set out are part of Debian s Foundation Documents - they are core values for Debian. When Debian makes compromises, it does so very slowly and with great deliberation, using its slowest and most heavyweight constitutional governance processes. Debian is not likely to want to engage in such a process for the benefit of one programming language. Users will get Rust from upstream . This is currently often the case. Right now, Rust is moving very quickly, and by Debian standards is very new. As Rust becomes more widely used, more stable, and more part of the infrastructure of the software world, it will need to become part of standard, stable, reliable, software distributions. That means Debian.