Debian Contributions: 2024-09 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.

Pydantic v2, by Colin Watson Pydantic is a useful library for validating data in Python using type hints: Freexian uses it in a number of projects, including Debusine. Its Debian packaging had been stalled at 1.10.17 in testing for some time, partly due to needing to make sure everything else could cope with the breaking changes introduced in 2.x, but mostly due to needing to sort out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo R hling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck. Colin upgraded a few Rust libraries to new upstream versions, packaged rust-jiter, and chased various failures in other packages. This eventually allowed getting current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing. It should now be much easier for us to stay up to date routinely.

Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, by Helmut Grohne Simon McVittie (not affiliated with Freexian) earlier restructured the libglib2.0-dev such that it would absorb more functionality and in particular provide tools for working with .gir files. Those tools practically require being run for their host architecture (practically this means running under qemu-user) which is at odds with the requirements of architecture cross bootstrap. The qemu requirement was expressed in package dependencies and also made people unhappy attempting to use libglib2.0-dev for i386 on amd64 without resorting to qemu. The use of qemu in architecture bootstrap is particularly problematic as it tends to not be ready at the time bootstrapping is needed. As a result, Simon proposed and implemented the introduction of a libgio-2.0-dev package providing a subset of libglib2.0-dev that does not require qemu. Packages should continue to use libglib2.0-dev in their Build-Depends unless involved in architecture bootstrap. Helmut reviewed and tested the implementation and integrated the necessary changes into rebootstrap. He also prepared a patch for libverto to use the new package and proposed adding forward compatibility to glib2.0. Helmut continued working on adding cross-exe-wrapper to architecture-properties and implemented autopkgtests later improved by Simon. The cross-exe-wrapper package now provides a generic mechanism to a program on a different architecture by using qemu when needed only. For instance, a dependency on cross-exe-wrapper:i386 provides a i686-linux-gnu-cross-exe-wrapper program that can be used to wrap an ELF executable for the i386 architecture. When installed on amd64 or i386 it will skip installing or running qemu, but for other architectures qemu will be used automatically. This facility can be used to support cross building with targeted use of qemu in cases where running host code is unavoidable as is the case for GObject introspection. This concludes the joint work with Simon and Niels Thykier on glib2.0 and architecture-properties resolving known architecture bootstrap regressions arising from the glib2.0 refactoring earlier this year.

Analyzing binary package metadata, by Helmut Grohne As Guillem Jover (not affiliated with Freexian) continues to work on adding metadata tracking to dpkg, the question arises how this affects existing packages. The dedup.debian.net infrastructure provides an easy playground to answer such questions, so Helmut gathered file metadata from all binary packages in unstable and performed an explorative analysis. Some results include:

• binutils-mipsen uses wrong file ownership
• /usr-merge is not the only cause for aliasing problems in Debian.
  • mediawiki vs vistrails
  • bmake vs ros-mk
  • golang-github-eapache-go-resiliency-dev vs golang-gopkg-eapache-go-resiliency.v1-dev
  • node-markdown-it vs libjs-markdown-it
  • dokuwiki vs php-phpseclib
  • dokuwiki vs php-random-compat

Guillem also performed a cursory analysis and reported other problem categories such as mismatching directory permissions for directories installed by multiple packages and thus gained a better understanding of what consistency checks dpkg can enforce.

Python archive rebuilds, by Stefano Rivera Last month Stefano started to write some tooling to do large-scale rebuilds in debusine, starting with finding packages that had already started to fail to build from source (FTBFS) due to the removal of setup.py test. This month, Stefano did some more rebuilds, starting with experimental versions of dh-python. During the Python 3.12 transition, we had added a dependency on python3-setuptools to dh-python, to ease the transition. Python 3.12 removed distutils from the stdlib, but many packages were expecting it to still be available. Setuptools contains a version of distutils, and dh-python was a convenient place to depend on setuptools for most package builds. This dependency was never meant to be permanent. A rebuild without it resulted in mass-filing about 340 bugs (and around 80 more by mistake). A new feature in Python 3.12, was to have unittest s test runner exit with a non-zero return code, if no tests were run. We added this feature, to be able to detect tests that are not being discovered, by mistake. We are ignoring this failure, as we wouldn t want to suddenly cause hundreds of packages to fail to build, if they have no tests. Stefano did a rebuild to see how many packages were affected, and found that around 1000 were. The Debian Python community has not come to a conclusion on how to move forward with this. As soon as Python 3.13 release candidate 2 was available, Stefano did a rebuild of the Python packages in the archive against it. This was a more complex rebuild than the others, as it had to be done in stages. Many packages need other Python packages at build time, typically to run tests. So transitions like this involve some manual bootstrapping, followed by several rounds of builds. Not all packages could be tested, as not all their dependencies support 3.13 yet. The result was around 100 bugs in packages that need work to support Python 3.13. Many other packages will need additional work to properly support Python 3.13, but being able to build (and run tests) is an important first step.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles prepared the update of python-pyaarlo package to a new upstream release.
• Carles worked on updating python-ring-doorbell to a new upstream release. Unfinished, pending to package a new dependency python3-firebase-messaging RFP #1082958 and its dependency python3-http-ece RFP #1083020.
• Carles improved po-debconf-manager. Main new feature is that it can open Salsa merge requests. Aiming for a lightning talk in MiniDebConf Toulouse (November) to be functional end to end and get feedback from the wider public for this proof of concept.
• Carles helped one translator to use po-debconf-manager (added compatibility for bullseye, fixed other issues) and reviewed 17 package templates.
• Colin upgraded the OpenSSH packaging to 9.9p1.
• Colin upgraded the various YubiHSM packages to new upstream versions, enabled more tests, fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures, made yubihsm-shell build reproducibly, and fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed. As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes.
• Colin fixed quite a bit of fallout from setuptools 72.0.0 removing setup.py test, backported a large upstream patch set to make buildbot work with SQLAlchemy 2.0, and upgraded 25 other Python packages to new upstream versions.
• Enrico worked with Jakob Haufe to get him up to speed for managing sso.debian.org
• Rapha l did remove spam entries in the list of teams on tracker.debian.org (see #1080446), and he applied a few external contributions, fixing a rendering issue and replacing the DDPO link with a more useful alternative. He also gave feedback on a couple of merge requests that required more work. As part of the analysis of the underlying problem, he suggested to the ftpmasters (via #1083068) to auto-reject packages having the too-many-contacts lintian error, and he raised the severity of #1076048 to serious to actually have that 4 year old bug fixed.
• Rapha l uploaded zim and hamster-time-tracker to fix issues with Python 3.12 getting rid of setuptools. He also uploaded a new gnome-shell-extension-hamster to cope with the upcoming transition to GNOME 47.
• Helmut sent seven patches and sponsored one upload for cross build failures.
• Helmut uploaded a Nagios/Icinga plugin check-smart-attributes for monitoring the health of physical disks.
• Helmut collaborated on sbuild reviewing and improving a MR for refactoring the unshare backend.
• Helmut sent a patch fixing coinstallability of gcc-defaults.
• Helmut continued to monitor the evolution of the /usr-move. With more and more key packages such as libvirt or fuse3 fixed. We re moving into the boring long-tail of the transition.
• Helmut proposed updating the meson buildsystem in debhelper to use env2mfile.
• Helmut continued to update patches maintained in rebootstrap. Due to the work on glib2.0 above, rebootstrap moves a lot further, but still fails for any architecture.
• Santiago reviewed some Merge Request in Salsa CI, such as: !478, proposed by Otto to extend the information about how to use additional runners in the pipeline and !518, proposed by Ahmed to add support for Ubuntu images, that will help to test how some debian packages, including the complex MariaDB are built on Ubuntu. Santiago also prepared !545, which will make the reprotest job more consistent with the result seen on reproducible-builds.
• Santiago worked on different tasks related to DebConf 25. Especially he drafted the fundraising brochure (which is almost ready).
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded package libcupsfilter to fix the autopkgtest and a dependency problem of this package. After package splix was abandoned by upstream and OpenPrinting.org adopted its maintenance, Thorsten uploaded their first release.
• Anupa published posts on the Debian Administrators group in LinkedIn and moderated the group, one of the tasks of the Debian Publicity Team.
• Anupa helped organize DebUtsav 2024. It had over 100 attendees with hand-on sessions on making initial contributions to Linux Kernel, Debian packaging, submitting documentation to Debian wiki and assisting Debian Installations.

1. Introduction
2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis (this article)
5. Current status and roadmap

• a stable cross-domain HTTP API
• a low-level JavaScript library for interacting with the HTTP API
• a high-level library of WebComponents as a framework-neutral way of rapidly building frontends

• the Particiapi server which provides the HTTP API
• the example frontend project which currently contains both the client library and an experimental example frontend built with it

• Enabling Unified Kernel Image on Debian

Preparing for Key Enrollment Before enrolling our keys, we need to put the device in Secure Boot Setup Mode. Verify the status using the bootctl status command. You should see output similar to the following image:

  sudo ls /efi/loader/keys/chamunda
db.auth  KEK.auth  PK.auth

Signing the Bootloader Sign the systemd-boot bootloader with your new keys:

sbsign --key <path-to db.key> --cert <path-to db.crt> \
   /usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/systemd-bootx64.efi

Install the signed bootloader using bootctl install. The output should resemble this:

Note

If you encounter warnings about mount options, update your fstab with the umask=0077 option for the EFI partition.

Verify the signature using sbsign --verify:

SecureBootPrivateKey=/path/to/db.key
SecureBootCertificate=/path/to/db.crt

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)
# Repeat for other kernel versions if necessary

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/dracut:
dracut: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.10.9-amd64
Updating kernel version 6.10.9-amd64 in systemd-boot...
Signing unsigned original image
Using config file: /etc/kernel/uki.conf
+ sbverify --list /boot/vmlinuz-6.10.9-amd64
+ sbsign --key /home/vasudeva.sk/Documents/personal/secureboot/db.key --cert /home/vasudeva.sk/Documents/personal/secureboot/db.crt /tmp/ukicc7vcxhy --output /tmp/kernel-install.staging.QLeGLn/uki.efi
Wrote signed /tmp/kernel-install.staging.QLeGLn/uki.efi
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-systemd-boot:
Installing kernel version 6.10.9-amd64 in systemd-boot...
Signing unsigned original image
Using config file: /etc/kernel/uki.conf
+ sbverify --list /boot/vmlinuz-6.10.9-amd64
+ sbsign --key /home/vasudeva.sk/Documents/personal/secureboot/db.key --cert /home/vasudeva.sk/Documents/personal/secureboot/db.crt /tmp/ukit7r1hzep --output /tmp/kernel-install.staging.dWVt5s/uki.efi
Wrote signed /tmp/kernel-install.staging.dWVt5s/uki.efi

Enrolling Keys in Firmware Use systemd-boot to enroll your keys:

systemctl reboot --boot-loader-menu=0

Select the enroll option with your hostname in the systemd-boot menu. After key enrollment, the system will reboot into the newly signed kernel. Verify with bootctl:

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for 50 years of queries , a article published in Communications of the ACM

• AS2697 Education and Research Network
• AS9885 NKN Internet Gateway
• AS23770 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (used as National Centre for Biological Sciences network)
• AS38021 Network of Indian Institute of Foreign Trade
• AS38620 National Knowledge Network
• AS38872 Indian School of Business
• AS45340 B.M.S College of Engineering
• AS55296 National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
• AS55479 Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
• AS55566 Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics
• AS55824 NKN Core Network
• AS56056 AMITY-IN
• AS55847 NKN Edge Network
• AS58703 Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
• AS58758 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (used as Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) network)
• AS59163 GLA University
• AS59193 Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
• AS131226 Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
• AS131473 SRM University
• AS132423 Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
• AS132524 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (used as main campus network)
• AS132749 Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi
• AS132780 Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
• AS132984 Uka Tarsadia University
• AS132785 Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence Deemed to be University
• AS132995 South Asian University
• AS133002 Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology
• AS133233 S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences
• AS133273 Tata Institute of Social Sciences
• AS133308 Indira Gandhi Centre For Atomic Research
• AS133313 Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics
• AS133552 B.M.S. College of Engineering
• AS133723 Institute for Plasma Research
• AS134003 Centre For Cellular And Molecular Platforms
• AS134023 Aligarh Muslim University
• AS134322 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (used as International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) network)
• AS134901 Indian Institute of Science Education And Research
• AS134934 Institute For Stem Cell Biology And Regenerative Medicine
• AS135730 Datta Meghe Institute Of Medical Sciences
• AS135734 Birla Institute of Technology And Science
• AS135835 Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy
• AS136005 Raman Research Institute
• AS136304 Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar
• AS136470 B.M.S. College of Engineering
• AS136702 Physical Research Laboratory
• AS137136 Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute
• AS137282 Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology
• AS137617 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
• AS137956 Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar
• AS138155 Jawaharlal Nehru University
• AS138231 Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad
• AS140033 Indian Institute of Technology, Bhilai
• AS140118 Indian Institute of Technology Banaras Hindu University
• AS140192 Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala
• AS140200 Panjab University
• AS141270 Indian Institute Of Technology, Indore
• AS141340 Indian Institute Of Technology, Madras
• AS141477 Indira Gandhi National Open University
• AS141478 Director National Institute Of Technology, Calicut
• AS141288 National Institute of Science Education And Research Bhubaneswar
• AS141507 National Institute of Mental Health And Neurosciences
• AS142493 Sri Ramachandra Institute Of Higher Education And Research
• AS147239 Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA)
• AS147258 Dayalbagh Educational Institute
• AS149607 National Forensic Sciences University
• AS151086 Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
• AS152533 National Institute of Technology, Karnataka

• AS132926 Allen Career Institute
• AS141841 Indian Institute of Hardware Technology Limited

• Only 14 (out of 67) networks have/announce IPv6 prefixes.
• Two networks have IX presence; AS132785 Shiv Nadar at Extreme IX Delhi and AS56056 Amity at DE-CIX Delhi.
• TIFR as an organization has 4 ASNs (AS23770, AS58758, AS132524 and AS134322), BMS College of Engineering has 3 (AS45340, AS133552 and AS136470) and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has 2 (AS58703 and AS151086).
• AS2697, AS9885, AS38620, AS55824 and AS55847 ie Education and Research Network (ERNET) and National Knowledge Network (NKN) form the Indian NREN.
• 43 network have NKN as their upstream, while BSNL comes second as upstream for 21.

• For the Debian firmware-nonfree package:
  • I opened the MR:
    • !104: Update to linux-support-6.10.6
  • I reviewed the MRs:
    • !102: Backport firmware-nonfree 20240709-2~bpo12+1 to Bookworm
  • I responded to a query about backporting.
• For the Debian linux package:
  • I opened or updated the MRs:
    • !741: Draft: Fix some reproducibility issues
    • !1153: Update to 6.11
    • !1161: Fix and clean up Build-Depends
    • !1164: d/config: Fix broken configs that were being resolved differently by kconfig
    • !1175: Fix perf build failure on many architectures
  • I reviewed the MRs:
    • !964: tools/arch/x86/intel_sdsi: Add sdsi package for Intel SDSi provisioning tool (merged)
    • !1136: Compile with gcc-14 on all architectures (merged)
    • !1148: [arm64] drivers/phy/marvell: Enable PHY_MVEBU_CP110_UTMI as module (merged)
    • !1149: [arm64] Include modules for Lenovo Yoga C630 and Lenovo Miix 630 (merged)
    • !1150: Draft: debian/lib/python/debian_linux/debian.py: allow more liberal revision suffixes than just \+b\d+
    • !1155: [ia64] Purge ia64 from installer (merged)
    • !1156: [x86] enable mfd components for BXT pmic (merged)
    • !1157: [x86] Enable IPU6 and related camera options (merged)
    • !1163: riscv64 kernel config update for 6.11 (merged)
    • !1173: Update to 6.11-rc5 (merged)
    • !1165: [amd64] Enable DRM_ACCEL_HABANALABS and DRM_ACCEL_IVPU (merged)
    • !1176: [riscv64] fix conflict between kernel-image and mtd-core-modules (merged)
  • I merged my own MRs:
    • !1161: Fix and clean up Build-Depends
    • !1164: d/config: Fix broken configs that were being resolved differently by kconfig
    • !1175: Fix perf build failure on many architectures
  • I uploaded:
    • linux version 6.11~rc4-1~exp1 to experimental.
    • linux version 6.11~rc5-1~exp1 to experimental.
    • linux version 6.10.6-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports.
  • Upstream, I commented on additional backports required to address CVE-2024-26621 and CVE-2024-42258.
  • I responded to bug reports:
    • #1072004: linux: regression in the 9p protocol in 6.8 breaks autopkgtest qemu jobs (affecting debci)
  • Upstream, I submitted the patch aacraid: Fix double-free on probe failure which should fix part of bug #1075855.
  • Upstream, I pointed out that the fix in !1175 is needed in Linux 6.11.
  • I updated the bullseye-security branch to upstream version 5.10.224, but didn t make a new upload.
  • I updated the bullseye-security-6.1 branch, merging changes from version 6.1.106-3.
• For initramfs-tools:
  • I opened and later merged the MRs:
    • !129: hook_functions: Fix copy_file with source including a directory symlink
    • !130: Fix autopkgtest failures on armhf and ppc64el
    • !131: hook-functions: copy_file: Canonicalise target filename
    • !132: autopkgtest: Run tests as root
    • !133: Backport fixes for bookworm
  • I reviewed the MRs:
    • !128: Put compressed kernel modules and firmware in an uncompressed cpio
  • I uploaded:
    • version 0.144 to Debian unstable.
    • version 0.145 to Debian unstable.
    • version 0.142+deb12u1 to Debian bookworm.
  • I responded to Debian bug reports:
    • #984584: initramfs-tools: autopkgtest amd64-separate-usr fails if TMPDIR is a tmpfs
    • #1079333: initramfs-tools: upgrading causes dpkg(1) to fail
    • #1079150: cryptsetop: Waiting for encrypted source device
    • #1080203: initramfs-tools: USB keyboard stopped working on LUKS prompt
• For the Debian iproute package, I reverted the recent removal of the /usr/sbin/ip symlink and uploaded version 6.10.0-2.
• For kernel-wedge:
  • I fixed a bug in duplicate detection that linux !1176 had revealed.
  • I added support for packages installing modules under /usr/lib/modules, and a test case for this.
  • I uploaded version 2.106 to Debian unstable, including the above and some other bug fixes.
• For the Debian sgt-puzzles package, I responded to and wrote a patch for bug #1079717: sgt-puzzles: [Mozaic] crashes when copying the game.

The backbone: Matrix I chose to use Matrix as the place where I integrate everything. Despite there being some heavy (and justified) criticism on the protocol itself, it serves me well for what I need right now. Obviously, I don t like the fact that I have to provide Matrix and all of its accompanying bridges a VPS with 4GB of RAM and 3 vCPUs, but I think that that ship has sailed, unfortunately. In an ideal world, I would be using XMPP and dedicating only a fraction of the resources I m using today to have a full chat system. And since I have been running my personal XMPP server for more than a decade now, I did try to find a solution that would allow me to keep using it, but unfortunately the protocol became almost a hobbyist thing, so there s that.

A few disclaimers I self-host everything, including my Matrix server. Much of what I did won t work if you don t self-host Matrix, so keep that in mind. This won t be a post teaching you how to deploy the services. My intention is to describe what I use and for what purpose. Also, as much as I try to use Debian packages for everything I do, I opted to deploy all services using a community-maintained Ansible playbook which is very well written and organized: matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. Last but not least, as I said above, you will likely need a machine with a good amount of RAM, CPU and storage, especially if you deploy Synapse as your Matrix homeserver (which is what I recommend if you plan to use the bridges I ll mention). My current VPS has 4GB of RAM, 3 vCPUs and 80GB of storage (of which I m currently using approximately 55GB).

Problem #1: my Matrix client(s) There are a lot of clients that can talk the Matrix protocol, but most of them are either web clients or GUI programs. I live on the terminal, more specifically inside Emacs, so I settled for the amazing ement.el Emacs mode. It works surprisingly well, but unfortunately doesn t support end-to-end encryption out of the box; for that, you have to hook it up with pantalaimon. Unfortunately, the project seems abandoned and therefore I don t recommend you to use it. I don t use it myself. When I have to reply some E2E encrypted message from another user, I go to my web browser and use my self-hosted Element client. It s a nuisance, but one that I m willing to accept because of security concerns. If you re into web clients and don t want to use Element (because it is heavy), you can try Cinny. It s lightweight and supports a decent set of features. If you re a terminal lover but don t use Emacs, you may want to try gomuks or iamb.

Problem #2: IRC bridging There are basically two types of IRC bridges for Matrix:

• The regular and most used matrix-appservice-irc. This bridge takes Matrix to IRC (think of IRC users with the [m] suffix appended to their nicknames), and is what the matrix.org and other big homeservers (including matrix.debian.social) use. It s a complex service which allows thousands of Matrix users to connect to IRC networks, but that unfortunately has complex problems and is only worth using if you intend to host a community server.
• A bouncer-like bridge called Heisenbridge. This is what I use personally. It takes IRC to Matrix, which means that people on IRC will not know that you re using Matrix. This bridge is much simpler, and because it acts like a bouncer it s pretty much impossible for it to cause problems with the IRC network.

Due to the fact that I sometimes like to use other IRC clients, I still run a regular ZNC bouncer, and I use Heisenbridge to connect to my ZNC. This means that I can use, e.g., ERC inside Emacs and my Matrix bridge at the same time. But you don t necessarily need to run another bouncer; you can simply use Heisenbridge and connect directly to the IRC network(s) you want. A word of caution, though: unlike ZNC, Heisenbridge doesn t support per-user configuration when you use it in bouncer mode. This is the reason why you need to self-host it, and why it s not possible to offer the service to other users (they would have access to your IRC network configuration otherwise). It s also worth talking about logs. I find that keeping logs of everything that goes on IRC has saved me a bunch of times, and so I find it really important to continue doing that. Unfortunately, neither ement.el nor Element support logging things out of the box (at least not that I know). This is also one of the reasons why I still keep my ZNC around: I configure it to log everything.

Problem #3: Telegram I don t use Telegram myself, but unfortunately several people from the Debian community do, especially in Brazil. There is a whole Debian community on Telegram, and I wanted to be able to bridge our Debian Matrix channels to their Telegram counterparts. I am currently using mautrix-telegram for that, and it s working great. You need someone with a Telegram account to configure their credentials so that the bridge can connect to it, but afterwards it s really easy to bridge channels together.

Problem #4: GitLab webhooks Something else I wanted to be able to do was to receive notifications regarding new issues, merge requests and other activities from Salsa. For this, I m using maubot, which is awesome and has a huge list of plugins. I m using the gitlab one.

Final thoughts Overall, I m satisfied with the setup I have now. It has certainly taken some time and effort to find the right tool for each problem I needed to solve, and I still feel like there are some rough edges to soften (like the fact that my Emacs client doesn t support E2E encryption out of the box, or the whole logging situation), but otherwise things are working fine and I haven t had any big problems with the deployment. You do have to be much more careful about stuff (for example, when I installed an unrelated service that hijacked my Apache configuration and made Matrix s federation silently stop working), though. If you have more specific questions about any part of my setup, shoot me an email and I ll do my best to help. Happy chatting!

1. LWN: The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds
2. Intermediate Autotools build artifacts removed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs
3. Distribution news
4. Mailing list news
5. diffoscope
6. Website updates
7. Upstream patches
8. Reproducibility testing framework

LWN: The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds The free software newspaper of record, Linux Weekly News, published an in-depth article based on Holger Levsen s talk, Reproducible Builds: The First Eleven Years which was presented at the recent DebConf24 conference in Busan, South Korea. Titled The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds and written by Jake Edge, LWN s article not only summarises Holger s talk and clarifies its message but it links to external information as well. Holger s original talk can also be watched on the DebConf24 webpage (direct .webm link and his HTML slides are available also). There are also a significant number of comments on LWN s page as well. Holger Levsen also headed a scheduled discussion session at DebConf24 on Preserving *other* build artifacts addressing a topic where a number of Debian packages are (or would like to) produce results that are neither the .deb files, the build logs nor the logs of CI tests. This is an issue for reproducible builds as this 4th type of build artifact are typically shipped within the binary .deb packages, and are invariably non-deterministic; thus making the .deb files unreproducible. (A direct .webm link and HTML slides are available).

Intermediate Autotools build artifacts removed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs Peter Eisentraut wrote a detailed blog post on the subject of The new PostgreSQL 17 make dist . Like many projects, the PostgreSQL database has previously pre-built parts of its GNU Autotools build system: the reason for this is a mix of convenience and traditional practice . Peter astutely notes that this arrangement in the build system is quite tricky as:

You need to carefully maintain the different states of clean source code , partially built source code , and fully built source code , and the commands to transition between them.

However, Peter goes on to mention that:

a lot more attention is nowadays paid to the software supply chain. There are security and legal reasons for this. When users install software, they want to know where it came from, and they want to be sure that they got the right thing, not some fake version or some version of dubious legal provenance.

And cites the XZ Utils backdoor as a reason to care about transparent and reproducible ways of distributing and communicating a source tarball and provenance. Because of this, intermediate build artifacts are now henceforth essentially disallowed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs.

Distribution news In Debian this month, 30 reviews of Debian packages were added, 17 were updated and 10 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. One issue type was added by Chris Lamb, too. [ ] In addition, an issue was filed to update the Salsa CI pipeline (used by 1,000s of Debian packages) to no longer test for reproducibility with reprotest s build_path variation. Holger Levsen provided a rationale for this change in the issue, which has already been made to the tests being performed by tests.reproducible-builds.org.
In Arch Linux this month, Jelle van der Waa published a short blog post on the topic of Investigating creating reproducible images with mkosi, motivated by the desire to make it possible for anyone to re-recreate the official Arch cloud image bit-by-bit identical on their own machine as per [the] reproducible builds definition. In addition, Jelle filed a patch for pacman, the Arch Linux package manager, to respect the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable when installing a package.
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In Android news, the IzzyOnDroid project added 49 new rebuilder recipes and now features 256 total reproducible applications representing 21% of the total offerings in the repository. IzzyOnDroid is an F-Droid style repository for Android apps[:] applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly GitHub).

Mailing list news From our mailing list this month:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted a brief message to the list with some helpful information regarding nondeterminism within Rust binaries, positing the use of the codegen-units = 16 default and resulting in a bug being filed in the Rust issue tracker. [ ]
• Bernhard also wrote to the list, following up to a thread in November 2023, on attempts to make the LibreOffice suite of office applications build reproducibly. In the thread from this month, Bernhard could announce that the four patches previously mentioned have landed in LibreOffice upstream.
• Fay Stegerman linked the mailing list to a thread she made on the Signal issue tracker regarding whether device-specific binaries [can] ever be considered meaningfully reproducible . In particular: the whole part about allow[ing] multiple third parties to come to a consensus on a correct result breaks down completely when correct is device-specific and not something everyone can agree on. [ ]
• Developer kpcyrd posted an update for source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. Announcing that it now importing packages from live-bootstrap ( a usable Linux system [that is] created with only human-auditable, and wherever possible, human-written, source code ) into its database of provenance data.
• Lastly, Mechtilde Stehmann posted an update to an earlier thread about how Java builds are not reproducible on the armhf architecture, enquiring how they might gain temporary access to such a machine in order to perform some deeper testing. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb released versions 274, 275, 276 and 277, uploaded these to Debian, and made the following changes as well:

• New features:
  • Strip ANSI escapes usually colour codes from the output of the Procyon Java decompiler. [ ]
  • Factor out a method for stripping ANSI escapes. [ ]
  • Append output from dumppdf(1) in more cases, avoiding situations where we fallback to a binary diff. [ ]
  • Add support for versions of Perl s IO::Compress::Zip version 2.212. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Also catch RuntimeError exceptions when importing the PyPDF library so that it, or, crucially, its transitive dependencies, cannot not cause diffoscope to traceback at runtime and build time. [ ]
  • Do not call marshal.load( ) of precompiled Python bytecode as it, alas, inherently unsafe. Replace for now with a brief summary of the code section of .pyc. [ ][ ]
  • Don t include excessive debug output when calling dumppdf(1). [ ]
• Testsuite-related changes:
  • Don t bother to check version number in test_python.py: the fixture for this test is fixed. [ ][ ]
  • Update test_zip text fixtures and definitions to support new changes to the Perl IO::Compress library. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the available architectures for a number of test dependencies [ ] and Sergei Trofimovich fixed an issue to avoid diffoscope crashing when hashing directory symlinks [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian proposed GNU Guix updates for diffoscope versions 275 and 276 and 277.

Website updates There were a rather substantial number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

• Alba Herrerias:
  • Substantially extend the guidance on the Contribute page. [ ]
• Chris Lamb:
  • Set the future: true configuration value so we render all files and documents in the website, regardless of whether they have a date property in the future. After all, we don t re-generate the website on a timer, and have other ways of making unpublished, draft posts. [ ][ ]
• Fay Stegerman:
  • Add IzzyOnDroid (IoD) to the Projects page. [ ]
• hulkoba:
  • Considerably overhaul the History page in the documentation, linking strip-nondeterminism and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH [ ], fixing the test statistics link [ ], adjusting the Google Summer of Code application link [ ], a link to a Debian bug [ ], and removed a dead link to the debhelper utility [ ].
  • Use the jekyll-sitemap plugin to create a sitemap for the website. [ ]
  • Use raw HTML to avoid a literal .lead directive appearing in the page. [ ]
  • Fix a number of issues on the Virtual machine drivers page, such as keeping the Gitian info, linking (and then removing) an issue on the Bitcoin issue tracker [ ] and fixing a link to the Bazel website [ ].
  • Address a broken footnote link on the Timestamps page. [ ]
  • Unify the style on the Commandments of Reproducible Builds page in order to match other documentation entries. [ ]
  • Add a table of contents to the main Documentation page. [ ]
  • Avoid a number of so-called here links on the Variations in the build environment page. [ ]
  • Fix a link to the man2html patch on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation page. [ ]
  • Fix a link to sources.debian.org on the Randomness page. [ ]
• kpcyrd:
  • Fix a typo on the Variations in the build environment page. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add all the sponsors to the Hamburg 2024 summit page. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Fix a link in the summit sponsor prospectus PDF. [ ]
• Pol Dellaiera:
  • Fix the DoI for their thesis on the Publications page. [ ]

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:
  • agama-integration-tests (uses a random TCP-port number in .lock file)
  • ca-certificates-mozilla:ca-certificates-mozilla-prebuilt
  • cosmic (hash order issue)
  • openSUSE (meta-issue to test reproducibility in the openSUSE Build Service)
  • pop-launcher (parallelism-related issue)
  • post (toolchain-issue, avoiding Rust parallelism)
  • rpm-config-SUSE (date-related issue)
  • rust (Rust toolchain issue)
  • weblate (build gets stuck)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1078048 filed against scikit-optimize.
  • #1078153 filed against pan.
  • #1078687 filed against tetzle.
  • #1079041 filed against apg.
  • #1079312 filed against receptor.
• James Addison:
  • #1064782 forwarded and merged in bind9-doc
  • #1066083 forwarded and merged in gnome-maps

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 August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

• Temporarily install the openssl-provider-legacy package for the Debian unstable environments for running diffoscope due to Debian bug #1078944. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Mark Debian armhf architecture nodes as being down due to proxy down. [ ][ ]
• Detect proxy failures. [ ][ ][ ]
• Run the index-buildinfo for the builtin-pho script with the -q switch. [ ]
• Disable all Arch Linux reproducible jobs. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the website configuration to install the ruby-jekyll-sitemap package as it is now used in the website [ ], Roland Clobus updated the script to build Debian live images to treat openQA issues as warnings [ ], and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4b node as down [ ].

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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

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

• Bel m - PA
• Po os de Caldas - MG

Planing A Self Organized Solo Trip You know the movie Queen? The actor Kangana Ranaut plays in that movie the role of Rani Mehra, a 24-year-old Punjabi woman, who was a simple, homely girl that was always reliant on her family. Similar to Rani I too rarely ventured out without my parents and often needed my younger sibling by my side. Inspired by her transformation, I decided it was time to take control of my own story and discover who I truly am.

Trip Requirements

My First Passport The journey began with a significant first step: Obtaining my first passport Never having had one before, I scheduled the nearest available interview date on June 29 2022. This meant traveling to Solapur, a city 309 km from my hometown, accompanied by my father. After successfully completing the interview, I received my passport on July 14 2022.

Select A Country, Booking Flights And Accommodation Excited and ready to embark on my adventure, I planed trip to Albania and booked the flight tickets. Why? I had heard from friends that it was a beautiful European country with beaches and other attractions, and importantly, it didn t require a visa for Indian citizens and was more affordable than other European destinations. Before heading to Albania, I planned a overnight stop in Abu Dhabi with a transit visa, thanks to friend who knew the process for obtaining it. Some of my friends did travel also to Europe at the same time and quite close to my plannings, but that I realized just later the trip.

Day 1, Starting The Experience On July 20, 2022, I started my journey by traveling from Pune, Maharashtra, to Delhi, where my brother lives. He came to see me off at the airport, adding a touch of warmth and support to the beginning of my solo adventure. Upon arriving in Delhi, with my next flight scheduled for July 21, I stayed at a backpacker hostel named Zostel, Paharganj, Delhi to rest. During my stay, I noticed that many travelers at the hostel carried rucksacks, which sparked a desire in me to get one for my own trip to Europe. Up until then, I had always shopped with my mom and had never bought anything on my own. Inspired by the travelers, I set out to find a suitable rucksack. I traveled alone by metro from Paharganj to Rohini to visit a Decathlon store, where I purchased a 50-liter rucksack. This was a significant step in preparing for my European adventure and marked a milestone in my journey of self reliance.

Day 2, Flying To Abu Dhabi The following day, July 21 2024, I had a flight to Abu Dhabi. I spent the night at the hostel to rest before my journey. On the day of the flight, I needed to reach the airport by 3 PM, and a friend kindly came to drop me off. With my rucksack packed and excitement building, I was ready for the next leg of my adventure. When we arrived at the airport, my friend saw me off, marking the start of my international journey. With mom made spices, chutneys, and chilly flakes packed for comfort, I completed my immigration process in about two and a half hours. I then settled at the gate for my flight, feeling a mix of excitement and anxiety as thoughts raced through my mind. To ease my nerves, I struck up a conversation with a man seated nearby who was also traveling to Abu Dhabi for work. He provided helpful information about safety and transportation in Abu Dhabi, which reassured me. With the boarding process complete and my anxiety somewhat eased. I found my window seat on the flight and settled in, excited for the journey ahead. Next to me was a young man from Ranchi(Zarkhand, India), heading to Abu Dhabi for work at a mining factory. We had an engaging conversation about work culture in Abu Dhabi and recruitment from India. Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I completed my transit, collected my luggage, and began finding my way to the hotel Premier Inn AbuDhabi, which was in the airport area. To my surprise, I ran into the same man from the flight, now in a cab. He kindly offered to drop me at my hotel, which I gladly accepted since navigating an unfamiliar city with a short acquaintance felt safer. At the hotel gate, he asked if I had local currency (Dirhams) for payment, as sometimes online transactions can fail. That hadn t crossed my mind, and I realized I might be left stranded if a transaction failed. Recognizing his help as a godsend, I asked if he could lend me some Dirhams, promising to transfer the amount later. He kindly assured me to pay him back once I reached the hotel room. With that relief, I checked into the hotel, feeling deeply grateful for the unexpected assistance and transferred the money to him after getting to my room.

Day 3, Flying And Arrive In Tirana Once in the hotel room, I found it hard to sleep, anxious about waking up on time for my flight. I set an alarm to wake up early, but my subconscious mind kept me alert, and I woke up before the alarm went off. I got freshened up and went down for breakfast, where I found some vegetarian options like Idli-Sambar and bread with butter, along with some morning tea. After breakfast, I headed back to the airport, ready to catch my flight to my final destination: Tirana, Albania. I reached Tirana, Albania after a six hours flight, feeling exhausted and I was suffering from a headache. The air pressure had blocked my ears, and jet lag added to my fatigue. After collecting my checked luggage, I headed to the first ATM machine at the airport. Struggling to insert my card, I asked a nearby gentleman for help. He tried his best, but my card got stuck inside the machine. Panic set in as I worried about how I would survive without money. Taking a deep breath, I found an airport employee and explained the situation. The gentleman stayed with me, offering support and repeatedly apologizing for his mistake. However, it wasn t his fault, the ATM was out of order, which I hadn t noticed. My focus was solely on retrieving my ATM card. The airport employee worked diligently, using a hairpin to carefully extract my card. Finally, the card was freed, and I felt an immense sense of relief, grateful for the help of these kind strangers. I used another ATM, successfully withdrew money, and then went to an airport mobile SIM shop to buy a new SIM card for local internet and connectivity.

Day 4, Arriving In Tirana, Facing Challenges In A Foreign Country I had booked a stay at a backpacker hostel near the city center of Tirana. After sorting out the ATM and SIM card issues, I searched for a bus or any transport to get there. It was quite late, around 8:30 PM, and being in a new city, I was in a hurry. I saw a bus nearly leaving the airport, stopped it, and asked if it went to the city center. They gave me the green flag, so I boarded the airport service bus and reached the city center. Feeling very tired, I discovered that the hostel was about an hour and a half away by walking. Deciding to take a cab, I faced a challenge as the driver couldn t understand my English or accent. Using a mobile translator to convert my address from English to Albanian, I finally communicated my destination to him. With that sorted out, I headed to the Blue Door Backpacker Hostel and arrived around 9 PM, relieved to have finally reached my destination and I checked in. I found my top bunk bed, only to realize I had booked a mixed-gender dormitory. This detail had completely escaped my notice during the booking process. I felt unsure about how to handle the situation. Coincidentally, my experience mirrored what Kangana faced in the movie Queen . Feeling acidic due to an empty stomach and the exhaustion of heavy traveling, I wasn t up to cooking in the hostel s kitchen. I asked the front desk about the nearest restaurant. It was nearly 9:30 PM, and the streets were deserted. To avoid any mishaps like in the movie Queen, I kept my passport securely locked in my bag, ensuring it wouldn t be a victim of theft. Venturing out for dinner, I felt uneasy on the quiet streets. I eventually found a restaurant recommended by the hostel, but the menu was almost entirely non-vegetarian. I struggled to ask about vegetarian options and was uncertain if any dishes contained eggs, as some people consider eggs to be vegetarian. Feeling frustrated and unsure, I left the restaurant without eating. I noticed a nearby grocery store that was about to close and managed to get a few extra minutes to shop. I bought some snacks, wafers, milk, and tea bags (though I couldn t find tea powder to make Indian-style tea). Returning to the hostel, I made do with wafers, cookies, and milk for dinner. That day was incredibly tough for me, I filled with exhaustion and struggle in a new country, I was on the verge of tears . I made a video call home before sleeping on the top bunk bed. It was a new experience for me, sharing a room with both unknown men and women. I kept my passport safe inside my purse and under my pillow while sleeping, staying very conscious about its security.

Day 5, Exploring Nearby Places I woke up the next day at noon. After having some coffee, the hostel management girl asked if I wanted breakfast. She offered curd with cornflakes, which I refused because I don t like curd. Instead, I ordered a pizza from a vegetarian pizza place with her help, and I started feeling better. I met some people in the hostel, some from Syria and others from Italy. I struggled to understand their accents but kept pushing myself to get involved in their discussions. Despite the challenges, I felt more at ease and was slowly adapting to my new environment. I went out from the hostel in the evening to buy some vegetables to cook something. I searched for shops and found some potatoes, tomatoes, and rice. I decided to cook Khichdi, an Indian dish made with rice, and added some chili flakes I brought from home. After preparing my dinner, I ate and then went to sleep again.

Day 6, Tiranas Recent History The next day, I planned to explore the city and visited Bunkart-1, a fascinating museum in a massive underground bunker from the communist era. Originally built as a shelter for Albania s political and military elite, it now offers a unique glimpse into the country s history under Enver Hoxha s oppressive regime. The museum s exhibits include historical artifacts, photographs, and multimedia displays that detail the lives of Albanians during that time. Walking through the dimly lit corridors, I felt the weight of history and gained a deeper understanding of Albania s past.

Day 7-8, Meeting Friends From India The next day, I accidentally met with Chirag, who was returning from the Debian Conference 2022 held in Prizren, Kosovo, and staying at the same hostel. When I encountered him, he was talking on the phone, and I recognized he was Indian by his accent. I introduced myself, and we discovered we had some mutual friends. Chirag told me that our common friend, Raju, was also coming to stay at the hostel the next day. This news made me feel relaxed and happy to have known people around. When Raju arrived, the three of us, Chirag, Raju, and I planned to have dinner at an Indian restaurant and explore Tirana city. I had a great time talking and enjoying their company.

Day 9-10, Meeting More Friends Raju had a ticket to leave soon, so Chirag and I made a plan to visit Shkod r and the nearby Komani Lake for kayaking. We started our journey early in the morning by bus and reached Shkod r. There, we met new friends from the conference, Pavit and Abraham, who were already there. We had dinner together and enjoyed an ice cream treat from Chirag.

Day 12, Kayaking And Say Good Bye To Friends The next day, Pavit and Abraham had a flight back to India, so Chirag and I went to Komani Lake. We had an adventurous time kayaking, even though neither of us knew how to swim. We took a ferry through the backwaters to the island on Komani Lake and enjoyed a fantastic adventure together. After our trip, Chirag returned to Tirana for his flight back to India, leaving me to continue my journey alone.

Day 13, Climbing Rozafa Castel By stopping at Shkod r, I visited Rozafa Castle. Despite the language barrier, as most locals only spoke Albanian, people around me guided me correctly on how to get there. At times, I used applications like Google Translate to communicate. To read signs or hotel menus, I used Google Photos' language converter. I even used the audio converter to understand and speak some basic Albanian phrases. I took a bus from Shkod r to the southern part of Albania, heading to Sarand . The journey lasted about five to six hours, and I had booked a stay at Mona s Hostel. Upon arrival, I met Eliza from America, and we went together to Ksamil Beach, spending a wonderful day there.

Day 14, Vlora Beach: Beach Side Cycling Next, I traveled to Vlor , where I stayed for one day. During my time there, I enjoyed beach side cycling with a cycle provided by the hostel owner and spent some time feeding fish. I also met a fellow traveler from Delhi who had brought along some preserved Indian curry. He kindly shared it with me, which was a welcome change after nearly 15 days without authentic Indian cuisine, except for what I had cooked myself in various hostels.

Day 15-16 Visiting Durress, Travelling Back To Tirana I then visited Durr s, exploring its beautiful beaches, before heading back to Tirana one day before my flight home. On the day of my flight, my alarm didn t go off, and I woke up late at the hostel. In a frantic rush, I packed everything in just five minutes and dashed toward the city center to catch the bus to the airport. If I had been just five minutes later, I would have missed the bus. Thankfully, I managed to stop it just in time and began my journey back home, reflecting on the incredible adventure I had experienced. Fortunately, I wasn t late; I arrived at the airport just in time. After clearing immigration, I boarded my flight, which had a layover in Warsaw, Poland. The journey from Tirana to Warsaw took about two and a half hours, followed by a seven to eight-hour flight from Poland back to India. Once I arrived in Delhi, I returned to Zostel and booked a train ticket to Aurangabad for the next three days.

Backview This trip was an incredible adventure for me. I never imagined I could accomplish something like this, but I did. Meeting diverse people, experiencing different cultures, and learning so much made this journey truly unforgettable. Looking back, I realize how much I ve grown from this experience. Although I may have more opportunities to travel abroad in the future, this trip will always hold a special place in my heart. The memories I made and the incredible people I met along the way are irreplaceable. This experience goes beyond what I can express through this blog or words; it was incredibly precious to me. Every moment of this journey is etched in my memory, and I am grateful for every part of it.

Recovering DPL It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it. It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August. During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything. Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!

Video team I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.

It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ). I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks. This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)

Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!

Packaging I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:

• Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).
• Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.
• Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.
• Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).
• Backport obs-gradient-source for bookworm.
• Did some initial packaging on Cambalache, I ll upload to unstable once wlroots (0.18) hits unstable.
• Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)

Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

Social Conference Dinner

Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago

The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.

Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+

Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.

• I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
• I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
• Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
• I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).
• We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
• and many other fly-by discussions.

Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf

• loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
• toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
• extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
• Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
• Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.

So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

Getting started

1. Install required packages.

$ sudo apt install -y make ruby-pg ruby-json ruby-term-ansicolor

1. Clone https://salsa.debian.org/kenhys/apt-upgrade-canary.
2. Just sudo make install.

Use case in action If there is no serious bugs which is reported against target packages, apt-upgrade-canary reports no error.

apt-upgrade-canary: no problem

If there are something weird happen, it reports matched bugs.

apt-upgrade-canary: serious case

So you can stay on.

PGPASSWORD="udd-mirror" psql --port=5432 --host=udd-mirror.debian.net \
  --username=udd-mirror udd -c "select source from sources \
   where release = 'sid' and (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' \
   OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL \
   OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%' \
   order by random() limit 10;"

1. update our internal template generators to make Pod security settings explicit
2. introduce Kyverno policies in Audit mode
3. see how the cluster would behave with them, and if we had any offending resources reported by the new policies, and correct them
4. modify Kyverno policies and set them in Enforce mode
5. drop PSP

• corrected the external HAproxy kubernetes apiserver health checks, from checking just for open TCP ports, to actually checking the /healthz HTTP endpoint, which more accurately reflected the health of each k8s apiserver.
• having a more realistic development environment. In lima-kilo, we created a couple of helper scripts to create/delete 4000 policy resources, each on a different namespace.
• greatly over-provisioned memory in the Kubernetes control plane servers. This is, bigger memory in the base virtual machine hosting the control plane. Scaling the memory headroom of the apiserver would prevent it from running out of memory, and therefore crashing the whole system. We went from 8GB RAM per virtual machine to 32GB. In our cluster, a single apiserver pod could eat 7GB of memory on a normal day, so having 8GB on the base virtual machine was clearly not enough. I also sent a patch proposal to Kyverno upstream documentation suggesting they clarify the additional memory pressure on the apiserver.
• corrected resource requests and limits of Kyverno, to more accurately describe our actual usage.
• increased the number of replicas of the Kyverno admission controller to 7, so admission requests could be handled more timely by Kyverno.