DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Developer Conference,
is taking place in Kochi, India from September 10th to 17th, 2023.
Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at Infopark, Kochi
to participate and work in a conference exclusively run by volunteers.
Today the main conference starts with over 373 expected attendants and 92
scheduled activities, including 45-minute and 20-minute talks, Bird of a Feather
("BoF") team meetings, workshops, a job fair, as well as a variety of other
events.
The full schedule is updated each
day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees over the course of the
conference.
If you would like to engage remotely, you can follow the video streams
available from the DebConf23 website for the events happening in the three talk
rooms: Anamudi, Kuthiran and Ponmudi. Or you can join the conversations
happening inside the talk rooms via the OFTC IRC network
in the #debconf-anamudi, #debconf-kuthiran, and the #debconf-ponmudi
channels. Please also join us in the #debconf channel for common discussions
related to DebConf.
You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf23 provided by our
micronews service or the @debian profile on your
favorite social network.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcoming environment for all participants.
Please see our Code of Conduct page on the DebConf23 website for more
information on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf23,
particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Proxmox and Siemens.
~
DebConf23, the 24th edition of the Debian
conference is taking place in Infopark at Kochi, Kerala, India.
Thanks to the hard work of its organizers, it will be, this year as well, an
interesting and fruitful event for attendees.
We would like to warmly welcome the sponsors of DebConf23, and
introduce them to you.
We have three Platinum sponsors.
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.
/ to /usr, we will also run into the problems that the file move
moratorium was meant to prevent. The way forward is detecting them early and
applying workarounds on a per-package basis. Said detection is now automated
using the Debian Usr Merge Analysis Tool.
As problems are reported to the bug tracking system, they are connected to the
reports if properly usertagged. Bugs and patches for problem categories
DEP17-P2 and DEP17-P6 have been filed.
After consensus has been reached
on the bootstrapping matters, debootstrap has been
changed to swap the initial unpack and merging
to avoid unpack errors due to pre-existing links. This is a precondition for
having base-files install the aliasing symbolic links eventually.
It was identified that the root filesystem used by the Debian installer is
still unmerged and a
change has been proposed.
debhelper was changed to
recognize systemd units installed to /usr.
A discussion with the CTTE and release team on repealing the moratorium has
been initiated.
dpkg-buildflags now
defaults to issue arm64-specific compiler flags, more care is needed to
distinguish between build architecture flags and host architecture flags than
previously.Welcome to the August 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
serde_derive macro as a precompiled binary. As Ax Sharma writes:
The move has generated a fair amount of push back among developers who worry about its future legal and technical implications, along with a potential for supply chain attacks, should the maintainer account publishing these binaries be compromised.After intensive discussions, use of the precompiled binary was phased out.
On August 4th, Holger Levsen gave a talk at BornHack 2023 on the Danish island of Funen titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years which promised to contain:
[ ] an overview about reproducible builds, the past, the presence and the future. How it started with a small [meeting] at DebConf13 (and before), how it grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an executive order of the president of the United States. (HTML slides)Holger repeated the talk later in the month at Chaos Communication Camp 2023 in Zehdenick, Germany: A video of the talk is available online, as are the HTML slides.
Just another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany.
Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field.
If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out, which have more details about the event and location.
We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so do reach out to the organizing team if you are able to help. (Also of note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit, and their schedule has just been published.)
Vagrant Cascadian was interviewed on the SustainOSS podcast on reproducible builds:
Vagrant walks us through his role in the project where the aim is to ensure identical results in software builds across various machines and times, enhancing software security and creating a seamless developer experience. Discover how this mission, supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy and a broad community, is changing the face of Linux distros, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and F-Droid. They also explore the challenges of managing random elements in software, and Vagrant s vision to make reproducible builds a standard best practice that will ideally become automatic for users. Vagrant shares his work in progress and their commitment to the last mile problem.The episode is available to listen (or download) from the Sustain podcast website. As it happens, the episode was recorded at FOSSY 2023, and the video of Vagrant s talk from this conference (Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust is now available on Archive.org:
It was also announced that Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the Open Source Firmware Conference in October on the topic of Reproducible Builds All The Way Down.
hello-traditional package from Debian. The entire thread can be viewed from the archive page, as can Vagrant Cascadian s reply.
In diffoscope development this month, versions 247, 248 and 249 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also added documentation for the new specialize_as method and expanding the documentation of the existing specialize as well [ ]. In addition, Fay Stegerman added specialize_as and used it to optimise .smali comparisons when decompiling Android .apk files [ ], Felix Yan and Mattia Rizzolo corrected some typos in code comments [ , ], Greg Chabala merged the RUN commands into single layer in the package s Dockerfile [ ] thus greatly reducing the final image size. Lastly, Roland Clobus updated tool descriptions to mark that the xb-tool has moved package within Debian [ ].
In Debian, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were added, including Chris Lamb adding a new timestamp_in_documentation_using_sphinx_zzzeeksphinx_theme toolchain issue.
In August, F-Droid added 25 new reproducible apps and saw 2 existing apps switch to reproducible builds, making 191 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.
arimo (modification time in build results)apptainer (random Go build identifier)arrow (fails to build on single-CPU machines)camlp (parallelism-related issue)developer (Go ordering-related issue)elementary-xfce-icon-theme (font-related problem)gegl (parallelism issue)grommunio (filesystem ordering issue)grpc (drop nondetermistic log)guile-parted (parallelism-related issue)icinga (hostname-based issue)liquid-dsp (CPU-oriented problem)memcached (package fails to build far in the future)openmpi5/openpmix (date/copyright year issue)openmpi5 (date/copyright year issue)orthanc-ohif+orthanc-volview (ordering related issue plus timestamp in a Gzip)perl-Net-DNS (package fails to build far in the future)postgis (parallelism issue)python-scipy (uses an arbitrary build path)python-trustme (package fails to build far in the future)qtbase/qmake/goldendict-ng (timestamp-related issue)qtox (date-related issue)ring (filesytem ordering related issue)scipy (1 & 2) (drop arbtirary build path and filesytem-ordering issue)snimpy (1 & 3) (fails to build on single-CPU machines as well far in the future)tango-icon-theme (font-related issue)
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
reproducible-tracker.json data file. [ ]pbuilder.tgz for Debian unstable due to #1050784. [ ][ ]usrmerge. [ ][ ]armhf nodes (wbq0 and jtx1a) as down; investigation is needed. [ ]buildd.debian.org. [ ][ ]
#reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
I ve just finalised the OpenPGP key list for the DebConf 23 Keysigning party. This will follow the new style approach of being a continuous keysigning throughout the course of the conference, with an introduction session up front to confirm no one s fingerprint is corrupted and that we all calculated the same hash of the file. Participants will then verify each other s identities over the conference week, hopefully being able to build up a better level of verification than a one shot key signing session.
Those paying attention will note that my key details have changed this year; I am finally make a concerted effort to migrate to an elliptic curve based key. I managed to bootstrap it sufficiently at OMGWTFBBQ, but I m keen to ensure it s well integrated into the web of trust, so please do come talk to me at DebConf so we can exchange fingerprints!
pub ed25519 2023-08-19 [C] [expires: 2025-08-18]
419F B4B6 567E 6EF7 DEAF 80A0 9026 108F B942 BEA4
uid [ultimate] Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li>
| Publisher: | Spender Books |
| Copyright: | 2023 |
| ISBN: | 1-7392859-1-3 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 271 |
September.
Looking at performance traces and analysing scheduling and other issues.
CPU Cache doesn't really play into effect until I figure out the scheduling issues. They don't collide.
# Load configuration files for the default server block.
include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;
location /
autoindex on;
autoindex_exact_size off;
autoindex_format html;
autoindex_localtime off;
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
[Unit]
Description=Rocky Linux Mirroring script
[Service]
Type=simple
User=mirror
Group=mirror
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rockylinux
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
[Unit]
Description=Run Rocky Linux mirroring script daily
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 08:13:00
OnCalendar=*-*-* 22:13:00
Persistent=true
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
This is a very long script in total.#!/bin/env bash
#
# mirrorsync - Synchronize a Rocky Linux mirror
# By: Dennis Koerner <koerner@netzwerge.de>
#
# The latest version of this script can be found at:
# https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky-tools
#
# Please read https://docs.rockylinux.org/en/rocky/8/guides/add_mirror_manager
# for further information on setting up a Rocky mirror.
#
# Copyright (c) 2021 Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation
Logfile looks something like this: the single time spec file is used to check whether another rsync needs to be run# A complete list of mirrors can be found at
# https://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirrormanager/mirrors/Rocky
src="mirrors.vinters.com::rocky"
# Your local path. Change to whatever fits your system.
# $mirrormodule is also used in syslog output.
mirrormodule="rocky-linux"
dst="/srv/$ mirrormodule "
filelistfile="fullfiletimelist-rocky"
lockfile="/home/mirror/rocky.lockfile"
logfile="/home/mirror/rocky.log"
deleting 9.1/plus/x86_64/os/repodata/3585b8b5-90e0-4856-9df2-95f646bc62c7-PRIMARY.xml.gzIt was essentially easier to store fullfiletimelist-rocky in /home/mirror than anywhere else.
sent 606,565 bytes received 38,808,194,155 bytes 44,839,746.64 bytes/sec
total size is 1,072,593,052,385 speedup is 27.64
End: Fri 27 Jan 2023 08:27:49 GMT
fullfiletimelist-rocky unchanged. Not updating at Fri 27 Jan 2023 22:13:16 GMT
fullfiletimelist-rocky unchanged. Not updating at Sat 28 Jan 2023 08:13:16 GMT
I discovered Gazelle Twin last year via Stuart
Maconie's Freak Zone (two of her
tracks ended up on my 2022 Halloween playlist).
Through her website I learned of The Horror Show!
exhibition at Somerset House1 in London that I managed to visit
earlier this year.
I've been intending to write a 5-track blog post (a la
Underworld, the Cure, Coil) for a while
but I have been spurred on by the excellent news that she's got a new album on
the way, and, she's performing at the Sage Gateshead in
November. Buy tickets
now!!
Here's the five tracks I recommend to get started:
Work involves supporting Windows (there's a lot of specialised hardware design software that's only supported under Windows, so this isn't really avoidable), but also involves git, so I've been working on extending our support for hardware-backed SSH certificates to Windows and trying to glue that into git. In theory this doesn't sound like a hard problem, but in practice oh good heavens.
Back in June 2018, Michael Stapelberg put the Raspberry Pi image building up
for
adoption. He
created the first set of unofficial, experimental Raspberry Pi images for
Debian. I promptly answered to him, and while it took me some time to actually
warp my head around Michael s work, managed to eventually do so. By December, I
started pushing some
updates.
Not only that: I didn t think much about it in the beginning, as the needed
non-free pacakge was called raspi3-firmware, but By early 2019, I had it
running for all of the then-available Raspberry families (so the package was
naturally renamed to
raspi-firmware). I got my
Raspberry Pi 4 at DebConf19 (thanks to Andy, who brought it from Cambridge), and
it soon joined the happy Debian family. The images are built daily, and are
available in https://raspi.debian.net.
In the process, I also adopted Lars great vmdb2 image building
tool, and have kept it decently up to
date (yes, I m currently lagging behind, but I ll get to it soonish ).
Anyway This year, I have been seriously neglecting the Raspberry builds. I
have simply not had time to regularly test built images, nor to debug why the
builder has not picked up building for trixie (testing). And my time
availability is not going to improve any time soon.
We are close to one month away from moving for six months to Paran
(Argentina),
where I ll be focusing on my PhD. And while I do contemplate taking my
Raspberries along, I do not forsee being able to put much energy to them.
So This is basically a call for adoption for the Raspberry Debian images
building service. I do intend to stick around and try to help. It s not only me
(although I m responsible for the build itself) we have a nice and healthy
group of Debian people hanging out in the #debian-raspberrypi channel in OFTC
IRC.
Don t be afraid, and come ask. I hope giving this project in adoption will
breathe new life into it!

Em 2023 o tradicional Debian Day est
sendo celebrado de forma especial, afinal no dia 16 de agostoo Debian completou
30 anos!
Para comemorar este marco especial na vida do Debian, a
comunidade Debian Brasil organizou uma semana
de palestras online de 14 a 18 de agosto. O evento foi chamado de
Debian 30 anos.
Foram realizadas 2 palestras por noite, das 19h s 22h, transmitidas pelo canal
Debian Brasil no YouTube
totalizando 10 palestras. As grava es j est o dispon veis tamb m no canal
Debian Brasil no Peertube.
Nas 10 atividades tivemos as participa es de 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contribuidores(as).
A audi ncia ao vivo variou bastante, e o pico foi na palestra sobre preseed com
o Eriberto Mota quando tivemos 47 pessoas assistindo.
Obrigado a todos(as) participantes pela contribui o que voc s deram para o
sucesso do nosso evento.










place tag, any part of which was within my ambit. That included some places that probably oughtn t to have counted, but, fine.
I also decided that I wouldn t visit suburbs of Cambridge, separately from Cambridge itself. I don t consider them separate settlements, at least, not if they re conurbated with Cambridge. So that excluded Trumpington, for example. But I decided that Girton and Fen Ditton were (just) separable. Although the place where I consider Girton and Cambridge to nearly touch, is administratively well inside Girton, I chose to look at land use (on the ground, and in OSM data), rather than administrative boundaries.
But I did visit both Histon and Impington, and all each of the Shelfords and Stapleford, as separate entries in my list. Mostly because otherwise I d have to decide whether to skip (say) Impington, or Histon. Whereas skipping suburbs of Cambridge in favour of Cambridge itself was an easy decision, and it also got rid of a bunch of what would have been quite short, boring, urban expeditions.
I sorted all the Greats and Littles under G and L, rather than (say) Shelford, Great , which seemed like it would be cheating because then I would be able to do Shelford, Great and Shelford, Little in one go.
Northstowe turned from mostly a building site into something that was arguably a settlement, during my project. It wasn t included in the output of my original data mining. Of course it s conurbated with Oakington - but happily, Northstowe inserts right before Oakington in the alphabetical list, so I decided to add it, visiting both the old and new in the same day.
There are a bunch of other minor edge cases. Some villages have an outlying hamlet. Mostly I included these. There are some individual farms, which I generally didn t count.
Some stats
I visited 150 villages plus the Lords Bridge radio observatory. The project took 3 years and 3 months to complete.
There were 96 rides, totalling about 4900km. So my mean distance was around 51km. The median distance per ride was a little higher, at around 52 km, and the median duration (including stoppages) was about 2h40. The total duration, if you add them all up, including stoppages, was about 275h, giving a mean speed including photo stops, lunches and all, of 18kph.
The longest ride was 89.8km, collecting Scotland Farm, Shepreth, and Six Mile Bottom, so riding across the Cam valley. The shortest ride was 7.9km, collecting Cambridge (obviously); and I think that s the only one I did on my Brompton. The rest were all on my trusty Thorn Audax.
My fastest ride (ranking by distance divided by time spent in motion) was to collect Haddenham, where I covered 46.3km in 1h39, giving an average speed in motion of 28.0kph.
The most I collected in one day was 5 places: West Wickham, West Wratting, Westley Bottom, Westley Waterless, and Weston Colville. That was the day of the Wests. (There s only one East: East Hatley.)
Map
Here is a pretty picture of all of my tracklogs:
Edited 2023-08-25 01:32 BST to correct a slip.
For the first time, the city of Belo Horizonte held a
Debian Day to celebrate the
anniversary of the Debian Project.
The communities Debian Minas Gerais
and Free Software Belo Horizonte and Region
felt motivated to celebrate this special date due the 30 years of the Debian
Project in 2023 and they organized a meeting on August 12nd in
UFMG Knowledge Space.
The Debian Day organization in Belo Horizonte received the important support
from UFMG Computer Science Department to book the
room used by the event.
It was scheduled three activities:
Pela primeira vez a cidade de Belo Horizonte realizou um
Debian Day para celebrar o
anivers rio do Projeto Debian.
As comunidades Debian Minas Gerais
e Software Livre de BH e Regi o
se sentiram motivadas para celebrar esta data especial devido aos 30 anos do
Projeto Debian em 2023 e organizou um encontro no dia 12 de agosto dentro
Espa o do Conhecimento da UFMG.
A organiza o do Debian Day em Belo Horizonte recebeu o importante apoio do
Departamento de Ci ncia da Computa o da UFMG para
reservar a sala que foi utilizada para o evento.
A programa o contou com tr s atividades:
As we all know, this year is a very special year for the Debian project, the
project turns 30!
network:
version: 2
virtual-ethernets:
veth0:
peer: veth1
veth1:
peer: veth0
dummy-devices:
dm0:
addresses:
- 192.168.0.123/24
...
Furthermore, we implemented CFFI based Python bindings on top of libnetplan s API, that can easily be consumed by 3rd party applications (see full cffi-bindings.py example):
from netplan import Parser, State, NetDefinition from netplan import NetplanException, NetplanParserExceptionparser = Parser() # Parse the full, existing YAML config hierarchy parser.load_yaml_hierarchy(rootdir='/') # Validate the final parser state state = State() try: # validation of current state + new settings state.import_parser_results(parser) except NetplanParserException as e: print('Error in', e.filename, 'Row/Col', e.line, e.column, '->', e.message) except NetplanException as e: print('Error:', e.message) # Walk through ethernet NetdefIDs in the state and print their backend # renderer, to demonstrate working with NetDefinitionIterator & # NetDefinition for netdef in state.ethernets.values(): print('Netdef', netdef.id, 'is managed by:', netdef.backend) print('Is it configured to use DHCP?', netdef.dhcp4 or netdef.dhcp6)
dummy-devices) interfaces (LP#1774203) by @daniloegea in #361virtual-ethernets) interfaces by @daniloegea in #368
Apparently it s nearly four years since I last posted to my blog. Which is, to a degree, the point here. My time, and priorities, have changed over the years. And this lead me to the decision that my available time and priorities in 2023 aren t compatible with being a Debian or Ubuntu developer, and realistically, haven t been for years. As of earlier this month, I quit as a Debian Developer and Ubuntu MOTU.
I think a lot of my blogging energy got absorbed by social media over the last decade, but with the collapse of Twitter and Reddit due to mismanagement, I m trying to allocate more time for blog-based things instead. I may write up some of the things I ve achieved at work (.NET 8 is now snapped for release Soon
). I might even blog about work-adjacent controversial topics, like my changed feelings about the entire concept of distribution packages. But there s time for that later. Maybe.
I ll keep tagging vaguely FOSS related topics with the Debian and Ubuntu tags, which cause them to be aggregated in the Planet Debian/Ubuntu feeds (RSS, remember that from the before times?!) until an admin on those sites gets annoyed at the off-topic posting of an emeritus dev and deletes them.
But that s where we are. Rather than ignore my distro obligations, I ve admitted that I just don t have the energy any more. Let someone less perpetually exhausted than me take over. And if they don t, maybe that s OK too.
Next.