Dear Debianites This morning I decided to just start writing Bits from DPL and send whatever I have by 18:00 local time. Here it is, barely proof read, along with all it's warts and grammar mistakes! It's slightly long and doesn't contain any critical information, so if you're not in the mood, don't feel compelled to read it! Get ready for a new DPL! Soon, the voting period will start to elect our next DPL, and my time as DPL will come to an end. Reading the questions posted to the new candidates on debian-vote, it takes quite a bit of restraint to not answer all of them myself, I think I can see how that aspect contributed to me being reeled in to running for DPL! In total I've done so 5 times (the first time I ran, Sam was elected!). Good luck to both Andreas and Sruthi, our current DPL candidates! I've already started working on preparing handover, and there's multiple request from teams that have came in recently that will have to wait for the new term, so I hope they're both ready to hit the ground running! Things that I wish could have gone better Communication Recently, I saw a t-shirt that read:

Adulthood is saying, 'But after this week things will slow down a bit' over and over until you die.

I can relate! With every task, crisis or deadline that appears, I think that once this is over, I'll have some more breathing space to get back to non-urgent, but important tasks. "Bits from the DPL" was something I really wanted to get right this last term, and clearly failed spectacularly. I have two long Bits from the DPL drafts that I never finished, I tend to have prioritised problems of the day over communication. With all the hindsight I have, I'm not sure which is better to prioritise, I do rate communication and transparency very highly and this is really the top thing that I wish I could've done better over the last four years. On that note, thanks to people who provided me with some kind words when I've mentioned this to them before. They pointed out that there are many other ways to communicate and be in touch with the community, and they mentioned that they thought that I did a good job with that. Since I'm still on communication, I think we can all learn to be more effective at it, since it's really so important for the project. Every time I publicly spoke about us spending more money, we got more donations. People out there really like to see how we invest funds in to Debian, instead of just making it heap up. DSA just spent a nice chunk on money on hardware, but we don't have very good visibility on it. It's one thing having it on a public line item in SPI's reporting, but it would be much more exciting if DSA could provide a write-up on all the cool hardware they're buying and what impact it would have on developers, and post it somewhere prominent like debian-devel-announce, Planet Debian or Bits from Debian (from the publicity team). I don't want to single out DSA there, it's difficult and affects many other teams. The Salsa CI team also spent a lot of resources (time and money wise) to extend testing on AMD GPUs and other AMD hardware. It's fantastic and interesting work, and really more people within the project and in the outside world should know about it! I'm not going to push my agendas to the next DPL, but I hope that they continue to encourage people to write about their work, and hopefully at some point we'll build enough excitement in doing so that it becomes a more normal part of our daily work. Founding Debian as a standalone entity This was my number one goal for the project this last term, which was a carried over item from my previous terms. I'm tempted to write everything out here, including the problem statement and our current predicaments, what kind of ground work needs to happen, likely constitutional changes that need to happen, and the nature of the GR that would be needed to make such a thing happen, but if I start with that, I might not finish this mail. In short, I 100% believe that this is still a very high ranking issue for Debian, and perhaps after my term I'd be in a better position to spend more time on this (hmm, is this an instance of "The grass is always better on the other side", or "Next week will go better until I die?"). Anyway, I'm willing to work with any future DPL on this, and perhaps it can in itself be a delegation tasked to properly explore all the options, and write up a report for the project that can lead to a GR. Overall, I'd rather have us take another few years and do this properly, rather than rush into something that is again difficult to change afterwards. So while I very much wish this could've been achieved in the last term, I can't say that I have any regrets here either. My terms in a nutshell COVID-19 and Debian 11 era My first term in 2020 started just as the COVID-19 pandemic became known to spread globally. It was a tough year for everyone, and Debian wasn't immune against its effects either. Many of our contributors got sick, some have lost loved ones (my father passed away in March 2020 just after I became DPL), some have lost their jobs (or other earners in their household have) and the effects of social distancing took a mental and even physical health toll on many. In Debian, we tend to do really well when we get together in person to solve problems, and when DebConf20 got cancelled in person, we understood that that was necessary, but it was still more bad news in a year we had too much of it already. I can't remember if there was ever any kind of formal choice or discussion about this at any time, but the DebConf video team just kind of organically and spontaneously became the orga team for an online DebConf, and that lead to our first ever completely online DebConf. This was great on so many levels. We got to see each other's faces again, even though it was on screen. We had some teams talk to each other face to face for the first time in years, even though it was just on a Jitsi call. It had a lasting cultural change in Debian, some teams still have video meetings now, where they didn't do that before, and I think it's a good supplement to our other methods of communication. We also had a few online Mini-DebConfs that was fun, but DebConf21 was also online, and by then we all developed an online conference fatigue, and while it was another good online event overall, it did start to feel a bit like a zombieconf and after that, we had some really nice events from the Brazillians, but no big global online community events again. In my opinion online MiniDebConfs can be a great way to develop our community and we should spend some further energy into this, but hey! This isn't a platform so let me back out of talking about the future as I see it... Despite all the adversity that we faced together, the Debian 11 release ended up being quite good. It happened about a month or so later than what we ideally would've liked, but it was a solid release nonetheless. It turns out that for quite a few people, staying inside for a few months to focus on Debian bugs was quite productive, and Debian 11 ended up being a very polished release. During this time period we also had to deal with a previous Debian Developer that was expelled for his poor behaviour in Debian, who continued to harass members of the Debian project and in other free software communities after his expulsion. This ended up being quite a lot of work since we had to take legal action to protect our community, and eventually also get the police involved. I'm not going to give him the satisfaction by spending too much time talking about him, but you can read our official statement regarding Daniel Pocock here: https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20211117 In late 2021 and early 2022 we also discussed our general resolution process, and had two consequent votes to address some issues that have affected past votes:

• https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003
• https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_001

In my first term I addressed our delegations that were a bit behind, by the end of my last term all delegation requests are up to date. There's still some work to do, but I'm feeling good that I get to hand this over to the next DPL in a very decent state. Delegation updates can be very deceiving, sometimes a delegation is completely re-written and it was just 1 or 2 hours of work. Other times, a delegation updated can contain one line that has changed or a change in one team member that was the result of days worth of discussion and hashing out differences. I also received quite a few requests either to host a service, or to pay a third-party directly for hosting. This was quite an admin nightmare, it either meant we had to manually do monthly reimbursements to someone, or have our TOs create accounts/agreements at the multiple providers that people use. So, after talking to a few people about this, we founded the DebianNet team (we could've admittedly chosen a better name, but that can happen later on) for providing hosting at two different hosting providers that we have agreement with so that people who host things under debian.net have an easy way to host it, and then at the same time Debian also has more control if a site maintainer goes MIA. More info: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianNet You might notice some Openstack mentioned there, we had some intention to set up a Debian cloud for hosting these things, that could also be used for other additional Debiany things like archive rebuilds, but these have so far fallen through. We still consider it a good idea and hopefully it will work out some other time (if you're a large company who can sponsor few racks and servers, please get in touch!) DebConf22 and Debian 12 era DebConf22 was the first time we returned to an in-person DebConf. It was a bit smaller than our usual DebConf - understandably so, considering that there were still COVID risks and people who were at high risk or who had family with high risk factors did the sensible thing and stayed home. After watching many MiniDebConfs online, I also attended my first ever MiniDebConf in Hamburg. It still feels odd typing that, it feels like I should've been at one before, but my location makes attending them difficult (on a side-note, a few of us are working on bootstrapping a South African Debian community and hopefully we can pull off MiniDebConf in South Africa later this year). While I was at the MiniDebConf, I gave a talk where I covered the evolution of firmware, from the simple e-proms that you'd find in old printers to the complicated firmware in modern GPUs that basically contain complete operating systems- complete with drivers for the device their running on. I also showed my shiny new laptop, and explained that it's impossible to install that laptop without non-free firmware (you'd get a black display on d-i or Debian live). Also that you couldn't even use an accessibility mode with audio since even that depends on non-free firmware these days. Steve, from the image building team, has said for a while that we need to do a GR to vote for this, and after more discussion at DebConf, I kept nudging him to propose the GR, and we ended up voting in favour of it. I do believe that someone out there should be campaigning for more free firmware (unfortunately in Debian we just don't have the resources for this), but, I'm glad that we have the firmware included. In the end, the choice comes down to whether we still want Debian to be installable on mainstream bare-metal hardware. At this point, I'd like to give a special thanks to the ftpmasters, image building team and the installer team who worked really hard to get the changes done that were needed in order to make this happen for Debian 12, and for being really proactive for remaining niggles that was solved by the time Debian 12.1 was released. The included firmware contributed to Debian 12 being a huge success, but it wasn't the only factor. I had a list of personal peeves, and as the hard freeze hit, I lost hope that these would be fixed and made peace with the fact that Debian 12 would release with those bugs. I'm glad that lots of people proved me wrong and also proved that it's never to late to fix bugs, everything on my list got eliminated by the time final freeze hit, which was great! We usually aim to have a release ready about 2 years after the previous release, sometimes there are complications during a freeze and it can take a bit longer. But due to the excellent co-ordination of the release team and heavy lifting from many DDs, the Debian 12 release happened 21 months and 3 weeks after the Debian 11 release. I hope the work from the release team continues to pay off so that we can achieve their goals of having shorter and less painful freezes in the future! Even though many things were going well, the ongoing usr-merge effort highlighted some social problems within our processes. I started typing out the whole history of usrmerge here, but it's going to be too long for the purpose of this mail. Important questions that did come out of this is, should core Debian packages be team maintained? And also about how far the CTTE should really be able to override a maintainer. We had lots of discussion about this at DebConf22, but didn't make much concrete progress. I think that at some point we'll probably have a GR about package maintenance. Also, thank you to Guillem who very patiently explained a few things to me (after probably having have to done so many times to others before already) and to Helmut who have done the same during the MiniDebConf in Hamburg. I think all the technical and social issues here are fixable, it will just take some time and patience and I have lots of confidence in everyone involved. UsrMerge wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge DebConf 23 and Debian 13 era DebConf23 took place in Kochi, India. At the end of my Bits from the DPL talk there, someone asked me what the most difficult thing I had to do was during my terms as DPL. I answered that nothing particular stood out, and even the most difficult tasks ended up being rewarding to work on. Little did I know that my most difficult period of being DPL was just about to follow. During the day trip, one of our contributors, Abraham Raji, passed away in a tragic accident. There's really not anything anyone could've done to predict or stop it, but it was devastating to many of us, especially the people closest to him. Quite a number of DebConf attendees went to his funeral, wearing the DebConf t-shirts he designed as a tribute. It still haunts me when I saw his mother scream "He was my everything! He was my everything!", this was by a large margin the hardest day I've ever had in Debian, and I really wasn't ok for even a few weeks after that and I think the hurt will be with many of us for some time to come. So, a plea again to everyone, please take care of yourself! There's probably more people that love you than you realise. A special thanks to the DebConf23 team, who did a really good job despite all the uphills they faced (and there were many!). As DPL, I think that planning for a DebConf is near to impossible, all you can do is show up and just jump into things. I planned to work with Enrico to finish up something that will hopefully save future DPLs some time, and that is a web-based DD certificate creator instead of having the DPL do so manually using LaTeX. It already mostly works, you can see the work so far by visiting https://nm.debian.org/person/ACCOUNTNAME/certificate/ and replacing ACCOUNTNAME with your Debian account name, and if you're a DD, you should see your certificate. It still needs a few minor changes and a DPL signature, but at this point I think that will be finished up when the new DPL start. Thanks to Enrico for working on this! Since my first term, I've been trying to find ways to improve all our accounting/finance issues. Tracking what we spend on things, and getting an annual overview is hard, especially over 3 trusted organisations. The reimbursement process can also be really tedious, especially when you have to provide files in a certain order and combine them into a PDF. So, at DebConf22 we had a meeting along with the treasurer team and Stefano Rivera who said that it might be possible for him to work on a new system as part of his Freexian work. It worked out, and Freexian funded the development of the system since then, and after DebConf23 we handled the reimbursements for the conference via the new reimbursements site: https://reimbursements.debian.net/ It's still early days, but over time it should be linked to all our TOs and we'll use the same category codes across the board. So, overall, our reimbursement process becomes a lot simpler, and also we'll be able to get information like how much money we've spent on any category in any period. It will also help us to track how much money we have available or how much we spend on recurring costs. Right now that needs manual polling from our TOs. So I'm really glad that this is a big long-standing problem in the project that is being fixed. For Debian 13, we're waving goodbye to the KFreeBSD and mipsel ports. But we're also gaining riscv64 and loongarch64 as release architectures! I have 3 different RISC-V based machines on my desk here that I haven't had much time to work with yet, you can expect some blog posts about them soon after my DPL term ends! As Debian is a unix-like system, we're affected by the Year 2038 problem, where systems that uses 32 bit time in seconds since 1970 run out of available time and will wrap back to 1970 or have other undefined behaviour. A detailed wiki page explains how this works in Debian, and currently we're going through a rather large transition to make this possible. I believe this is the right time for Debian to be addressing this, we're still a bit more than a year away for the Debian 13 release, and this provides enough time to test the implementation before 2038 rolls along. Of course, big complicated transitions with dependency loops that causes chaos for everyone would still be too easy, so this past weekend (which is a holiday period in most of the west due to Easter weekend) has been filled with dealing with an upstream bug in xz-utils, where a backdoor was placed in this key piece of software. An Ars Technica covers it quite well, so I won't go into all the details here. I mention it because I want to give yet another special thanks to everyone involved in dealing with this on the Debian side. Everyone involved, from the ftpmasters to security team and others involved were super calm and professional and made quick, high quality decisions. This also lead to the archive being frozen on Saturday, this is the first time I've seen this happen since I've been a DD, but I'm sure next week will go better! Looking forward It's really been an honour for me to serve as DPL. It might well be my biggest achievement in my life. Previous DPLs range from prominent software engineers to game developers, or people who have done things like complete Iron Man, run other huge open source projects and are part of big consortiums. Ian Jackson even authored dpkg and is now working on the very interesting tag2upload service! I'm a relative nobody, just someone who grew up as a poor kid in South Africa, who just really cares about Debian a lot. And, above all, I'm really thankful that I didn't do anything major to screw up Debian for good. Not unlike learning how to use Debian, and also becoming a Debian Developer, I've learned a lot from this and it's been a really valuable growth experience for me. I know I can't possible give all the thanks to everyone who deserves it, so here's a big big thanks to everyone who have worked so hard and who have put in many, many hours to making Debian better, I consider you all heroes! -Jonathan

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.

Freexian Meetup, by Stefano Rivera, Utkarsh Gupta, et al. During DebConf, Freexian organized a meetup for its collaborators and those interested in learning more about Freexian and its services. It was well received and many people interested in Freexian showed up. Some developers who were interested in contributing to LTS came to get more details about joining the project. And some prospective customers came to get to know us and ask questions. Sadly, the tragic loss of Abraham shook DebConf, both individually and structurally. The meetup got rescheduled to a small room without video coverage. With that, we still had a wholesome interaction and here s a quick picture from the meetup taken by Utkarsh (which is also why he s missing!).

Debusine, by Rapha l Hertzog, et al. Freexian has been investing into debusine for a while, but development speed is about to increase dramatically thanks to funding from SovereignTechFund.de. Rapha l laid out the 5 milestones of the funding contract, and filed the issues for the first milestone. Together with Enrico and Stefano, they established a workflow for the expanded team. Among the first steps of this milestone, Enrico started to work on a developer-friendly description of debusine that we can use when we reach out to the many Debian contributors that we will have to interact with. And Rapha l started the design work of the autopkgtest and lintian tasks, i.e. what s the interface to schedule such tasks, what behavior and what associated options do we support? At this point you might wonder what debusine is supposed to be let us try to answer this: Debusine manages scheduling and distribution of Debian-related build and QA tasks to a network of worker machines. It also manages the resulting artifacts and provides the results in an easy to consume way. We want to make it easy for Debian contributors to leverage all the great QA tools that Debian provides. We want to build the next generation of Debian s build infrastructure, one that will continue to reliably do what it already does, but that will also enable distribution-wide experiments, custom package repositories and custom workflows with advanced package reviews. If this all sounds interesting to you, don t hesitate to watch the project on salsa.debian.org and to contribute.

lpr/lpd in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz During Debconf23, Till Kamppeter presented CPDB (Common Print Dialog Backend), a new way to handle print queues. After this talk it was discussed whether the old lpr/lpd based printing system could be abandoned in Debian or whether there is still demand for it. So Thorsten asked on the debian-devel email list whether anybody uses it. Oddly enough, these old packages are still useful:

• Within a small network it is easier to distribute a printcap file, than to properly configure cups clients.
• One of the biggest manufacturers of WLAN router and DSL boxes only supports raw queues when attaching an USB printer to their hardware. Admittedly the CPDB still has problems with such raw queues.
• The Pharos printing system at MIT is still lpd-based.

As a result, the lpr/lpd stuff is not yet ready to be abandoned and Thorsten will adopt the relevant packages (or rather move them under the umbrella of the debian-printing team). Though it is not planned to develop new features, those packages should at least have a maintainer. This month Thorsten adopted rlpr, an utility for lpd printing without using /etc/printcap. The next one he is working on is lprng, a lpr/lpd printer spooling system. If you know of any other package that is also needed and still maintained by the QA team, please tell Thorsten.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Discussion about lifting the file move moratorium has been initiated with the CTTE and the release team. A formal lift is dependent on updating debootstrap in older suites though. A significant number of packages can automatically move their systemd unit files if dh_installsystemd and systemd.pc change their installation targets. Unfortunately, doing so makes some packages FTBFS and therefore patches have been filed. The analysis tool, dumat, has been enhanced to better understand which upgrade scenarios are considered supported to reduce false positive bug filings and gained a mode for local operation on a .changes file meant for inclusion in salsa-ci. The filing of bugs from dumat is still manual to improve the quality of reports. Since September, the moratorium has been lifted.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Rapha l updated Django s backport in bullseye-backports to match the latest security release that was published in bookworm. Tracker.debian.org is still using that backport.
• Helmut Grohne sent 13 patches for cross build failures.
• Helmut Grohne performed a maintenance upload of debvm enabling its use in autopkgtests.
• Helmut Grohne wrote an API-compatible reimplementation of autopkgtest-build-qemu. It is powered by mmdebstrap, therefore unprivileged, EFI-only and will soon be included in mmdebstrap.
• Santiago continued the work regarding how to make it easier to (automatically) test reverse dependencies. An example of the ongoing work was presented during the Salsa CI BoF at DebConf 23.
  In fact, omniorb-dfsg test pipelines as the above were used for the omniorb-dfsg 4.3.0 transition, verifying how the reverse dependencies (tango, pytango and omnievents) were built and how their autopkgtest jobs run with the to-be-uploaded omniorb-dfsg new release.
• Utkarsh and Stefano attended and helped run DebConf 23. Also continued winding up DebConf 22 accounting.
• Anton Gladky did some science team uploads to fix RC bugs.

Twenty-four is a big number. More than one/fourth (or more) of my life is behind me now. At this point, I truly feel like I have become an adult; mentally and physically. Another year seem to have gone by quickly. I still vividly remember writing 23 and Counting and here I m writing the next one so soon. Probably the lowest I felt ever on my birthday; with loss of Abraham and on the other hand, medical issues with a dear one. Didn t even felt like birthday was almost here. The loss of Abraham, taught me to care for people more and meet cherish everyone. I m grateful for all the people who supported and cared for me and others during times of grief when things went numb. Thank you! Also, for the first time ever, I went to office on my birthday. This probably would become a norm in coming years. Didn t felt like doing anything, so just went to office. The cake, wishes and calls kept coming in throughout the day. I m grateful for the all people around for remembering :) This year marked my first official job switch where I moved from MakeMyTrip to Unmukti as a GNU/Linux Network Systems engineer (that s a mouthful of a job role, I know) where I do anything and everything ranging from system admin, network engineering, a bit of social media, chronicling stuff on company blog and bringing up new applications as per requirement. Moving from MMT to Unmukti was a big cultural shift. From a full-blown corporate with more than 3 thousand employees to a small 5-person team. People still think I work for a startup on hearing the low head count, though Unmukti is a 13 year old organization. I get the freedom to work at my own pace and put my ideas in larger technical discussions, while also actively participating in the community, which I m truly grateful of. I go full geek here and almost everyone here is on the same spectrum, so things technical or societal discussions just naturally flow. The months of August-September again marked the Great Refresh. For reasons unforeseen, I have had to pack my stuff again and move, albeit to just next door for now, but that gave me the much need opportunity to sift through my belongings here. As usual, I threw a boatload of stuff which was of no use and/or just hogging space. My wardrobe cupboard finally got cleaned and sorted, with old and new clothes getting (re)discovered. The Refresh is always a pain with loads of collating stuff in carry worthy bags and hauling stuff but as usual, there s nothing else I can do other than just pack and move. This year also culminated our four plus years of work for organizing annual Debian conference, DebConf to India. DebConf23 happened in Kochi, Kerala from 3rd September to 17th September (including DebCamp). First concrete work to bring conference to India was done Raju Dev who made the first bid during DebConf18 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. We lost but won during the next year bid at DebConf19 Curitiba, Brazil in 2019. I joined the efforts after meeting the team online after DebConf20. Initially started with the publicity team, but we didn t need much publicity for event, I was later asked to join sponsors/fundraising team. That turned out to be quite an experience. Then the conference itself turned to be a good experience. More on that in an upcoming DebConf23 blog post, which will come eventually. After seeing how things work out in Debian in 2020, I had the goal to become a Debian Developer (DD) before DebConf23, which gave me almost three years to get involved and get recognized to become a DD. I was more excited to grab sahil AT debian.org, a short email with only my name and no number of characters after it. After, quite a while, I dropped the hope of become a DD because I wasn t successful in my attempts to meaningfully package and technically contribute to the project. But people in Debian India later convinced me that I have done enough to become a Debian Developer, non uploading, purely by showing up and helping around all for the Debian conferences. I applied and got sponsored (i.e. supported) for my request by srud and Praveen. Finally, on 23rd Feb, I officially became part of Debian project as 14th (at the moment) Debian Developer from India. Got sahil AT debian.org too :) For some grace, I also became a DD before DebConf23. Becoming a DD didn t change anything much though, I still believe, it might have helped secure me a job though. Also, worth mentioning is my increased interest in OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping. I heavily mapped this year and went around for mapathon-meetups too. One step towards a better OSM and more community engagement around it. Looking back at my blog, this year around, it seems mostly dotted with Debian and one OSM post. Significant shift from the range of topics I use to write about in the past year but blogging this year wasn t a go-to activity. Other stuff kept me busy. Living in Gurugram has shown me many facades of life from which I was shielded or didn t come across earlier. It made me realize all the privileges which has helped me along the way, which became apparent while living almost alone here and managing thing by oneself.

Man, you re no longer with us, but I am touched by the number of people you have positively impacted. Almost every DebConf23 presentations by locals I saw after you, carried how you were instrumental in bringing them there. How you were a dear friend and brother. It s a weird turn of events, that you left us during one thing we deeply cared and worked towards making possible since the last 3 years together. Who would have known, that Sahil, I m going back to my apartment tonight and casual bye post that would be the last conversation we ever had. Things were terrible after I heard the news. I had a hard time convincing myself to come see you one last time during your funeral. That was the last time I was going to get to see you, and I kept on looking at you. You, there in front of me, all calm, gave me peace. I ll carry that image all my life now. Your smile will always remain with me. Now, who ll meet and receive me on the door at almost every Debian event (just by sheer co-incidence?). Who ll help me speak out loud about all the Debian shortcomings (and then discuss solutions, when sober :)). It was a testament of the amount of time we had already spent together online, that when we first met during MDC Palakkad, it didn t feel we were physically meeting for the first time. The conversations just flowed. Now this song is associated with you due to your speech during post MiniDebConf Palakkad dinner. Hearing it reminds me of all the times we spent together chilling and talking community (which you cared deeply about). I guess, now we can t stop caring for the community, because your energy was contagious. Now, I can t directly dial your number to listen - Hey Sahil! What s up? from the other end, or Tell me, tell me on any mention of the problem. Nor would I be able to send reference usage of your Debian packaging guide in the wild. You already know how popular this guide of yours. How many people that guide has helped with getting started with packaging. Our last telegram text was me telling you about guide usage in Ravi s DebConf23 presentation. Did I ever tell you, I too got my first start with packaging from there. I started looking up to you from there, even before we met or talked. Now, I missed telling you, I was probably your biggest fan whenever you had the mic in hand and started speaking. You always surprised me all the insights and idea you brought and would kept on impressing me for someone who was just my age but was way more mature. Reading recent toots from Raju Dev made me realize how much I loved your writings. You wrote How the Future will remember Us , Doing what s right and many more. The level of depth in your thought was unparalleled. I loved reading those. That s why I kept pestering you to write more, which you slowly stopped. Now I fully understand why though. You were busy; really busy helping people out or just working for making things better. You were doing Debian, upstream projects, web development, designs, graphics, mentoring, free software evangelism while being the go-to person for almost everyone around. Everyone depended on you, because you were too kind to turn down anyone. Man, I still get your spelling wrong :) Did I ever tell you that? That was the reason, I used to use AR instead online. You ll be missed and will always be part of our conversations, because you have left a profound impact on me, our friends, Debian India and everyone around. See you! the coolest man around. In memory:

• Farewell Abraham video by Vysakh Premkumar
• Tails project dedicating 5.17.1 release
• Hopscotch team dedicating 2023.8.1 release
• Athul dedicating 0.2.5 release of waka-readme
• Debian project

PS - Just found you even had a Youtube channel, you one heck of a talented man.

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.

Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.

Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA

I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.

From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

I very, very nearly didn t make it to DebConf this year, I had a bad cold/flu for a few days before I left, and after a negative covid-19 test just minutes before my flight, I decided to take the plunge and travel. This is just everything in chronological order, more or less, it s the only way I could write it.

DebCamp I planned to spend DebCamp working on various issues. Very few of them actually got done, I spent the first few days in bed further recovering, took a covid-19 test when I arrived and after I felt better, and both were negative, so not sure what exactly was wrong with me, but between that and catching up with other Debian duties, I couldn t make any progress on catching up on the packaging work I wanted to do. I ll still post what I intended here, I ll try to take a few days to focus on these some time next month: Calamares / Debian Live stuff:

• #980209 installation fails at the install boot loader phase
• #1021156 calamares-settings-debian: Confusing/generic program names
• #1037299 Install Debian -> Untrusted application launcher
• #1037123 Minimal HD space required too small for some live images
• #971003 Console auto-login doesn t work with sysvinit

At least Calamares has been trixiefied in testing, so there s that! Desktop stuff:

• #1038660 please set a placeholder theme during development, different from any release
• #1021816 breeze: Background image not shown any more
• #956102 desktop-base: unwanted metadata within images
• #605915 please mtheake it a non-native package
• #681025 Put old themes in a new package named desktop-base-extra
• #941642 desktop-base: split theme data files and desktop integrations in separate packages

The Egg theme that I want to develop for testing/unstable is based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme that was used for Bullseye. Egg, as in, something that hasn t quite hatched yet. Get it? (for #1038660) Debian Social:

• Set up Lemmy instance
  • I started setting up a Lemmy instance before DebCamp, and meant to finish it.
• Migrate PeerTube to new server
  • We got a new physical server for our PeerTube instance, we should have more space for growth and it would help us fix the streaming feature on our platform.

Loopy: I intended to get the loop for DebConf in good shape before I left, so that we can spend some time during DebCamp making some really nice content, unfortunately this went very tumbly, but at least we ended up with a loopy that kind of worked and wasn t too horrible. There s always another DebConf to try again, right?

So DebCamp as a usual DebCamp was pretty much a wash (fitting with all the rain we had?) for me, at least it gave me enough time to recover a bit for DebConf proper, and I had enough time left to catch up on some critical DPL duties and put together a few slides for the Bits from the DPL talk.

DebConf Bits From the DPL I had very, very little available time to prepare something for Bits fro the DPL, but I managed to put some slides together (available on my wiki page). I mostly covered:

• A very quick introduction of myself (I ve done this so many times, it feels redundant giving my history every time), and some introduction on what it is that the DPL does. I declared my intent not to run for DPL again, and the reasoning behind it, and a few bits of information for people who may intend to stand for DPL next year.
• The sentiment out there for the Debian 12 release (which has been very positive). How we include firmware by default now, and that we re saying goodbye to architectures both GNU/KFreeBSD and mipsel.
• Debian Day and the 30th birthday party celebrations from local groups all over the world (and a reminder about the Local Groups BoF later in the week).
• I looked forward to Debian 13 (trixie!), and how we re gaining riscv64 as a release architecture, as well as loongarch64, and that plans seem to be forming to fix 2k38 in Debian, and hopefully largely by the time the Trixie release comes by.
• I made some comments about Enterprise Linux as people refer to the RHEL eco-system these days, how really bizarre some aspects of it is (like the kernel maintenance), and that some big vendors are choosing to support systems outside of that eco-system now (like CPanel now supporting Ubuntu too). I closed with the quote below from Ian Murdock, and assured the audience that if they want to go out and make money with Debian, they are more than welcome too.

Job Fair I walked through the hallway where the Job Fair was hosted, and enjoyed all the buzz. It s not always easy to get this right, but this year it was very active and energetic, I hope lots of people made some connections! Cheese & Wine Due to state laws and alcohol licenses, we couldn t consume alcohol from outside the state of Kerala in the common areas of the hotel (only in private rooms), so this wasn t quite as big or as fun as our usual C&W parties since we couldn t share as much from our individual countries and cultures, but we always knew that this was going to be the case for this DebConf, and it still ended up being alright. Day Trip I opted for the forest / waterfalls daytrip. It was really, really long with lots of time in the bus. I think our trip s organiser underestimated how long it would take between the points on the route (all in all it wasn t that far, but on a bus on a winding mountain road, it takes long). We left at 8:00 and only found our way back to the hotel around 23:30. Even though we arrived tired and hungry, we saw some beautiful scenery, animals and also met indigenous river people who talked about their struggles against being driven out of their place of living multiple times as government invests in new developments like dams and hydro power.

Photos available in the DebConf23 public git repository. Losing a beloved Debian Developer during DebConf To our collective devastation, not everyone made it back from their day trips. Abraham Raji was out to the kayak day trip, and while swimming, got caught by a whirlpool from a drainage system. Even though all of us were properly exhausted and shocked in disbelief at this point, we had to stay up and make some tough decisions. Some initially felt that we had to cancel the rest of DebConf. We also had to figure out how to announce what happened asap both to the larger project and at DebConf in an official manner, while ensuring that due diligence took place and that the family is informed by the police first before making anything public. We ended up cancelling all the talks for the following day, with an address from the DPL in the morning to explain what had happened. Of all the things I ve ever had to do as DPL, this was by far the hardest. The day after that, talks were also cancelled for the morning so that we could attend his funeral. Dozens of DebConf attendees headed out by bus to go pay their final respects, many wearing the t-shirts that Abraham had designed for DebConf. A book of condolences was set up so that everyone who wished to could write a message on how they remembered him. The book will be kept by his family.

Today marks a week since his funeral, and I still feel very raw about it. And even though there was uncertainty whether DebConf should even continue after his death, in hindsight I m glad that everyone pushed forward. While we were all heart broken, it was also heart warming to see people care for each other in all of this. If anything, I think I needed more time at DebConf just to be in that warm aura of emotional support for just a bit longer. There are many people who I wanted to talk to who I barely even had a chance to see. Abraham, or Abru as he was called by some people (which I like because bru in Afrikaans is like bro in English, not sure if that s what it implied locally too) enjoyed artistic pursuits, but he was also passionate about knowledge transfer. He ran classes at DebConf both last year and this year (and I think at other local events too) where he taught people packaging via a quick course that he put together. His enthusiasm for Debian was contagious, a few of the people who he was mentoring came up to me and told me that they were going to see it through and become a DD in honor of him. I can t even remember how I reacted to that, my brain was already so worn out and stitching that together with the tragedy of what happened while at DebConf was just too much for me. I first met him in person last year in Kosovo, I already knew who he was, so I think we interacted during the online events the year before. He was just one of those people who showed so much promise, and I was curious to see what he d achieve in the future. Unfortunately, we was taken away from us too soon. Poetry Evening Later in the week we had the poetry evening. This was the first time I had the courage to recite something. I read Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keely). The first time I heard about this poem was in an interview with Julian Assange s wife, where she mentioned that he really loves this poem, and it caught my attention because I really like the Weezer song Return to Ithaka and always wondered what it was about, so needless to say, that was another rabbit hole at some point. Group Photo Our DebConf photographer organised another group photo for this event, links to high-res versions available on Aigar s website.

BoFs I didn t attend nearly as many talks this DebConf as I would ve liked (fortunately I can catch up on video, should be released soon), but I did make it to a few BoFs. In the Local Groups BoF, representatives from various local teams were present who introduced themselves and explained what they were doing. From memory (sorry if I left someone out), we had people from Belgium, Brazil, Taiwan and South Africa. We talked about types of events a local group could do (BSPs, Mini DC, sprints, Debian Day, etc. How to help local groups get started, booth kits for conferences, and setting up some form of calendar that lists important Debian events in a way that makes it easier for people to plan and co-ordinate. There s a mailing list for co-ordination of local groups, and the irc channel is #debian-localgroups on oftc.

If you got one of these Cheese & Wine bags from DebConf, that s from the South African local group!

In the Debian.net BoF, we discussed the Debian.net hosting service, where Debian pays for VMs hosted for projects by individual DDs on Debian.net. The idea is that we start some form of census that monitors the services, whether they re still in use, whether the system is up to date, whether someone still cares for it, etc. We had some discussion about where the lines of responsibility are drawn, and we can probably make things a little bit more clear in the documentation. We also want to offer more in terms of backups and monitoring (currently DDs do get 500GB from rsync.net that could be used for backups of their services though). The intention is also to deploy some form of configuration management for some essentials across the hosts. We should also look at getting some sponsored hosting for this. In the Debian Social BoF, we discussed some services that need work / expansion. In particular, Matrix keeps growing at an increased rate as more users use it and more channels are bridged, so it will likely move to its own host with big disks soon. We might replace Pleroma with a fork called Akkoma, this will need some more home work and checking whether it s even feasible. Some services haven t really been used (like Writefreely and Plume), and it might be time to retire them. We might just have to help one or two users migrate some of their posts away if we do retire them. Mjolner seems to do a fine job at spam blocking, we haven t had any notable incidents yet. WordPress now has improved fediverse support, it s unclear whether it works on a multi-site instance yet, I ll test it at some point soon and report back. For upcoming services, we are implementing Lemmy and probably also Mobilizon. A request was made that we also look into Loomio. More Information Overload There s so much that happens at DebConf, it s tough to take it all in, and also, to find time to write about all of it, but I ll mention a few more things that are certainly worth of note. During DebConf, we had some people from the Kite Linux team over. KITE supplies the ICT needs for the primary and secondary schools in the province of Kerala, where they all use Linux. They decided to switch all of these to Debian. There was an ad-hoc BoF where locals were listening and fielding questions that the Kite Linux team had. It was great seeing all the energy and enthusiasm behind this effort, I hope someone will properly blog about this! I learned about the VGLUG Foundation, who are doing a tremendous job at promoting GNU/Linux in the country. They are also training up 50 people a year to be able to provide tech support for Debian. I came across the booth for Mostly Harmless, they liberate old hardware by installing free firmware on there. It was nice seeing all the devices out there that could be liberated, and how it can breathe new life into old harware.

Some hopefully harmless soldering.

Overall, the community and their activities in India are very impressive, and I wish I had more time to get to know everyone better. Food Oh yes, one more thing. The food was great. I tasted more different kinds of curry than I ever did in my whole life up to this point. The lunch on banana leaves was interesting, and also learning how to eat this food properly by hand (thanks to the locals who insisted on teaching me!), it was a fruitful experience? This might catch on at home too less dishes to take care of!

Special thanks to the DebConf23 Team I think this may have been one of the toughest DebConfs to organise yet, and I don t think many people outside of the DebConf team knows about all the challenges and adversity this team has faced in organising it. Even just getting to the previous DebConf in Kosovo was a long and tedious and somewhat risky process. Through it all, they were absolute pro s. Not once did I see them get angry or yell at each other, whenever a problem came up, they just dealt with it. They did a really stellar job and I did make a point of telling them on the last day that everyone appreciated all the work that they did. Back to my nest I bought Dax a ball back from India, he seems to have forgiven me for not taking him along.

I ll probably take a few days soon to focus a bit on my bugs and catch up on my original DebCamp goals. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for being such fantastic people.

(I wrote this up for an internal work post, but I figure it s worth sharing more publicly too.) I spent last week at DebConf23, this years instance of the annual Debian conference, which was held in Kochi, India. As usual, DebConf provides a good reason to see a new part of the world; I ve been going since 2004 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and while I ve missed a few (Mexico, Bosnia, and Switzerland) I ve still managed to make it to instances on 5 continents. This has absolutely nothing to do with work, so I went on my own time + dime, but I figured a brief write-up might prove of interest. I first installed Debian back in 1999 as a machine that was being co-located to operate as a web server / email host. I was attracted by the promise of easy online upgrades (or, at least, upgrades that could be performed without the need to be physically present at the machine, even if they naturally required a reboot at some point). It has mostly delivered on this over the years, and I ve never found a compelling reason to move away. I became a Debian Developer in 2000. As a massively distributed volunteer project DebConf provides an opportunity to find out what s happening in other areas of the project, catch up with team mates, and generally feel more involved and energised to work on Debian stuff. Also, by this point in time, a lot of Debian folk are good friends and it s always nice to catch up with them. On that point, I felt that this year the hallway track was not quite the same as usual. For a number of reasons (COVID, climate change, travel time, we re all getting older) I think fewer core teams are achieving critical mass at DebConf - I was the only member physically present from 2 teams I m involved in, and I d have appreciated the opportunity to sit down with both of them for some in-person discussions. It also means it s harder to use DebConf as a venue for advancing major changes; previously having all the decision makers in the same space for a week has meant it s possible to iron out the major discussion points, smoothing remote implementation after the conference. I m told the mini DebConfs are where it s at for these sorts of meetings now, so perhaps I ll try to attend at least one of those next year. Of course, I also went to a bunch of talks. I have differing levels of comment about each of them, but I ve written up some brief notes below about the ones I remember something about. The comment was made that we perhaps had a lower level of deep technical talks, which is perhaps true but I still think there were a number of high level technical talks that served to pique ones interest about the topic. Finally, this DebConf was the first I m aware of that was accompanied by tragedy; as part of the day trip Abraham Raji, a project member and member of the local team, was involved in a fatal accident.

Talks (videos not yet up for all, but should appear for most)

• Opening Ceremony
  Not much to say here; welcome to DebConf!
• Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction
  I ended up running this, as Gunnar couldn t make it. Debian makes heavy use of the OpenPGP web of trust (no mass ability to send out Yubikeys + perform appropriate levels of identity verification), so making sure we re appropriately cross-signed, and linked to local conference organisers, is a dull but important part of the conference. We use a modified keysigning approach where identity verification + fingerprint confirmation happens over the course of the conference, so this session was just to explain how that works and confirm we were all working from the same fingerprint list.
• State of Stateless - A Talk about Immutability and Reproducibility in Debian
  Stateless OSes seem to be gaining popularity, so I went along to this to see if there was anything of note. It was interesting, but nothing earth shattering - very high level.
• What s missing so that Debian is finally reproducible?
  Reproducible builds are something I ve been keeping an eye on for a long time, and I continue to be impressed by the work folks are putting into this - both for Debian, and other projects. From a security standpoint reproducible builds provide confidence against trojaned builds, and from a developer standpoint knowing you can build reproducibly helps with not having to keep a whole bunch of binary artefacts around.
• Hello from keyring-maint
  In the distant past the process of getting your OpenPGP key into the Debian keyring (which is used to authenticate uploads + votes, amongst other things) was a clunky process that was often stalled. This hasn t been the case for at least the past 10 years, but there s still a residual piece of project memory that thinks keyring is a blocker. So as a team we say hi and talk about the fact we do monthly updates and generally are fairly responsive these days.
• A declarative approach to Linux networking with Netplan
  Debian s /etc/network/interfaces is a fairly basic (if powerful) mechanism for configuring network interfaces. NetworkManager is a better bet for dynamic hosts (i.e. clients), and systemd-network seems to be a good choice for servers (I m gradually moving machines over to it). Netplan tries to provide a unified mechanism for configuring both with a single configuration language. A noble aim, but I don t see a lot of benefit for anything I use - my NetworkManager hosts are highly dynamic (so no need to push shared config) and systemd-network (or /etc/network/interfaces) works just fine on the other hosts. I m told Netplan has more use with more complicated setups, e.g. when OpenVSwitch is involved.
• Quick peek at ZFS, A too good to be true file system and volume manager.
  People who use ZFS rave about it. I m naturally suspicious of any file system that doesn t come as part of my mainline kernel. But, as a longtime cautious mdraid+lvm+ext4 user I appreciate that there have been advances in the file system space that maybe I should look at, and I ve been trying out btrfs on more machines over the past couple of years. I can t deny ZFS has a bunch of interesting features, but nothing I need/want that I can t get from an mdraid+lvm+btrfs stack (in particular data checksumming + reflinks for dedupe were strong reasons to move to btrfs over ext4).
• Bits from the DPL
  Exactly what it says on the tin; some bits from the DPL.
• Adulting
  Enrico is always worth hearing talk; Adulting was no exception. Main takeaway is that we need to avoid trying to run the project on martyrs and instead make sure we build a sustainable project. I ve been trying really hard to accept I just don t have time to take on additional responsibilities, no matter how interesting or relevant they might seem, so this resonated.
• My life in git, after subversion, after CVS.
  Putting all of your home directory in revision control. I ve never made this leap; I ve got some Ansible playbooks that push out my core pieces of configuration, which is held in git, but I don t actually check this out directly on hosts I have accounts on. Interesting, but not for me.
• EU Legislation BoF - Cyber Resilience Act, Product Liability Directive and CSAM Regulation
  The CRA seems to be a piece of ill informed legislation that I m going to have to find time to read properly. Discussion was a bit more alarmist than I personally feel is warranted, but it was a short session, had a bunch of folk in it, and even when I removed my mask it was hard to make myself understood.
• What s new in the Linux kernel (and what s missing in Debian)
  An update from Ben about new kernel features. I m paying less attention to such things these days, so nice to get a quick overview of it all.
• Intro to SecureDrop, a sort-of Linux distro
  Actually based on Ubuntu, but lots of overlap with Debian as a result, and highly customised anyway. Notable, to me, for using OpenPGP as some of the backend crypto support. I managed to talk to Kunal separately about some of the pain points around that, which was an interesting discussion - they re trying to move from GnuPG to Sequoia, primarily because of the much easier integration and lack of requirement for the more complicated GnuPG features that sometimes get in the way.
• The Docker(.io) ecosystem in Debian
  I hate Docker. I m sure it s fine if you accept it wants to take over the host machine entirely, but when I ve played around with it that s not been the case. This talk was more about the difficulty of trying to keep a fast moving upstream with lots of external dependencies properly up to date in a stable release. Vendoring the deps and trying to get a stable release exception seems like the least bad solution, but it s a problem that affects a growing number of projects.
• Chiselled containers
  This was kinda of interesting, but I think I missed the piece about why more granular packaging wasn t an option. The premise is you can take an existing .deb and chisel it into smaller components, which then helps separate out dependencies rather than pulling in as much as the original .deb would. This was touted as being useful, in particular, for building targeted containers. Definitely appealing over custom built userspaces for containers, but in an ideal world I think we d want the information in the main packaging and it becomes a lot of work.
• Debian Contributors shake-up
  Debian Contributors is a great site for massaging your ego around contributions to Debian; it s also a useful point of reference from a data protection viewpoint in terms of information the project holds about contributors - everything is already public, but the Contributors website provides folk with an easy way to find their own information (with various configurable options about whether that s made public or not). T ssia is working on improving the various data feeds into the site, but realistically this is the responsibility of every Debian service owner.
• New Member BOF
  I m part of the teams that help get new folk into Debian - primarily as a member of the New Member Front Desk, but also as a mostly inactive Application Manager. It s been a while since we did one of these sessions so the Front Desk/Debian Account Managers that were present did a panel session. Nothing earth shattering came out of it; like keyring-maint this is a team that has historically had problems, but is currently running smoothly.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Abraham Raji (abraham)
• Phil Morrell (emorrp1)
• Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa)
• Mathias Gibbens (gibmat)
• Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun)
• Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gavin Lai
• Martin Dosch
• Taavi V n nen
• Daichi Fukui
• Daniel Gr ber
• Vivek K J
• William Wilson
• Ruben Pollan

Congratulations!

Just in case you stumbled on this incidentally and you wonder Who in the seven fat worlds is this mysterious...? Ha! That was what I was thinking about you you were thinking about me. You gerrit!? I heard you listening to my thoughts; I listened to yours too. I wonder if you heard me too. I will like to talk, today, about what it is I do at Debian as an Outreachy Intern under the JavaScript team. I woke up this morning and decided to bore you with so much details. I must have woken up glorified!

A Broader View My sole role at Debian alongside my teammate, aided by our mentors, is to facilitate the Node.js 16 and Webpack 5 Transitioning. What exactly does that mean? Node.js 16, as of the time of this writing, is the active LTS release from the Node.js developers while Webpack 5 is also the current release from the Webpack developers. At Debian we have to work towards supporting these packages. Debian as an OS comes with a package manager coined Advanced Package Tool or simply APT on which command-line programs specific to Debian and it's many-flavored distributions, apt, apt-get, apt-cache are based. This means before the conception of yarn and npm, the typical JavaScript developer's package managers, apt has been. Debian unlike yarn and npm, ideally, only supports one version of a software at any point in time and on edge cases may have to support an extra one as noted in this chat between my mentor and a member. To provide support for Webpack 5 and Node.js 16 which as regards to Debian are currently in experimental and only can be migrated to unstable after our transitioning, we have to test, reverse build, report and fix bugs till a certain level of compatibility has been attained with dependent packages currently in unstable. Webpack and Node.js have their respective dependencies, but there are certain software and packages also dependent on Webpack and/or Node.js, these are termed as reverse-dependencies. We have to test and build these reverse-dependencies, report and fix bugs and incompatibilities with the new versions of Webpack and Node.js. For reverse-dependent packages not yet supporting Webpack 5 and/or Node.js 16, we'll open an issue in form of a feature-request in upstream repository asking for Webpack 5 and/or Node.js 16 support. Ideally, Debian manages a repository of all supported packages on a GitLab managed Git based VCS. For JavaScript packages maintained by the JS Team, the home of those packages sits at https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/. Supported packages are pulled from upstream repository, mostly GitHub, using some certian packaging tools provided by Debian. The pulled source cannot be directly modified else it will break build. So there exists a dedicated folder named debian where certain cofiguration files, scripts and rules to convey to the debian package builder live at. In some cases, source code needs to be modified; these are done via patching which means the modifications won't live in the source but in a dedicated patch file inside the debian/patches/ folder. The modifications are diffed line by line with the original source (just as with git) and the result is output in a file managed by debian utility tool, Quilt. The contents of the debian folder are instructions on how to build the source into binaries or an installable archive .deb (like Java's .jar or Android's .apk).

Understanding Debian Software Release Cycle There are quite some interesting things about the software release cycle at Debian to get familiar with. Listed here are some release repositories alongside their codenames as of Debian 11:

1. Unstable (Sid)
2. Testing (Bookworm)
3. Stable (Bullseye)
4. Old stable (Buster)
5. Old old stable (Stretch)

Ha! Isn't it ironic that unstable is the only one with a stable codename? Some of these, if not all, have codenames subject to change after every new release and/or migration. Only unstable which is referred to as Sid never changes. The current stable release which is Debian 11 is codenamed Bullseye. The next stable release which will be Debian 12 will be codenamed Bookworm because the current testing repository will be migrated to stable and released as Debian 12. The previous stable release which was Debian 10, now old stable, was codenamed Buster. To better understand Debian releases you may take a look at this wiki that completely defines them. Basically, as explained by one of my mentors remixed in my own words, experimental software are migrated to unstable after (as I said earlier) they have attained a certain level of compatibility with dependent software. They remain in unstable for a long period of time undergoing testing, autopkgtest tests, regression tests, etc. At this point bugs are reported and fixed to a satisfactory level. The unstable repository is then migrated to testing where release-critical bugs are reported and fixed to a satisfactory level where one can comfortably say testing is almost stable , and voila (!), testing is released as a Debian stable version. This happens roughly every two years. Some months before a new stable release, a soft freeze is turned on such that no new versions or transitions should be uploaded to unstable. Only fixes will be uploaded at this point. In like 4-6 weeks before the release, a hard freeze is turned on that completely disallows uploading to unstable, not even fixes. In due time, testing becomes the new stable release and freeze is lifted.

References

1. Packaging pre-requisites
2. Working with chroots
3. Sbuild (clean builds)
4. Updating a Debian Package by Abraham Raji

What is Debian ? Debian is also known as Debian GNU/Linux is a free open-source operating system (OS) based currently on the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel, developed by the community-supported Debian Project; although efforts are in place to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd.

Fun fact about Debian

• Debian was the first Linux distribution to include a package management system for easy installation and removal of software. It was also the first Linux distribution that could be upgraded without requiring reinstallation.
• To protect your system against Trojan horses and other malevolent software, Debian's servers verify that uploaded packages come from their registered Debian maintainers.
• Debian comes with over 59000 packages; as of this writing (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine), a package manager (APT), and other utilities that make it possible to manage thousands of packages on thousands of computers as easily as installing a single application. All of it is FREE!
• Debian is also the basis for many other distributions, most notably Ubuntu

What is Webpack ? Webpack is a static module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. When webpack processes your application, it internally builds a dependency graph from one or more entry points and then combines every module your project needs into one or more bundles, which are static assets to serve your content from

What is nodejs ? Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast and scalable network applications and also developing server-side applications, Here javascript code is no longer limited to the traditional method of running on the web browser

What does Transitioning mean in Debian? Transitioning is a concept in Debian about maintaining only one version of a library like webpack, nodejs. There is a bottleneck as other libraries and applications may not support the version we have in Debian. So we have to port that software which For example, node-mini-css-extract-plugin, node-mermaid and so many packages uses webpack. In buster we had webpack4 and in bullseye, we want to update it to webpack5. node-mini-css-extract-plugin already supports webpack5, but others like node-mermaid don't support it yet. So either we wait or we help those projects to update their webpack version. Check out this chat between my mentor and a community member on transitioning of rails6

Getting Started with Creating or Updating packages in Debian To be able to create or maintain packages suitable for uploading to Debian you must be in a sid/unstable environment or distribution. See recommended instructions on how to setup Debian Sid via this link See link on how to debianize a new package See link for brief steps on how to update a package to its new upstream version. For more detailed content on the whys and hows of updating a package to its new upstream version visit here Note In updating to the new upstream version we have to watch out for breaking changes caused by both minor updates or major updates. As per https://semver.org major updates(e.g If the current version is 2.3.4, then 3.0 is a major update) of libraries with versions greater than 1.0 and minor updates(e.g If the current version is 0.10 then 0.11 is a minor update) of libraries with versions less than 1.0 can have breaking changes

The overall flow of webpack5 and nodejs16 transitioning in Debian After grasping the fundamental process and flow on how to update a package, you are well on your way to transitioning . Transitioning in webpack or nodejs involves building and testing of dependencies or packages that depend on webpack or nodejs respectively called reverse-dependencies, these reverse dependencies are tested and built with the new updated version usually uploaded to the experimental distribution if reverse dependencies are built and tested successfully both reverse dependencies and dependency in this case nodejs or webpack are then uploaded to the unstable/sid distribution for further processing

The major guidelines to follow while transitioning are

• Find a list of reverse dependencies to fix
• See if new upstream versions of reverse dependencies are available that supports the transitioning version
• See if new upstream of reverse dependencies are available that supports the transitioning version works
• Report bugs found while rebuilding and testing reverse dependencies in Debian
• Forward bugs found while rebuilding and testing reverse dependencies upstream
• Fix or update packages and forward patches upstream

After a successful transitioning phase users of the Debian OS have access to the latest and also oldest installation of these packages via apt based on their preferences, which implies having the benefit of more features, bug fixes, updated security patches from those packages, all these are possible due to the community of amazing people

Here s my (ninth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 16th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/ This month was a little intense. I did a lot of different kinds of things in Debian this month. Whilst most of my time went on doing security stuff, I also sponsored a bunch of packages. Here are the following things I did this month:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• rails (2:5.2.4.3+dfsg-1) - fix a bunch of CVEs in Sid and Bullseye.
• ruby-json (2.1.0+dfsg-2+deb10u1) - backport CVE-2020-10663 fix to Buster.
• ruby-json (2.0.1+dfsg-3+deb9u1) - backport CVE-2020-10663 fix to Stretch.
• ruby-kaminari (1.0.1-6) - add patch to fix CVE-2020-11082.
• ruby2.3 (2.3.3-1+deb9u8) - backport CVE-2020-10663 fix to Stretch.
• python-libusb1 (1.8-1.1) - NMU for a source-only upload.
• pry (0.13.1-1) - Fix failing tests & new upstream version.
• ruby-rubocop-packaging (0.1.0-1) - NEW (#963016).
• batalert (0.4.0-1) - fixes against RuboCop.
• json-schema-test-suite (2.0.0-1.1) - NMU for a source-only upload on request.
• ruby-ahoy-email (1.1.0-1) - Disable tests temporarily (#959060).
• micro (2.0.6-1) - fix crashing at startup (#961853).
• golang-github-zyedidia-tcell (1.4.8-1) - new upstream version.
• micro (2.0.6-1~bpo10+1) - backport the fix for (#961853).
• micro (2.0.6-2) - fix the reintroduced versioning issue (#953400).
• ruby-whitequark-parser (2.7.1.4-1) - new upstream version.

Other $things:

• Hosted Ruby team meeting. Logs here.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• FTP Trainee reviewing.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored ruby-ast for Abraham, libexif for Hugh, djangorestframework-gis and karlseguin-ccache for Nilesh, and twig-extensions, twig-i18n-extension, and mariadb-mysql-kbs for William.

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GSoC Phase 1, Part 2! Last month, I got selected as a Google Summer of Code student for Debian again! \o/
I am working on the Upstream-Downstream Cooperation in Ruby project. The first half of the first month is blogged here, titled, GSoC Phase 1.
Also, I log daily updates at gsocwithutkarsh2102.tk. Whilst the daily updates are available at the above site^, I ll breakdown the important parts of the later half of the first month here:

• Documented the first cop, GemspecGit via PR #2.
• Made an initial release, v0.1.0!
• Spread the word/usage about this tool/library via adding them in the official RuboCop docs.
• We had our third weekly meeting where we discussed the next steps and the things that are supposed to be done for the next set of cops.
• Wrote more tests so as to cover different aspects of the GemspecGit cop.
• Opened PR #4 for the next Cop, RequireRelativeToLib.
• Introduced rubocop-packaging to the outer world and requested other upstream projects to use it! It is being used by 6 other projects already
• Had our fourth weekly meeting where we pair-programmed (and I sucked :P) and figured out a way to make the second cop work.
• Found a bug, reported at issue #5 and raised PR #6 to fix it.
• And finally, people loved the library/tool (and it s outcome):
  
  
  
  (for those who don t know, @bbatsov is the author of RuboCop, @lienvdsteen is an amazing fullstack engineer at GitLab, and @pboling is the author of some awesome Ruby tools and libraries!)

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Continuation of GSoC for other Ruby related stuff!

Whilst I have already mentioned it multiple times but it s still not enough to stress how amazing Antonio Terceiro and David Rodr guez are!
They re more than just mentors to me! Well, only they know how much I trouble them with different things, which are not only related to my GSoC project but also extends to the projects they maintain! :P
David maintains rubygems and bundler and Antonio maintains debci. So on days when I decide to hack on rubygems or debci, only I know how kind and nice David and Anotonio are to me!
They very patiently walk me through with whatever I am stuck on, no matter what and no matter when. Thus, with them around, I contributed to these two projects and more, with regards to working on rubocop-packaging.
Following are a few things that I raised:

• PR #3731 for rubygems/bundler to ship default .rubocop.yml file.
• PR #2140 for pry to fix bundler_spec test.
• PR #3740 for rubygems/bundler to fix all RuboCop offenses.
• MR #114 for debci to show package details on the retry page.
• Issue #356 against rake to request to support all gitignore rule patterns in rake/file_list.
• PR #9 for fast_ignore to use fast_ignore instead of git ls-files.
• PR #3748 for rubygems/bundler to add actions to automatically bump man page month.
• PR #8160 for rubocop to add rubocop-packaging as a known extension.
• PR #3754 for rubygems/bundler to constrain the shipped RuboCop s version.
• Issue #8 against fast_ignore to clarify the strange behavior of include_files.
• PR #3765 for rubygems/bundler to fix remaining RuboCop issues and add tests.

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Debian LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. This was my ninth month as a Debian LTS paid contributor. I was assigned 30.00 hours and worked on the following things:

CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2215-1, fixing CVE-2020-3327 and CVE-2020-3341, for clamav.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 0.101.5+dfsg-0+deb8u2.
• Issued DLA 2216-1, fixing CVE-2020-8161, for ruby-rack.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 1.5.2-3+deb8u3.
• Issued DLA 2234-1, fixing CVE-2005-1513, CVE-2005-1514, CVE-2005-1515, CVE-2020-3811, and CVE-2020-3812, for netqmail.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 1.06-6.2~deb8u1.
• Uploaded a fix for CVE-2020-8162, CVE-2020-8164, CVE-2020-8165, CVE-2020-8166, and CVE-2020-8167, for rails. This upload was for Sid and Bullseye and these CVE(s) were fixed in version 2:5.2.4.3+dfsg-1.
• Uploaded a fix for CVE-2020-11082, for ruby-kaminari. This upload was for Sid and Bullseye and this CVE was fixed in version 1.0.1-6.
• Uploaded a fix for CVE-2020-10663, for ruby-json, ruby2.1, and ruby2.5. These uploads were for Stretch and Buster and were fixed in the version 2.3.3-1+deb9u8, 2.1.0+dfsg-2+deb10u1, 2.3.3-1+deb9u8, and 2.5.5-3+deb10u2.
• Issued DLA 2237-1, fixing CVE-2019-8842 and CVE-2020-3898, for cups.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 1.7.5-11+deb8u8.
• Issued DLA 2246-1, fixing CVE-2020-13696, for xawtv.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 3.103-3+deb8u1.
• Issued DLA 2248-1, fixing CVE-2020-0543, CVE-2020-0548, and CVE-2020-0549, for intel-microcode.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 3.20200609.2~deb8u1.
• Issued DLA 2249-1, fixing CVE-2020-0182 and CVE-2020-0198, for libexif.
  For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 0.6.21-2+deb8u4.

Other LTS Work:

• Triaged sympa, apache2, qemu, and coturn.
• Add fix for CVE-2020-0198/libexif.
• Requested CVE for bug#60251 against apache2 and prodded further.
• Raised issue #947 against sympa reporting an incomplete patch for CVE-2020-10936. More discussions internally.
• Created the LTS Survey on the self-hosted LimeSurvey instance.
• Attended the third LTS meeting. Logs here.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

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Other(s)

Sometimes it gets hard to categorize work/things into a particular category.
That s why I am writing all of those things inside this category.
This includes two sub-categories and they are as follows.

Personal: This month I did the following things:

• Wrote and published v0.1.0 of rubocop-packaging on RubyGems!
  It s open-sourced and the repository is here.
  Bug reports and pull requests are welcomed!
• Integrated a tiny (yet a powerful) hack to align images in markdown for my blog.
  Commit here.
• Released v0.4.0 of batalert on RubyGems!

Open Source: Again, this contains all the things that I couldn t categorize earlier.
Opened several issues and PRs:

• Issue #9 against 100daysof, reporting some broken CSS.
• PR #10 for 100daysof, fixing the above issue^.
• Issue #133 against djangorestframework-api-key, asking to fix copyright years.
• PR #5 for rspec-stubbed_env, dropping git ls-files in gemspec.
• PR #70 for rspec-pending_for, dropping git ls-files in gemspec.
• Issue #74, issue #143, issue #164, and issue #767 against multiple projects, asking them to use RuboCop.
• PR #212 for arbre, dropping git ls-files in gemspec.
• Issue #1749 and issue #1750 against micro, asking for help as the Debian package fails to build in buster-backports.
• PR #1751 for micro, fixing the above issue^.
• Issue #348 against hugo-coder, clarifying the weird timing issue in the blog posts.
• Issue #356 against hugo-coder, reporting the weird display of images and missing twitter cards.
• MR #12 for linter, dropping git ls-files in gemspec.
• MR #13 for linter, doing so minor refactoring.

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Thank you for sticking along for so long :) Until next time.
:wq for today.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during July 2017 (previous month):

• Updated travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds:
  • Moved the default mirror from ftp.de.debian.org to deb.debian.org. [ ]
  • Create a sensible debian/changelog file if one does not exist. [ ]
• Updated django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility:
  • Merged a PR to clarify the error message when a channel could not be found. [ ]
  • Reviewed and merged a suggestion to add a TestBackend. [ ]
• Added Pascal support to Louis Taylor's anyprint hack to add support for "print" statements from other languages into Python. [ ]
• Filed a PR against Julien Danjou's daiquiri Python logging helper to clarify an issue in the documentation. [ ]
• Merged a PR to Strava Enhancement Suite my Chrome extension that improves and fixes annoyances in the web interface of the Strava cycling and running tracker to remove Zwift activities with maps. [ ]
• Submitted a pull request for Redis key-value database store to fix a spelling mistake in a binary. [ ]
• Sent patches upstream to the authors of the OpenSVC cloud engine and the Argyll Color Management System to fix some "1204" typos.
• Fixed a number of Python and deployment issues in my stravabot IRC bot. [ ]
• Correct a "1204" typo in Facebook's RocksDB key-value store. [ ]
• Corrected =+ typos in the Calibre e-book reader software. [ ]
• Filed a PR against the diaspy Python interface to the DIASPORA social network to correct the number of seconds in a day. [ ]
• Sent a pull request to remedy a =+ typo in sparqlwrapper, a SPARQL endpoint interface for Python. [ ]
• Filed a PR against Postfix Admin to fix some =+ typos. [ ]
• Fixed a "1042" typo in ImageJ, a Java image processing library. [ ]
• On a less-serious note, I filed an issue for Brad Abraham's bot for the Reddit sub-reddit to add some missing "hit the gym" advice. [ ]

I also blogged about my recent lintian hacking and installation-birthday package.

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Whilst I managed to read almost sixty books in 2016 here are ten of my favourites in no particular order. Disappointments this year include Stewart Lee's Content Provider (nothing like his stand-up), Christopher Hitchens' And Yet (his best essays are already published) and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (great exposition, bizarre conclusion). The worst book I finished, by far, was Mark Edward's Follow You Home. Animal QC Gary Bell, QC Subtitled My Preposterous Life, this rags-to-riches story about a working-class boy turned eminent lawyer would be highly readable as a dry and factual account but I am compelled to include it here for its extremely entertaining style of writing. Full of unsurprising quotes that take one unaware: would you really expect a now-Queen's Counsel to "heartily suggest that if you find yourself suffering from dysentery in foreign climes you do not medicate it with lobster thermidor and a bottle of Ecuadorian red?" A real good yarn.

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So You've Been Publically Shamed Jon Ronson The author was initially recommended to me by Brad but I believe I started out with the wrong book. In fact, I even had my doubts about this one, prematurely judging from the title that it was merely cashing-in on a fairly recent internet phenomenon like his more recent shallow take on Trump and the alt-Right but in the end I read Publically Shamed thrice in quick succession. I would particularly endorse the audiobook version: Ronson's deadpan drawl suits his writing perfectly.

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The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday Whilst everyone else appears to be obligated to include Ryan's recent Ego is the Enemy in their Best of 2016 lists I was actually taken by his earlier "introduction by stealth" to stoic philosophy. Certainly not your typical self-help book, this is "a manual to turn to in troubling times". Returning to this work at least three times over the year even splashing out on the audiobook at some point I feel like I learned a great deal, although it is now difficult to pinpoint exactly what. Perhaps another read in 2017 is thus in order

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Layer Cake J.J. Connolly To judge a book in comparison to the film is to do both a disservice, but reading the book of Layer Cake really underscored just how well the film played to the strengths of that medium. All of the aspects that would not have worked had been carefully excised from the screenplay, ironically leaving more rewarding "layers" for readers attempting the book. A parallel adaption here might be No Country for Old Men - I would love to read (or write) a comparative essay between these two adaptions although McCarthy's novel is certainly the superior source material.

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Lying Sam Harris I've absorbed a lot of Sam Harris's uvre this year in the form of his books but moreover via his compelling podcast. I'm especially fond of Waking Up on spirituality without religion and would rank that as my favourite work of his. Lying is a comparatively short read, more of a long essay in fact, where he argues that we can radically simplify our lives by merely telling the truth in situations where others invariably lie. Whilst it would take a brave soul to adopt his approach his case is superlatively well-argued and a delight to read.

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Letters from a Stoic Seneca

Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one. Reading this in a beautifully svelte hardback, I tackled a randomly-chosen letter per day rather than attempting to read it cover-to-cover. Breaking with a life-long tradition, I even decided to highlight sections in pen so I could return to them at ease. I hope it's not too hackneyed to claim I gained a lot from "building up" a relationship with this book. Alas, it is one of those books that is too easy to recommend given that it might make one appear wise and learned, but if you find yourself in a slump, either in life or in your reading habits, it certainly has my approval.

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Solo: A James Bond Novel William Boyd I must have read all of the canonical Fleming novels as a teenager and Solo really rewards anyone who has done so. It would certainly punish anyone expecting a Goldeneye or at least be a little too foreign to be enjoyed. Indeed, its really a pastiche of these originals, both in terms of the time period, general tone (Bond is more somber; more vulnerable) and in various obsessions of Fleming's writing, such as the overly-detailed description of the gambling and dining tables. In this universe, 007's restaurant expenses probably contributed signifcantly to the downfall of the British Empire, let alone his waistline. Bond flicking through a ornithological book at one point was a cute touch

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The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck Mark Manson Certainly a wildcard to include here and not without its problems, The Subtle Art is a curious manifesto on how to approach life. Whilst Manson expouses an age-old philosophy of grounding yourself and ignoring the accumulation of flatscreen TVs, etc. he manages to do so in a fresh and provocative "21st-centry gonzo" style. Highly entertaining, at one point the author posits an alternative superhero ("Disappointment Panda") that dishes out unsolicited and uncomfortable truths to strangers before simply walking away: "You know, if you make more money, that s not going to make your kids love you," or: "What you consider friendship is really just your constant attempts to impress people." Ouch.

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The Fourth Protocol Frederick Forsyth I have a crystal-clear memory from my childhood of watching a single scene from a film in the dead of night: Pierce Brosnan sets a nuclear device to detonate after he can get away but a double-crossing accomplice surreptitiously brings the timetable forward in order that the bomb also disposes of him Anyway, at some point whilst reading The Fourth Protocol it dawned on me that this was that book. I might thus be giving the book more credit due to this highly satisfying connection but I think it stands alone as a superlative political page-turner and is still approachable outside the machinations of the Cold War.

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The Partner John Grisham After indulging in a bit too much non-fiction and an aborted attempt at The Ministry of Fear, I turned to a few so-called lower-brow writers such as Jeffrey Archer, etc. However, it was The Partner that turned out to be a real page-turner for somewhat undefinable reasons. Alas, it appears the rest of the author's output is unfortunately in the same vein (laywers, etc.) so I am hesitant to immediately begin others but judging from various lists online I am glad I approached this one first.

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Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga James Clavell Despite its length, I simply couldn't resist returning to Shogun this year although it did fatigue me to the point that I have still yet to commence on its sequel, Tai-Pan. Like any good musical composition, one is always rewarded by returning to a book and I took great delight in uncovering more symbolism throughout (such as noticing that one of the first words Blackthorne learns in Japanese is "truth") but also really savouring the tragic arcs that run throughout the novel, some beautiful phrases ("The day seemed to lose its warmth ") and its wistful themes of inevitability and karma.

Today, virtually all of the free software available can be found in packaged form in distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Users of these distributions have access to a library of thousands of applications, ranging from trivial to highly sophisticated software systems. Developers can find a vast array of programming languages, tools and libraries for constructing new applications. This is possible because we have a mature system for turning free software components into standardized modules (packages). Some software is more difficult to package and maintain, and I m occasionally surprised to find something very useful which isn t packaged yet, but in general, the software I want is packaged and ready before I realize I need it. Even the long tail of niche software is generally packaged very effectively. Thanks to coherent standards, sophisticated management tools, and the principles of software freedom, these packages can be mixed and matched to create complete software stacks for a wide range of devices, from netbooks to supercomputing clusters. These stacks are tightly integrated, and can be tested, released, maintained and upgraded as a unit. The Debian system is unparalleled for this purpose, which is why Ubuntu is based on it. The vision, for a free software operating system which is highly modular and customizable, has been achieved. Rough edges This is a momentous achievement, and the Debian packaging system fulfills its intended purpose very well. However, there are a number of areas where it introduces friction, because the package model doesn t quite fit some new problems. Most of these are becoming more common over time as technology evolves and changes shape.

• Embedded systems need to be pared down to the essentials to minimize storage, distribution, computation and maintenance costs. Standardized packaging introduces excessive code, data and interdependency which make the system larger than necessary. Tight integration makes it difficult to bootstrap the system from scratch for custom hardware. Projects like Embedded Debian aim to adapt the Debian system to be more suitable for use in these environments, to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, smart phones will soon become the most common type of computer globally.
• Data, in contrast to software, has simple requirements. It just needs to be up to date and accessible to programs. Packaging and distributing it through the standardized packaging process is awkward, doesn t offer tangible benefits, and introduces overhead. There have been extensive debates in Debian about how to handle large data sets. Meanwhile, this problem is becoming increasingly important as data science catalyzes a new wave of applications.
• Client/server and other types of distributed applications are notoriously tricky to package. The packaging system works within the context of a single OS instance, and so relationships which span multiple OS instances (e.g. a server application which depends on a database running on another server) are not straightforward. Meanwhile, the web has become a first-class application development platform, and this kind of interdependency is extremely common on both clients and servers.
• Cross-platform applications such as Firefox, Chromium and OpenOffice.org have long struggled with packaging. In order to be portable, they tend to bundle the components they depend on, such as libraries. Packagers strive for normalization, and want these applications to use the packaged versions of these libraries instead. Application developers build, test and ship one set of dependencies, but their users receive a different stack when they use the packaged version of the application. Developers on both sides are in constant tension as they expect their configuration to be the canonical one, and want it to be tightly integrated. Cross-platform application developers want to provide their own, application-specific cross-platform update mechanism, while distributions want to use the same mechanism for all their components.
• Virtual appliances aim to combine application and operating system into a portable bundle. While a modular OS is definitely called for, appliances face some of the same problems as embedded systems as they need to be minimized. Furthermore, the appliance becomes a component in itself, and requires metadata, distribution mechanisms and so on. If someone wants to install a virtual appliance, how should that work? Packaging them up as .debs doesn t make much sense for the same reasons that apply to large data sets. I haven t seen virtual appliances really taking off, but I expect cloud to change that.
• Runtime libraries for languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby provide their own packaging systems, which manage dependencies and other metadata, installation, upgrades and removal in a standardized way. Because these operate independently of the OS package manager, all sorts of problems arise. Projects such as GoboLinux have attempted to tie them together, to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, each new programming language we invent comes with a different, incompatible package manager, and distribution developers need to spend time repackaging them into their preferred format.

Why are we stuck?

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow

The packaging ecosystem is very strong. Not only do we have powerful tools for working with packages, we also benefit from packages being a well-understood concept, and having established processes for developing, exchanging and talking about them. Once something is packaged, we know what it is and how to work with it, and it fits into everything else. So, it is tempting to package everything in sight, as we already know how to make sense of packages. However, this may not always be the right tool for the job. Various attempts have been made to extend the packaging concept to make it more general, for example:

• Portage, of Gentoo fame, offers impressive flexibility by building packages with a custom configuration, tailored for the needs of the target system.
• Conary, from rPath, offers finer-grained dependencies, powerful revision control and object-oriented build recipes.
• Nix provides a consistent build and runtime environment, ensuring that programs are run with the same dependencies used to build them, by keeping the relevant versions installed. I don t know much about it, but it sounds like all dependencies implicitly refer to an exact version.

Other package managers aim to solve a specific problem, such as providing lightweight package management for embedded systems, or lazy dependency installation, or fixing the filesystem hierarchy. There is a long list of package managers of various levels which solve different problems. Most of these systems suffer from an important fundamental tradeoff: they are designed to manage the entire system, from the kernel through applications, and so they must be used wholesale in order to reap their full benefit. In other words, in their world, everything is a package, and anything which is not a package is out of scope. Therefore, each of these systems requires a separate collection of packages, and each time we invent a new one, its adherents set about packaging everything in the new format. It takes a very long time to do this, and most of them lose momentum before a mature ecosystem can form around them. This lock-in effect makes it difficult for new packaging technologies to succeed. Divide and Conquer No single package management framework is flexible enough to accommodate all of the needs we have today. Even more importantly, a generic solution won t account for the needs we will have tomorrow. I propose that in order to move forward, we must make it possible to solve packaging problems separately, rather than attempting to solve them all within a single system.

• Decouple applications from the platform. Debian packaging is an excellent solution for managing the network of highly interdependent components which make up the core of a modern Linux distribution. It falls short, however, for managing the needs of modern applications: fast-moving, cross-platform and client/server (especially web). Let s stop trying to fit these square pegs into round holes, and adopt a different solution for this space, preferably one which is comprehensible and useful to application developers so that they can do most of the work.
• Treat data as a service. It s no longer useful to package up documentation in order to provide local copies of it on every Linux system. The web is a much, much richer and more effective solution to that problem. The same principle is increasingly applicable to structured data. From documents and contacts to anti-virus signatures and PCI IDs, there s much better data to be had out there on the web than down here on the local filesystem.
• Simplify integration between packaging systems in order to enable a heterogeneous model. When we break the assumption that everything is a package, we will need new tools to manage the interfaces between different types of components. Applications will need to introspect their dependency chain, and system management tools will need to be able to interrogate applications. We ll need thoughtfully designed interfaces which provide an appropriate level of abstraction while offering sufficient flexibility to solve many different packaging problems. There is unarguably a cost to this heterogeneity, but I believe it would easily outweigh the shortcomings of our current model.

But I like things how they are! We don t have a choice. The world is changing around us, and distributions need to evolve with it. If we don t adapt, we will eventually give way to systems which do solve these problems. Take, for example, modern web browsers like Firefox and Chromium. Arguably the most vital application for users, the browser is coming under increasing pressure to keep up with the breakneck pace of innovation on the web. The next wave of real-time collaboration and multimedia applications relies on the rapid development of new capabilities in web browsers. Browser makers are responding by accelerating deployment in the field: both aggressively push new releases to their users. A report from Google found that Chrome upgrades 97% of their users within 21 days of a new release, and Firefox 85% (both impressive numbers). Mozilla recently changed their maintenance policies, discontinuing maintenance of stable releases and forcing Ubuntu to ship new upstream releases to users. These applications are just the leading edge of the curve, and the pressure will only increase. Equally powerful trends are pressing server applications, embedded systems, and data to adapt as well. The ideas I ve presented here are only one possible way forward, and I m sure there are more and better ideas brewing in distribution communities. I m sure that I m not the only one thinking about these problems. Whatever it looks like in the end, I have no doubt that change is ahead.

Cute meme du jour:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Well, OK. Page 56, fifth sentence:

“The functions of other software interrupt service routines are quite variable; The I/O postprocessing interrupt service routine has a specific function to perform but is data-driven by the I/O request packets (IRPs) in its work queue.”

I know at least one of the slightly more than one people (I count too, right?) who read my blog (Hi, Ian!) might well realize what book this came from: VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, by Ruth Goldenberg and Lawrence Kenah. Yes, the book really was the closest to me - I have an overdesk shelf, and it was the furthest out. The book, by the way, is a fascinating read; I don’t know of any other book that lays out the design of an entire OS kernel in the really quite elegant way that this book does. I got mine signed by Ruth, too, which is pretty damn cool. One highlight of this book are the quotes at the beginning of each chapter - sometimes funny, sometimes profound, frequently both. I decided to list those from the first part here, for the enjoyment of both my readers.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“By indirections find directions out.”

- Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, i

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine.

William Wordsworth, She Was A Phantom Of Delight

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world

waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

Robert Frost

“Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.”

Ray Cummings, The Man Who Mastered Time

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

‘Tis in my memory lock’d

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1, iii

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne, The Sun Rising

It is equally bad when one speeds on the guest unwilling to go, and when he holds back one who is hastening. Rather one should befriend the guest who is there, but speed him when he wishes.

Homer, The Oddysey

I was alone and unable to comunicate with anyone. I did not know the names of anything. I did not even know things had names. Then one day, after she had tried a number of approaches, my teacher held my hand under the water pump on our farm. As the cool water ran over my hand and arm, she spelled the word water in my other hand. She spelled it over and over, and suddenly I knew there was a name for things and that I would never be completely alone again.

Helen Keller

• Personal stuff coming up; if you are not that kind of person, please skip :-)
  
• I forgot to say on my previous post about YAPC::NA 2008 that while I was in Chicago, I had the really nice chance to meet Carlo Segre and Dirk Eddelbuettel and enjoy a couple of nice beers with them. Great guys!
  
• I'm probably not attending DebConf this year. It's just too expensive right now and since sponsorship appears to be not enough, chances for me are quite low now. The cheapest I can get from NYC is around $1050/1100, which might be cheap for some folks in Europe which paid the same amount in Euros, but not for me now.
• I'm not attending OSCON neither. I wanted to, I really did, but it'll have to be next year now, because...
  
• On that days, I'll be in Mexico City with Raquel renewing our visas. Almost one year already since we got here, time flies.
• Last Friday (Fourth of July), we were invited by Mike and Rachel O'Connor to a barbeque at their place in Brooklyn. Even though they are veggies, they had some meat sausages and burgers which were great (also the grilled corn!). We watched the fireworks from their roof, which I have to say, weren't as spectacular as I expected, but it was probably because we weren't very, very close to Manhattan or because a big building was blocking our view in front of us, or because of the rain. A bunch of their friends were also there. I enjoyed spending time with them and Mr. Micah Anderson and Sr. Abraham Estrada. By the way...
• There will be a Debian NYC BSP very soon now! Stay tuned! Represent! :P
  
• I've been playing more chess that it should be legal, as some of you may have already realized.
• I gave myself a present and bought a PSP. I now do alley-oops, slam dunks and all kind of dribbles on NBA Live 2008 on my morning commute ;-)
  
• And last; for my personal workstation, I'm trying now Ubuntu Hardy and I'm doing a personal project with Rails. I have to say that even though I had some encountered feelings about both of them, I've been having quite a nice surprise and experience with both.
  

Most absurd religious bullshit in long time. Baby Jesus cries like being stabbed in the eye with a fork. It is like a sweet gay love orgy between baby Mohamed, baby Jesus and baby Abraham while baby L. Ron Hubbard films it all and baby Buddha gives artistic directions. Wouldn’t you want to see that Holy Trinity? Just as real and inspiring as the other one. Baby Jesus is a fictional character just like Donald Duck or Terminator, get over it. If your personality is fully determined by several thousand years old megalomaniac fantasies to the point where you are unable to accept satire about it, you might have serious psychological issues and should seek professional help. If people get seriously offended at anything written online it is their own personal psychiatric problem. The fact that such irrational over-offensiveness is promoted in US. Opinion is an opinion even when stated as a fact or amusing expression or observation. Being offended by an opinion is a clear sign of lack of personal integrity and self-awareness. Don’t enforce your own psychological deficiencies on others or baby jesus will cry like he crapped his pants before the age of diapers.