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

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

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

Trick question: what is a remote? One of the most confusing things about git-annex was understanding its remote concept. I thought a remote is a place where you replicate your data. But not, that s a special remote. A normal remote is a git remote, but which is expected to be git/ssh/with command line access. So if you have a git+ssh remote, git-annex will not only try to push it s above-mentioned branch, but also copy the files. If such a remote is on a forge that doesn t support git-annex, then it will complain and get confused. Of course, if you read the extensive docs, you just do git config remote.<name>.annex-ignore true, and it will understand that it should not sync to it. But, aside, from this case, git-annex expects that all checkouts and clones of the repository are both metadata and data. And if you do any annex commands in them, all other clones will know about them! This can be unexpected, and you find people complaining about it, but nowadays there s a solution:

git clone   dir && cd dir
git config annex.private true
git annex init "temp copy"

This is important. Any leaf git clone must be followed by that annex.private true config, especially on CI/CD machines. Honestly, I don t understand why by default clones should be official data stores, but it is what it is. I settled on not making any of my checkouts stable , but only the actual storage places. Except those are not git repositories, but just git-annex storage things. I.e., special remotes. Is it confusing enough yet ?

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

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

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

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

import os
import os.path
import pathlib

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

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

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

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

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

symlink_target = '/none/binary-file-removed-from-git-history'.encode()
new_blob_id = value.insert_file_with_contents(symlink_target)
return (filename, SYMLINK_MODE, new_blob_id)

This goes and replaces files with a symlink to nowhere, but the symlink should explain why it s dangling. Then later renames or moving the files around work naturally , as the rename/mv doesn t care about file contents. Then, when the filtering is done via:

git-filter-repo --file-info-callback <(cat ~/filter-big.py ) --force

It is easy to onboard to git annex:

• remove all dangling symlinks
• copy the (binary) files from the original repository
• since they re named the same, and in the same places, git sees a type change
• then simply run git annex add on those files

For me it was easy as all such files were in a few directories, so just copying those directories back, a few git-annex add commands, and done. Of course, then adding a few rsync remotes, git annex copy --to, and the repository was ready. Well, I also found a bug in my own Hakyll setup: on a fresh clone, when the large files are just dangling symlinks, the builder doesn t complain, just ignores the images. Will have to fix.

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

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

Un bateau sur la Seine

Enjoy!

Welcome to our 5th report from the Reproducible Builds project in 2025! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please do visit the Contribute page on our website. In this report:

1. Security audit of Reproducible Builds tools published
2. When good pseudorandom numbers go bad
3. Academic articles
4. Distribution work
5. diffoscope and disorderfs
6. Website updates
7. Reproducibility testing framework
8. Upstream patches

---

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

When good pseudorandom numbers go bad Danielle Navarro published an interesting and amusing article on their blog on When good pseudorandom numbers go bad. Danielle sets the stage as follows:

[Colleagues] approached me to talk about a reproducibility issue they d been having with some R code. They d been running simulations that rely on generating samples from a multivariate normal distribution, and despite doing the prudent thing and using set.seed() to control the state of the random number generator (RNG), the results were not computationally reproducible. The same code, executed on different machines, would produce different random numbers. The numbers weren t just a little bit different in the way that we ve all wearily learned to expect when you try to force computers to do mathematics. They were painfully, brutally, catastrophically, irreproducible different. Somewhere, somehow, something broke.

Thanks to David Wheeler for posting about this article on our mailing list

Academic articles There were two scholarly articles published this month that related to reproducibility: Daniel Hugenroth and Alastair R. Beresford of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Mario Lins and Ren Mayrhofer of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria published an article titled Attestable builds: compiling verifiable binaries on untrusted systems using trusted execution environments. In their paper, they:

present attestable builds, a new paradigm to provide strong source-to-binary correspondence in software artifacts. We tackle the challenge of opaque build pipelines that disconnect the trust between source code, which can be understood and audited, and the final binary artifact, which is difficult to inspect. Our system uses modern trusted execution environments (TEEs) and sandboxed build containers to provide strong guarantees that a given artifact was correctly built from a specific source code snapshot. As such it complements existing approaches like reproducible builds which typically require time-intensive modifications to existing build configurations and dependencies, and require independent parties to continuously build and verify artifacts.

The authors compare attestable builds with reproducible builds by noting an attestable build requires only minimal changes to an existing project, and offers nearly instantaneous verification of the correspondence between a given binary and the source code and build pipeline used to construct it , and proceed by determining that t he overhead (42 seconds start-up latency and 14% increase in build duration) is small in comparison to the overall build time.
Timo Pohl, Pavel Nov k, Marc Ohm and Michael Meier have published a paper called Towards Reproducibility for Software Packages in Scripting Language Ecosystems. The authors note that past research into Reproducible Builds has focused primarily on compiled languages and their ecosystems, with a further emphasis on Linux distribution packages:

However, the popular scripting language ecosystems potentially face unique issues given the systematic difference in distributed artifacts. This Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) [paper] provides an overview of existing research, aiming to highlight future directions, as well as chances to transfer existing knowledge from compiled language ecosystems. To that end, we work out key aspects in current research, systematize identified challenges for software reproducibility, and map them between the ecosystems.

Ultimately, the three authors find that the literature is sparse , focusing on few individual problems and ecosystems, and therefore identify space for more critical research.

Distribution work In Debian this month:

• Ian Jackson filed a bug against the debian-policy package in order to delve into an issue affecting Debian s support for cross-architecture compilation, multiple-architecture systems, reproducible builds SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable and the ability to recompile already-uploaded packages to Debian with a new/updated toolchain (binNMUs). Ian identifies a specific case, specifically in the libopts25-dev package, involving a manual page that had interesting downstream effects, potentially affecting backup systems. The bug generated a large number of replies, some of which have references to similar or overlapping issues, such as this one from 2016/2017.
• Chris Hofstaedtler filed a bug against the metasnap.debian.net service to note that some packages are not available in metasnap API.
• 22 reviews of Debian packages were added, 24 were updated and 11 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid catalogue of open source applications for the Android platform published a blog post on Making reproducible builds visible. Noting that Reproducible builds are essential in order to have trustworthy software , Hans also mentions that F-Droid has been delivering reproducible builds since 2015 . However:

There is now a Reproducibility Status link for each app on f-droid.org, listed on every app s page. Our verification server shows or based on its build results, where means our rebuilder reproduced the same APK file and means it did not. The IzzyOnDroid repository has developed a more elaborate system of badges which displays a for each rebuilder. Additionally, there is a sketch of a five-level graph to represent some aspects about which processes were run.

Hans compares the approach with projects such as Arch Linux and Debian that provide developer-facing tools to give feedback about reproducible builds, but do not display information about reproducible builds in the user-facing interfaces like the package management GUIs.
Arnout Engelen of the NixOS project has been working on reproducing the minimal installation ISO image. This month, Arnout has successfully reproduced the build of the minimal image for the 25.05 release without relying on the binary cache. Work on also reproducing the graphical installer image is ongoing.
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for their work there.
Lastly in Fedora news, Jelle van der Waa opened issues tracking reproducible issues in Haskell documentation, Qt6 recording the host kernel and R packages recording the current date. The R packages can be made reproducible with packaging changes in Fedora.

diffoscope & disorderfs diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 295, 296 and 297 to Debian:

• Don t rely on zipdetails --walk argument being available, and only add that argument on newer versions after we test for that. [ ]
• Review and merge support for NuGet packages from Omair Majid. [ ]
• Update copyright years. [ ]
• Merge support for an lzma comparator from Will Hollywood. [ ][ ]

Chris also merged an impressive changeset from Siva Mahadevan to make disorderfs more portable, especially on FreeBSD. disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues [ ]. This was then uploaded to Debian as version 0.6.0-1. Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 296 [ ][ ] and 297 [ ][ ], and disorderfs to version 0.6.0 [ ][ ].

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

• Chris Lamb:
  • Merged four or five suggestions from Guillem Jover for the GNU Autotools examples on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH example page [ ]
  • Incorporated a number of fixes for the JavaScript SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH snippet from Sebastian Davis, which did not handle non-integer values correctly. [ ]
• David A. Wheeler:
  • Fix an apostrophe in the README.md file. [ ]
• Hans-Christoph Steiner:
  • Add the F-Droid Verification Server to the Tools page. [ ]
  • Add the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International as the website s root LICENSE file. [ ]
  • Updated the Recording the build environment page to add a section pertaining to how F-Droid handles this. [ ]
• Jochen Sprickerhof:
  • Add Chris Hofstaedtler to the Who is involved? page. [ ]
• Sebastian Davids:
  • Fix the CoffeeScript example on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. [ ]
  • Remove the JavaScript example that uses a fixed timezone on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. [ ]

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. However, Holger Levsen posted to our mailing list this month in order to bring a wider awareness to funding issues faced by the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL). As mentioned on OSL s public post, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable [and that] unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year . As Holger notes in his post to our mailing list, the Reproducible Builds project relies on hardware nodes hosted there. Nevertheless, Lance Albertson of OSL posted an update to the funding situation later in the month with broadly positive news.
Separate to this, there were various changes to the Jenkins setup this month, which is used as the backend driver of for both tests.reproducible-builds.org and reproduce.debian.net, including:

• Migrating the central jenkins.debian.net server AMD Opteron to Intel Haswell CPUs. Thanks to IONOS for hosting this server since 2012.
• After testing it for almost ten years, the i386 architecture has been dropped from tests.reproducible-builds.org. This is because that, with the upcoming release of Debian trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture there will be no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. As a result, a large number of nodes hosted by Infomaniak have been retooled from i386 to amd64.
• Another node, ionos17-amd64.debian.net, which is used for verifying packages for all.reproduce.debian.net (hosted by IONOS) has had its memory increased from 40 to 64GB, and the number of cores doubled to 32 as well. In addition, two nodes generously hosted by OSUOSL have had their memory doubled to 16GB.
• Lastly, we have been granted access to more riscv64 architecture boards, so now we have seven such nodes, all with 16GB memory and 4 cores that are verifying packages for riscv64.reproduce.debian.net. Many thanks to PLCT Lab, ISCAS for providing those.

Outside of this, a number of smaller changes were also made by Holger Levsen:

• reproduce.debian.net-related:
  • Only use two workers for the ppc64el architecture due to RAM size. [ ]
  • Monitor nginx_request and nginx_status with the Munin monitoring system. [ ][ ]
  • Detect various variants of network and memory errors. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Add a prominent link to reproducible-builds.org. [ ]
  • Add a rebuilderd-cache-cleanup.service and run it daily via timer. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Be more verbose what sources are being downloaded. [ ]
  • Correctly deal with packages with an epoch in their version [ ] and deal with binNMUs versions with an epoch as well [ ][ ].
  • Document how to reschedule all other errors on all archs. [ ]
  • Misc documentation improvements. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Include the $HOSTNAME variable in the rebuilderd logfiles. [ ]
  • Install the equivs package on all worker nodes. [ ][ ]
• Jenkins nodes:
  • Permit the sudo tool to fix up permission issues. [ ][ ]
  • Document how to manage diskspace with OpenStack. [ ]
  • Ignore a number of spurious monitoring errors on riscv64, FreeBSD, etc.. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Install ntpsec-ntpdate (instead of ntpdate) as the former is available on Debian trixie and bookworm. [ ][ ]
  • Use the same SSH ControlPath for all nodes. [ ]
  • Make sure the munin user uses the same SSH config as the jenkins user. [ ]
• tests.reproducible-builds.org-related:
  • Disable testing of the i386 architecture. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Document the current disk usage. [ ][ ]
  • Address some image placement now that we only test three architectures. [ ]
  • Keep track of build performance. [ ]
• Misc:
  • Fix a (harmless) typo in the multiarch_versionskew script. [ ]

In addition, Jochen Sprickerhof made a series of changes related to reproduce.debian.net:

• Add out of memory detection to the statistics page. [ ]
• Reverse the sorting order on the statistics page. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Improve the spacing between statistics groups. [ ]
• Update a (hard-coded) line number in error message detection pertaining to a debrebuild line number. [ ]
• Support Debian unstable in the rebuilder-debian.sh script. [ ] ]
• Rely on rebuildctl to sync only arch-specific packages. [ ][ ]

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • cmake/musescore
  • netdiscover
  • autotrace, ck, cmake, crash, cvsps, gexif, gq, gtkam, ibus-table-others, krb5-appl, ktoblzcheck-data, leafnode, lib2geom, libexif-gtk, libyui, linkloop, meson, MozillaFirefox, ncurses, notify-sharp, pcsc-acr38, pcsc-asedriveiiie-serial, pcsc-asedriveiiie-usb, pcsc-asekey, pcsc-eco5000, pcsc-reflex60, perl-Crypt-RC, python-boto3, python-gevent, python-pytest-localserver, qt6-tools, seamonkey, seq24, smictrl, sobby, solfege, urfkill, uwsgi, wsmancli, xine-lib, xkeycaps, xquarto, yast-control-center, yast-ruby-bindings and yast
  • libmfx-gen, libmfx, liboqs
• Chris Hofstaedtler:
  • #1104578 filed against jabber-muc.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1105171 filed against golang-github-lucas-clemente-quic-go.
• Jelle van der Waa:
  • gitlab-shell
• Jochen Sprickerhof:
  • #1104965 filed against bootp.
• Zhaofeng Li:
  • Add support for --mtime and --clamp-mtime to bsdtar.
• James Addison:
  • #1105119 for python3 requested enabling a LTO-adjacent option that should improve build reproducibility.
  • #1106274 upstream fix merged for freezegun for a timezone issue causing unit tests to fail during testing.
  • Opened a pull request for tutanota in an attempt to resolve a long-standing reproducibility issue.
• Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek:
  • 0xFFFF: Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for date in manual pages.

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

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

Welcome to post 49 in the R⁴ series. The Two Cultures is a term first used by C.P. Snow in a 1959 speech and monograph focused on the split between humanities and the sciences. Decades later, the term was (quite famously) re-used by Leo Breiman in a (somewhat prophetic) 2001 article about the split between data models and algorithmic models . In this note, we argue that statistical computing practice and deployment can also be described via this Two Cultures moniker. Referring to the term linking these foundational pieces is of course headline bait. Yet when preparing for the discussion of r2u in the invited talk in Mons (video, slides), it occurred to me that there is in fact a wide gulf between two alternative approaches of using R and, specifically, deploying packages. On the one hand we have the approach described by my friend Jeff as you go to the Apple store, buy the nicest machine you can afford, install what you need and then never ever touch it . A computer / workstation / laptop is seen as an immutable object where every attempt at change may lead to breakage, instability, and general chaos and is hence best avoided. If you know Jeff, you know he exaggerates. Maybe only slightly though. Similarly, an entire sub-culture of users striving for reproducibility (and sometimes also replicability ) does the same. This is for example evidenced by the popularity of package renv by Rcpp collaborator and pal Kevin. The expressed hope is that by nailing down a (sub)set of packages, outcomes are constrained to be unchanged. Hope springs eternal, clearly. (Personally, if need be, I do the same with Docker containers and their respective Dockerfile.) On the other hand, rolling is fundamentally different approach. One (well known) example is Google building everything at @HEAD . The entire (ginormous) code base is considered as a mono-repo which at any point in time is expected to be buildable as is. All changes made are pre-tested to be free of side effects to other parts. This sounds hard, and likely is more involved than an alternative of a whatever works approach of independent changes and just hoping for the best. Another example is a rolling (Linux) distribution as for example Debian. Changes are first committed to a staging place (Debian calls this the unstable distribution) and, if no side effects are seen, propagated after a fixed number of days to the rolling distribution (called testing ). With this mechanism, testing should always be installable too. And based on the rolling distribution, at certain times (for Debian roughly every two years) a release is made from testing into stable (following more elaborate testing). The released stable version is then immutable (apart from fixes for seriously grave bugs and of course security updates). So this provides the connection between frequent and rolling updates, and produces immutable fixed set: a release. This Debian approach has been influential for any other projects including CRAN as can be seen in aspects of its system providing a rolling set of curated packages. Instead of a staging area for all packages, extensive tests are made for candidate packages before adding an update. This aims to ensure quality and consistence and has worked remarkably well. We argue that it has clearly contributed to the success and renown of CRAN. Now, when accessing CRAN from R, we fundamentally have two accessor functions. But seemingly only one is widely known and used. In what we may call the Jeff model , everybody is happy to deploy install.packages() for initial installations. That sentiment is clearly expressed by this bsky post:

One of my #rstats coding rituals is that every time I load a @vincentab.bsky.social package I go check for a new version because invariably it s been updated with 18 new major features

And that is why we have two cultures. Because some of us, yours truly included, also use update.packages() at recurring (frequent !!) intervals: daily or near-daily for me. The goodness and, dare I say, gift of packages is not limited to those by my pal Vincent. CRAN updates all the time, and updates are (generally) full of (usually excellent) changes, fixes, or new features. So update frequently! Doing (many but small) updates (frequently) is less invasive than (large, infrequent) waterfall -style changes! But the fear of change, or disruption, is clearly pervasive. One can only speculate why. Is the experience of updating so painful on other operating systems? Is it maybe a lack of exposure / tutorials on best practices? These Two Cultures coexist. When I delivered the talk in Mons, I briefly asked for a show of hands among all the R users in the audience to see who in fact does use update.packages() regularly. And maybe a handful of hands went up: surprisingly few! Now back to the context of installing packages: Clearly only installing has its uses. For continuous integration checks we generally install into ephemeral temporary setups. Some debugging work may be with one-off container or virtual machine setups. But all other uses may well be under maintained setups. So consider calling update.packages() once in while. Or even weekly or daily. The rolling feature of CRAN is a real benefit, and it is there for the taking and enrichment of your statistical computing experience. So to sum up, the real power is to use

• install.packages() to obtain fabulous new statistical computing resources, ideally in an instant; and
• update.packages() to keep these fabulous resources current and free of (known) bugs.

For both tasks, relying on binary installations accelerates and eases the process. And where available, using binary installation with system-dependency support as r2u does makes it easier still, following the r2u slogan of Fast. Easy. Reliable. Pick All Three. Give it a try!

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Larger blocks besides the Phosh 0.47 release are on screen keyboard and cell broadcast improvements, work on separate volume streams, the switch of phoc to wlroots 0.19.0 and effort to make Phosh work on Debian's upcoming stable release (Trixie) out of the box. Trixie will ship with Phosh 0.46, if you want to try out 0.47 you can fetch it from Debian's experimental suite. See below for details on the above and more: phosh

• Track volume control based on media role priority (MR)
• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0

phoc

• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• More signal unlink fixes (MR)
• Further polish the wlroots 0.19 switch and undraft (MR)
• Start to track wlroots 0.20 dev branch (MR)
• Remember output configuration and restore scale,mode,transform for single output configs (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• CI maintenance (MR, MR, MR)
• New alerts panel (MR)
• Handle p-o-s to stevia rename (MR)

phosh-osk-stub / stevia

• Smoke test completers (MR)
• Better use horizontal space in completion bar (MR)
• Add emojis to completion bar (MR)
• Drop separate emoji data (MR)
• Add some keyword completions (MR)
• Better handle lots of completions (MR)
• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• Rename to Stevia (MR), (MR)
• Release 0.48~alpha1 to ease the rename for distros
• Some minor GTK4 preps (MR)

phosh-tour

• Release 0.47.0

phosh-osk-data

• Check packaging step (MR)

pfs

• Release 0.0.3

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Release 0.47.0

phrog

• Allow systemd to fail to help bootstrapping (MR)

phosh-debs

• Skip noinsttest profiles (MR) - no need for these in nightly builds and helps nocheck triggering errors
• Work around phrog install failure until fixed upstream (MR)
• Switch from osk-stub to stevia (MR)

meta-phosh

• Support automatic restart in more projects (MR)
• Fix glob for meson checks (MR)

feedbackd

• Expand media role MR with volume tracking (MR) - this is basically the same as the Wireplumber MR from below
• vibra-pattern: Don't overwrite magnitutde when changing global level (MR)
• Update fbcli manpage (MR)
• Drop custom script (MR)
• Add key- pressed,released events (MR)
• Release 0.8.2

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.3
• Use stronger button-pressed feedback for google,sargo (MR)

gmobile

• Install tests so they can run through ginsttest-runner (MR)
• Release 0.3.0, 0.3.1
• Small timer cleanups (MR)
• Add mcc to iso country code conversion (MR)
• Fix manpage subject (MR)

GNOME calls

• Fix crash on shutdown (MR)
• Drop meson version check (MR)
• Backport fixes for 48 (MR)

Debian

• phosh: Backport patches from 0.46 stable (MR)
• phosh: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• gnome-calls: Backport outging SIP call UI fix (MR)
• gmobile: Upload 0.3.0 with improved autopkg tests
• phoc: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• phosh-osk-stub: 0.47.0
• release-dom-compoenent: Drop tmp branch (MR)
• phosh-tour: Upload 0.47.0
• phosh-mobile-settings: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Upload 0.47.0
• wlroots: Upload 0.19.0
• stevia: Upload 0.48~alpha1
• meta-phosh: phosh-full: Depend on xwayland (MR)
• feedbackd-device-themes: Upload 0.8.3
• feedbackd: Upload 0.8.2
• feedbackd-device-themes: Backport key-press fix for google,sargo (MR)

ModemManager

• Simplify builds that need updated libqmi/libmbim (MR)
• CellBroadcast: Fix QMI channel reading corner cases (MR)
• Fix crash in CBM code (caused by unrelated bind-to refactor) (MR)
• Handle more data codings and expose CBM's language (MR)

osmo-cbc

• api-tool: Allow to set language of cell broadcast message (MR)

gsm-cell-testing

• Update docs to use our new MM subproject builds (MR)

mobile-broadband-provider-info

• Allow emergency number information (MR)
• Allow Cell Broadcast information (MR)
• Add .dir-locales.el and make tests easier to parse (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Add channel handling (MR)
• Indicate on DBus whether Cell Broadcasts are supported (MR)
• Add ASAN check and fix fallout (MR)

phosh-site

• Add a support feature matrix (MR)
• New post: OSK completion and correction

pipewire

• Simplify header use for projects that use -Wswitch-default (MR)

wireplumber

• Add lua script to track suitable volume control when role based policy linking is in use (MR)

python-dbusmock

• ModemManager: Add set-channel support (MR)

Bugs

• Standardize audio stream roles (MR). Otherwise we'll have a hard time with e.g. WirePlumbers role based policy linking as apps might use all kinds of types.

Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• gmobile/pp: Ignore buttons on headsets (MR)
• p-o-s: Add Arabic translation (MR)
• p-o-s: pipe completer examples (MR)
• p-o-s: US Dvorak layout (MR)
• p-m-s: Use static library for building (MR)
• p-m-s: pmos tweaks UI parts (MR)
• p-m-s: Notification categories that light up the screen (MR)
• gmobile: Border radius for oneplus,enchilada (MR)
• m-b-p-i: Telia IOT provider (MR)
• phosh-site: Highlight selected footnote (MR)
• bluez: Don't start mpris proxy for root user (Patch)
• phoc: shortcuts-inhibit: Add support for the keyboard shortcuts inhibit protocol (MR)

Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Debian 13 "Trixie" full freeze has started 2025-05-17, so this is a good time to take a look at some of the features, that this release will bring. Here we will focus on packages related to XMPP, a.k.a. Jabber. XMPP is a universal communication protocol for instant messaging, push notifications, IoT, WebRTC, and social applications. It has existed since 1999, originally called "Jabber", it has a diverse and active developers community. Clients

• Dino, a modern XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.4.2 to 0.5.0
  Dino now uses OMEMO encryption by default. It also supports XEP-0447: Stateless File Sharing for unencrypted file transfers. Users can now see preview images or other file details before downloading the file. Multiple widgets are redesigned to be compatible with mobile devices, e.g. running Mobian.
• Gajim, a GTK+-based Jabber client has been upgraded from 1.7.3 to 2.1.1
  There are many new features in Gajim, e.g. XEP-0444: Message Reactions, XEP-0461: Message Replies, XEP-0425: Moderated Message Retraction, XEP-0490: Message Displayed Synchronization, voice message recording, migration to GTK 4, and a lot of UI changes.
• go-sendxmpp, a CLI tool to send messages to contacts or MUCs: 0.5.6 0.14.1
  New features are support for sending XEP-0066: Out of Band Data and support for several modern authentication features (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile, XEP-0386: Bind 2, XEP-0484: Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens). New support of modern SCRAM mechanisms (SCRAM-SHA-1(-PLUS), SCRAM-SHA-256(-PLUS), SCRAM-SHA-515(-PLUS)) and SASL SCRAM Downgrade Protection (XEP-0474: SASL SCRAM Downgrade Protection) improve the security of the login process. Also a lot of bugfixes and smaller improvements found their way to the new version, for details see the changelog.
• Kaidan, a simple and user-friendly Jabber/XMPP client is upgraded from 0.8.0 to 0.12.2
  Kaidan supports end-to-end encryption via OMEMO 2, Automatic Trust Management and XMPP Providers. It has been migrated to QT 6 and many features have been added: XEP-0444: Message Reactions, XEP-0461: Message Replies, chat pinning, inline audio player, chat list filtering, local message removal, etc.
• Libervia is upgraded from 0.9.0~hg3993 to 0.9.0~hg4352
  Among other features, it now also contains a gateway to ActivityPub, e.g. to Mastodon.
• Poezio, a console based XMPP client as been updated from 0.14 to 0.15.0
  Better self-ping support. Use the system CA store by default.
• Profanity, a console based XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.13.1 to 0.15.0.
  Add support for XEP-0054: vcard-temp, Improve MAM support, show encryption for messages from history and handle alt+enter as newline char.
• Psi+, a QT based XMPP client (basic version) has been upgraded from 1.4.554 to 1.4.1456
• xmpp-dns, a CLI tool to check XMPP SRV records: 0.3.4 0.4.5
  It now supports showing connection targets defined by XEP-0156: Discovering Alternative XMPP Connection Methods/XEP-0487: Host Meta 2 - One Method To Rule Them All and testing of XEP-0206: XMPP Over BOSH and Websocket connections. A detailed list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Servers

• ejabberd, an extensible realtime platform (XMPP server, MQTT broker, SIP service) has been updated from Version 23.01 to 24.12
  Add support for XEP-0425: Moderated Message Retraction, XEP-0402: PEP Native Bookmarks, and XEP-0424 Message Retraction.
• Pros dy, a lightweight extensible XMPP server has been upgraded from 0.12.3 to 13.0.1
  Admins can disable and enable accounts as needed. A new role and permissions framework. Storage and performance improvements.

Libraries

• libomemo-c 0.5.0 to 0.5.1
• libstrophe, an XMPP library in C has been upgraded from 0.12.2 to 0.14.0
  It now supports XEP-0138: Stream Compression and adds various modern SCRAM mechanisms.
• omemo-dr, an OMEMO library used by Gajim is now in Debian, in version 1.0.1
• python-nbxmpp, a non blocking Jabber/XMPP Python 3 library, upgrade from 4.2.2 to 6.1.1
• python-oldmemo, a python-omemo backend for OMEMO 1, 1.0.3 to 1.1.0
• python-omemo, a Python 3 implementation of the OMEMO protocol, 1.0.2 to 1.2.0
• python-twomemo, a python-omemo backend for OMEMO 2, 1.0.3 to 1.1.0
• qxmpp 1.4.0 to 1.10.3
• slixmpp-omemo new 1.2.2
• slixmpp 1.8.3 to 1.10.0
• strophejs, a library for writing XMPP clients has been upgraded from 1.2.14 to 3.1.0

Gateways/Transports

• Biboumi, a gateway between XMPP and IRC, upgrades from 9.0 to 9.0+20241124.
• Debian 13 Trixie includes Slidge 0.2.12 and Matridge 0.2.3 for the first time! It is a gateway between XMPP and Matrix, with support for many chat features.

Not in Trixie

• Spectrum 2, a gateway from XMPP to various other messaging systems, did not make it into Debian 13, because it depends on Swift, which has release critical bugs and therefore cannot be part of a stable release.

I've been refreshing myself on the low-level guts of Linux container technology. Here's some notes on mount namespaces. In the below examples, I will use more than one root shell simultaneously. To disambiguate them, the examples will feature a numbered shell prompt: 1# for the first shell, and 2# for the second. Preliminaries Namespaces are normally associated with processes and are removed when the last associated process terminates. To make them persistent, you have to bind-mount the corresponding virtual file from an associated processes's entry in /proc, to another path¹. The receiving path needs to have its "propogation" property set to "private". Most likely your system's existing mounts are mostly "public". You can check the propogation setting for mounts with

1# findmnt -o+PROPAGATION

We'll create a new directory to hold mount namespaces we create, and set its Propagation to private, via a bind-mount of itself to itself.

1# mkdir /root/mntns
1# mount --bind --make-private /root/mntns /root/mntns

The namespace itself needs to be bind-mounted over a file rather than a directory, so we'll create one.

1# touch /root/mntns/1

Creating and persisting a new mount namespace

1# unshare --mount=/root/mntns/1

We are now 'inside' the new namespace in a new shell process. We'll change the shell prompt to make this clearer

PS1='inside# '

We can make a filesystem change, such as mounting a tmpfs

inside# mount -t tmpfs /mnt /mnt
inside# touch /mnt/hi-there

And observe it is not visible outside that namespace

2# findmnt /mnt
2# stat /mnt/hi-there
stat: cannot statx '/mnt/hi-there': No such file or directory

Back to the namespace shell, we can find an integer identifier for the namespace via the shell processes /proc entry:

inside# readlink /proc/$$/ns/mnt

It will be something like mnt:[4026533646]. From another shell, we can list namespaces and see that it exists:

2# lsns -t mnt
        NS TYPE NPROCS   PID USER             COMMAND
 
4026533646 mnt       1 52525 root             -bash

If we exit the shell that unshare created,

inside# exit

running lsns again should² still list the namespace, albeit with the NPROCS column now reading 0.

2# lsns -t mnt

We can see that a virtual filesystem of type nsfs is mounted at the path we selected when we ran unshare:

2# grep /root/mntns/1 /proc/mounts 
nsfs /root/mntns/1 nsfs rw 0 0

Entering the namespace from another process This is relatively easy:

1# nsenter --mount=/root/mntns/1
1# stat /mnt/hi-there
  File: /mnt/hi-there
 

More to come in future blog posts! References These were particularly useful in figuring this out:

• Building a container by hand using namespaces: The mount namespace
• the unshare(1) man page

I ve just got a second hand Nissan LEAF. It s not nearly as luxurious as the Genesis EV that I test drove [1]. It s also just over 5 years old so it s not as slick as the MG4 I test drove [2]. But the going rate for a LEAF of that age is $17,000 vs $35,000 or more for a new MG4 or $130,000+ for a Genesis. At this time the LEAF is the only EV in Australia that s available on the second hand market in quantity. Apparently the cheapest new EV in Australia is a Great Wall one which is $32,000 and which had a wait list last time I checked, so $17,000 is a decent price if you want an electric car and aren t interested in paying the price of a new car. Starting the Car One thing I don t like about most recent cars (petrol as well as electric) is that they needlessly break traditions of car design. Inserting a key and turning it clockwise to start a car is a long standing tradition that shouldn t be broken without a good reason. With the use of traditional keys you know that when a car has the key removed it can t be operated, there s no situation of the person with the key walking away and leaving the car driveable and there s no possibility of the owner driving somewhere without the key and then being unable to start it. To start a LEAF you have to have the key fob device in range, hold down the brake pedal, and then press the power button. To turn on accessories you do the same but without holding down the brake pedal. They also have patterns of pushes, push twice to turn it on, push three times to turn it off. This is all a lot easier with a key where you can just rotate it as many clicks as needed. The change of car design for the key means that no physical contact is needed to unlock the car. If someone stands by a car fiddling with the door lock it will get noticed which deters certain types of crime. If a potential thief can sit in a nearby car to try attack methods and only walk to the target vehicle once it s unlocked it makes the crime a lot easier. Even if the electronic key is as secure as a physical key allowing attempts to unlock remotely weakens security. Reports on forums suggest that the electronic key is vulnerable to replay attacks. I guess I just have to hope that as car thieves typically get less than 10% of the value of a car it s just not worth their effort to steal a $17,000 car. Unlocking doors remotely is a common feature that s been around for a while but starting a car without a key being physically inserted is a new thing. Other Features The headlights turn on automatically when the car thinks that the level of ambient light warrants it. There is an option to override this to turn on lights but no option to force the lights to be off. So if you have your car in the on state while parked the headlights will be on even if you are parked and listening to the radio. The LEAF has a bunch of luxury features which seem a bit ridiculous like seat warmers. It also has a heated steering wheel which has turned out to be a good option for me as I have problems with my hands getting cold. According to the My Nissan LEAF Forum the seat warmer uses a maximum of 50W per seat while the car heater uses a minimum of 250W [3]. So if there are one or two people in the car then significantly less power is used by just heating the seats and also keeping the car air cool reduces window fog. The Bluetooth audio support works well. I ve done hands free calls and used it for playing music from my phone. This is the first car I ve owned with Bluetooth support. It also has line-in which might have had some use in 2019 but is becoming increasingly useless as phones with Bluetooth become more popular. It has support for two devices connecting via Bluetooth at the same time which could be handy if you wanted to watch movies on a laptop or tablet while waiting for someone. The LEAF has some of the newer safety features, it tracks lane markers and notifies the driver via beeps and vibration if they stray from their lane. It also tries to read speed limit signs and display the last observed speed limit on the dash display. It also has a skid alert which in my experience goes off under hard acceleration when it s not skidding but doesn t go off if you lose grip when cornering. The features for detecting changing lanes when close to other cars and for emergency braking when another car is partly in the lane (even if moving out of the lane) don t seem well tuned for Australian driving, the common trend on Australian roads is lawful-evil to use DND terminology. Range My most recent driving was just over 2 hours driving with a distance of a bit over 100Km which took the battery from 62% to 14%. So it looks like I can drive a bit over 200Km at an average speed of 50Km/h. I have been unable to find out the battery size for my car, my model will have either a 40KWh or 62KWh battery. Google results say it should be printed on the B pillar (it s not) and that it can be deduced from the VIN (it can t). I m guessing that my car is the cheaper option which is supposed to do 240Km when new which means that a bit over 200Km at an average speed of 50Km/h when 6yo is about what s expected. If it has the larger battery designed to do 340Km then doing 200Km in real use would be rather disappointing. Assuming the battery is 40KWh that means it s 5Km/KWh or 10KW average for the duration. That means that the 250W or so used by the car heater should only make a about 2% difference to range which is something that a human won t usually notice. If I was to drive to another state I d definitely avoid using the heater or airconditioner as an extra 4km could really matter when trying to find a place to charge when you aren t familiar with the area. It s also widely reported that the LEAF is less efficient at highway speeds which is an extra difficulty for that. It seems that the LEAF just isn t designed for interstate driving in Australia, it would be fine for driving between provinces of the Netherlands as it s difficult to drive for 200km without leaving that country. Driving 700km to another city in a car with 200km range would mean charging 3 times along the way, that s 2 hours of charging time when using fast chargers. This isn t a problem at all as the average household in Australia has 1.8 cars and the battery electric vehicles only comprise 6.3% of the market. So if a household had a LEAF and a Prius they could just use the Prius for interstate driving. A recent Prius could drive from Melbourne to Canberra or Adelaide without refuelling on the way. If I was driving to another state a couple of times a year I could rent an old fashioned car to do that and still be saving money when compared to buying petrol all the time. Running Cost Currently I m paying about $0.28 per KWh for electricity, it s reported that the efficiency of charging a LEAF is as low as 83% with the best efficiency when fast charging. I don t own the fast charge hardware and don t plan to install it as that would require getting a replacement of the connection to my home from the street, a new switchboard, and other expenses. So I expect I ll be getting 83% efficiency when charging which means 48KWh for 200KM or 96KWH for the equivalent of a $110 tank of petrol. At $0.28/KWh it will cost $26 for the same amount of driving as $110 of petrol. I also anticipate saving money on service as there s no need for engine oil changes and all the other maintenance of a petrol engine and regenerative braking will reduce the incidence of brake pad replacement. I expect to save over $1100 per annum on using electricity instead of petrol even if I pay the full rate. But if I charge my car in the middle of the day when there is over supply and I don t get paid for feeding electricity from my solar panels into the grid (as is common nowadays) it could be almost free to charge the car and I could save about $1500 on fuel. Comfort Electric cars are much quieter than cars with petrol or Diesel engines which is a major luxury feature. This car is also significantly newer than any other car I ve driven much so it has features like Bluetooth audio which weren t in other cars I ve driven. When doing 100Km/h I can hear a lot of noise from the airflow, part of that would be due to the LEAF not having the extreme streamlining features that are associated with Teslas (such as retracting door handles) and part of that would be due to the car being older and the door seals not being as good as they were when new. It s still a very quiet car with a very smooth ride. It would be nice if they used the quality of seals and soundproofing that VW uses in the Passat but I guess the car would be heavier and have a shorter range if they did that. This car has less space for the driver than any other car I ve driven (with the possible exception of a 1989 Ford Laser AKA Mazda 323). The front seats have less space than the Prius. Also the batteries seem to be under the front seats so there s a bulge in the floor going slightly in front of the front seats when they are moved back which gives less space for the front passenger to move their legs and less space for the driver when sitting in a parked car. There are a selection of electric cars from MG, BYD, and Great Wall that have more space in the front seats, if those cars were on the second hand market I might have made a different choice but a second hand LEAF is the only option for a cheap electric car in Australia now. The heated steering wheel and heated seats took a bit of getting used to but I have come to appreciate the steering wheel and the heated seats are a good way of extending the range of the car. Misc Notes The LEAF is a fun car to drive and being quiet is a luxury feature, it s no different to other EVs in this regard. It isn t nearly as fast as a Tesla, but is faster than most cars actually drive on the road. When I was looking into buying a LEAF from one of the car sales sites I was looking at models less than 5 years old. But the ZR1 series went from 2017 to 2023 so there s probably not much difference between a 2019 model and a 2021 model but there is a significant price difference. I didn t deliberately choose a 2019 car, it was what a relative was selling at a time when I needed a new car. But knowing what I know now I d probably look at that age of LEAF if choosing from the car sales sites. Problems When I turn the car off the side mirrors fold in but when I turn it on they usually don t automatically unfold if I have anything connected to the cigarette lighter power port. This is a well known problem and documented on forums. This is something that Nissan really should have tested before release because phone chargers that connect to the car cigarette lighter port have been common for at least 6 years before my car was manufactured and at least 4 years before the ZE1 model was released. The built in USB port doesn t supply enough power to match the power use of a Galaxy Note 9 running Google maps and playing music through Bluetooth. On it s own this isn t a big deal but combined with the mirror issue of using a charger in the cigarette lighter port it s a problem. The cover over the charging ports doesn t seem to lock easily enough, I had it come open when doing 100Km/h on a freeway. This wasn t a big deal but as the cover opens in a suicide-door manner at a higher speed it could have broken off. The word is that LEAF service in Australia is not done well. Why do you need regular service of an electric car anyway? For petrol and Diesel cars it s engine oil replacement that makes it necessary to have regular service. Surely you can just drive it until either the brakes squeak or the tires seem worn. I have been having problems charging, sometimes it will charge from ~20% to 100% in under 24 hours, sometimes in 14+ hours it only gets to 30%. Conclusion This is a good car and the going price on them is low. I generally recommend them as long as you aren t really big and aren t too worried about the poor security. It s a fun car to drive even with a few annoying things like the mirrors not automatically extending on start. The older ones like this are cheap enough that they should be able to cover the entire purchase cost in 10 years by the savings from not buying petrol even if you don t drive a lot. With a petrol car I use about 13 tanks of petrol a year so my driving is about half the average for Australia. Some people could cover the purchase price of a second hand leaf in under 5 years.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/31/genesis-gv60/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/10/21/mg4-review/
• [3] https://mynissanleaf.com/threads/heat-pump-vs-seat-heater.33092/

In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling. Key elements of this workflow include:

• Using a Git fork/clone of the upstream repository as the starting point for creating Debian packaging repositories.
• Consistent use of the same git-buildpackage commands, with all package-specific options in gbp.conf.
• DEP-14 tag and branch names for an optimal Git packaging repository structure.
• Pristine-tar and upstream signatures for supply-chain security.
• Use of Files-Excluded in the debian/copyright file to filter out unwanted files in Debian.
• Patch queues to easily rebase and cherry-pick changes across Debian and upstream branches.
• Efficient use of Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance, for both automated feedback from CI systems and human feedback from peer reviews.

To make the instructions so concrete that anyone can repeat all the steps themselves on a real package, I demonstrate the steps by packaging the command-line tool Entr. It is written in C, has very few dependencies, and its final Debian source package structure is simple, yet exemplifies all the important parts that go into a complete Debian package:

1. Creating a new packaging repository and publishing it under your personal namespace on salsa.debian.org.
2. Using dh_make to create the initial Debian packaging.
3. Posting the first draft of the Debian packaging as a Merge Request (MR) and using Salsa CI to verify Debian packaging quality.
4. Running local builds efficiently and iterating on the packaging process.

Create new Debian packaging repository from the existing upstream project git repository First, create a new empty directory, then clone the upstream Git repository inside it:

shell Copy

mkdir debian-entr cd debian-entr git clone --origin upstreamvcs --branch master \ --single-branch https://github.com/eradman/entr.git

mkdir debian-entr
cd debian-entr
git clone --origin upstreamvcs --branch master \
 --single-branch https://github.com/eradman/entr.git

Using a clean directory makes it easier to inspect the build artifacts of a Debian package, which will be output in the parent directory of the Debian source directory. The extra parameters given to git clone lay the foundation for the Debian packaging git repository structure where the upstream git remote name is upstreamvcs. Only the upstream main branch is tracked to avoid cluttering git history with upstream development branches that are irrelevant for packaging in Debian. Next, enter the git repository directory and list the git tags. Pick the latest upstream release tag as the commit to start the branch upstream/latest. This latest refers to the upstream release, not the upstream development branch. Immediately after, branch off the debian/latest branch, which will have the actual Debian packaging files in the debian/ subdirectory.

shell Copy

cd entr git tag # shows the latest upstream release tag was '5.6' git checkout -b upstream/latest 5.6 git checkout -b debian/latest

cd entr
git tag # shows the latest upstream release tag was '5.6'
git checkout -b upstream/latest 5.6
git checkout -b debian/latest

%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'master'      %%
gitGraph:
checkout master
commit id: "Upstream 5.6 release" tag: "5.6"
branch upstream/latest
checkout upstream/latest
commit id: "New upstream version 5.6" tag: "upstream/5.6"
branch debian/latest
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial Debian packaging"
commit id: "Additional change 1"
commit id: "Additional change 2"
commit id: "Additional change 3"

At this point, the repository is structured according to DEP-14 conventions, ensuring a clear separation between upstream and Debian packaging changes, but there are no Debian changes yet. Next, add the Salsa repository as a new remote which called origin, the same as the default remote name in git.

shell Copy

git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:otto/entr-demo.git git push --set-upstream origin debian/latest

git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:otto/entr-demo.git
git push --set-upstream origin debian/latest

This is an important preparation step to later be able to create a Merge Request on Salsa that targets the debian/latest branch, which does not yet have any debian/ directory.

Launch a Debian Sid (unstable) container to run builds in To ensure that all packaging tools are of the latest versions, run everything inside a fresh Sid container. This has two benefits: you are guaranteed to have the most up-to-date toolchain, and your host system stays clean without getting polluted by various extra packages. Additionally, this approach works even if your host system is not Debian/Ubuntu.

shell Copy

cd .. podman run --interactive --tty --rm --shm-size=1G --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \ --env='DEB*' --volume=$PWD:/tmp/test --workdir=/tmp/test debian:sid bash

cd ..
podman run --interactive --tty --rm --shm-size=1G --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
 --env='DEB*' --volume=$PWD:/tmp/test --workdir=/tmp/test debian:sid bash

Note that the container should be started from the parent directory of the git repository, not inside it. The --volume parameter will loop-mount the current directory inside the container. Thus all files created and modified are on the host system, and will persist after the container shuts down. Once inside the container, install the basic dependencies:

shell Copy

apt update -q && apt install -q --yes git-buildpackage dpkg-dev dh-make

apt update -q && apt install -q --yes git-buildpackage dpkg-dev dh-make

Automate creating the debian/ files with dh-make To create the files needed for the actual Debian packaging, use dh_make:

shell Copy

# dh_make --packagename entr_5.6 --single --createorig Maintainer Name : Otto Kek l inen Email-Address : otto@debian.org Date : Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:17:51 +0000 Package Name : entr Version : 5.6 License : blank Package Type : single Are the details correct? [Y/n/q] Done. Please edit the files in the debian/ subdirectory now.

# dh_make --packagename entr_5.6 --single --createorig
Maintainer Name : Otto Kek l inen
Email-Address : otto@debian.org
Date : Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:17:51 +0000
Package Name : entr
Version : 5.6
License : blank
Package Type : single
Are the details correct? [Y/n/q]

Done. Please edit the files in the debian/ subdirectory now.

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

shell Copy

git add debian/ git commit -a -m "Initial Debian packaging"

git add debian/
git commit -a -m "Initial Debian packaging"

Review the files The full list of files after the above steps with dh_make would be:

Copy

-- entr -- LICENSE -- Makefile.bsd -- Makefile.linux -- Makefile.linux-compat -- Makefile.macos -- NEWS -- README.md -- configure -- data.h -- debian -- README.Debian -- README.source -- changelog -- control -- copyright -- gbp.conf -- entr-docs.docs -- entr.cron.d.ex -- entr.doc-base.ex -- manpage.1.ex -- manpage.md.ex -- manpage.sgml.ex -- manpage.xml.ex -- postinst.ex -- postrm.ex -- preinst.ex -- prerm.ex -- rules -- salsa-ci.yml.ex -- source -- format -- upstream -- metadata.ex -- watch.ex -- entr.1 -- entr.c -- missing -- compat.h -- kqueue_inotify.c -- strlcpy.c -- sys -- event.h -- status.c -- status.h -- system_test.sh -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.Debian
     -- README.source
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- gbp.conf
     -- entr-docs.docs
     -- entr.cron.d.ex
     -- entr.doc-base.ex
     -- manpage.1.ex
     -- manpage.md.ex
     -- manpage.sgml.ex
     -- manpage.xml.ex
     -- postinst.ex
     -- postrm.ex
     -- preinst.ex
     -- prerm.ex
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml.ex
     -- source
       -- format
     -- upstream
       -- metadata.ex
     -- watch.ex
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

You can browse these files in the demo repository. The mandatory files in the debian/ directory are:

• changelog,
• control,
• copyright,
• and rules.

All the other files have been created for convenience so the packager has template files to work from. The files with the suffix .ex are example files that won t have any effect until their content is adjusted and the suffix removed. For detailed explanations of the purpose of each file in the debian/ subdirectory, see the following resources:

• The Debian Policy Manual: Describes the structure of the operating system, the package archive and requirements for packages to be included in the Debian archive.
• The Developer s Reference: A collection of best practices and process descriptions Debian packagers are expected to follow while interacting with one another.
• Debhelper man pages: Detailed information of how the Debian package build system works, and how the contents of the various files in debian/ affect the end result.

As Entr, the package used in this example, is a real package that already exists in the Debian archive, you may want to browse the actual Debian packaging source at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/entr/-/tree/debian/latest/debian for reference. Most of these files have standardized formatting conventions to make collaboration easier. To automatically format the files following the most popular conventions, simply run wrap-and-sort -vast or debputy reformat --style=black.

Identify build dependencies The most common reason for builds to fail is missing dependencies. The easiest way to identify which Debian package ships the required dependency is using apt-file. If, for example, a build fails complaining that pcre2posix.h cannot be found or that libcre2-posix.so is missing, you can use these commands:

shell Copy

$ apt install -q --yes apt-file && apt-file update $ apt-file search pcre2posix.h libpcre2-dev: /usr/include/pcre2posix.h $ apt-file search libpcre2-posix.so libpcre2-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3 libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3.0.6

$ apt install -q --yes apt-file && apt-file update
$ apt-file search pcre2posix.h
libpcre2-dev: /usr/include/pcre2posix.h
$ apt-file search libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3.0.6

The output above implies that the debian/control should be extended to define a Build-Depends: libpcre2-dev relationship. There is also dpkg-depcheck that uses strace to trace the files the build process tries to access, and lists what Debian packages those files belong to. Example usage:

shell Copy

dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

Build the Debian sources to generate the .deb package After the first pass of refining the contents of the files in debian/, test the build by running dpkg-buildpackage inside the container:

shell Copy

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

The options -uc -us will skip signing the resulting Debian source package and other build artifacts. The -b option will skip creating a source package and only build the (binary) *.deb packages. The output is very verbose and gives a large amount of context about what is happening during the build to make debugging build failures easier. In the build log of entr you will see for example the line dh binary --buildsystem=makefile. This and other dh commands can also be run manually if there is a need to quickly repeat only a part of the build while debugging build failures. To see what files were generated or modified by the build simply run git status --ignored:

shell Copy

$ git status --ignored On branch debian/latest Untracked files: (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) debian/debhelper-build-stamp debian/entr.debhelper.log debian/entr.substvars debian/files Ignored files: (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed) Makefile compat.c compat.o debian/.debhelper/ debian/entr/ entr entr.o status.o

$ git status --ignored
On branch debian/latest

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

Ignored files:
 (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
 Makefile
 compat.c
 compat.o
 debian/.debhelper/
 debian/entr/
 entr
 entr.o
 status.o

Re-running dpkg-buildpackage will include running the command dh clean, which assuming it is configured correctly in the debian/rules file will reset the source directory to the original pristine state. The same can of course also be done with regular git commands git reset --hard; git clean -fdx. To avoid accidentally committing unnecessary build artifacts in git, a debian/.gitignore can be useful and it would typically include all four files listed as untracked above. After a successful build you would have the following files:

shell Copy

-- entr -- LICENSE -- Makefile -> Makefile.linux -- Makefile.bsd -- Makefile.linux -- Makefile.linux-compat -- Makefile.macos -- NEWS -- README.md -- compat.c -- compat.o -- configure -- data.h -- debian -- README.source.md -- changelog -- control -- copyright -- debhelper-build-stamp -- docs -- entr -- DEBIAN -- control -- md5sums -- usr -- bin -- entr -- share -- doc -- entr -- NEWS.gz -- README.md -- changelog.Debian.gz -- copyright -- man -- man1 -- entr.1.gz -- entr.debhelper.log -- entr.substvars -- files -- gbp.conf -- patches -- PR149-expand-aliases-in-system-test-script.patch -- series -- system-test-skip-no-tty.patch -- system-test-with-system-binary.patch -- rules -- salsa-ci.yml -- source -- format -- tests -- control -- upstream -- metadata -- signing-key.asc -- watch -- entr -- entr.1 -- entr.c -- entr.o -- missing -- compat.h -- kqueue_inotify.c -- strlcpy.c -- sys -- event.h -- status.c -- status.h -- status.o -- system_test.sh -- entr-dbgsym_5.6-1_amd64.deb -- entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz -- entr_5.6-1.dsc -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.buildinfo -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile -> Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- compat.c
   -- compat.o
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.source.md
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- debhelper-build-stamp
     -- docs
     -- entr
       -- DEBIAN
         -- control
         -- md5sums
       -- usr
       -- bin
         -- entr
       -- share
       -- doc
         -- entr
         -- NEWS.gz
         -- README.md
         -- changelog.Debian.gz
         -- copyright
       -- man
       -- man1
       -- entr.1.gz
     -- entr.debhelper.log
     -- entr.substvars
     -- files
     -- gbp.conf
     -- patches
       -- PR149-expand-aliases-in-system-test-script.patch
       -- series
       -- system-test-skip-no-tty.patch
       -- system-test-with-system-binary.patch
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml
     -- source
       -- format
     -- tests
       -- control
     -- upstream
       -- metadata
       -- signing-key.asc
     -- watch
   -- entr
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- entr.o
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- status.o
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr-dbgsym_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
 -- entr_5.6-1.dsc
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.buildinfo
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

The contents of debian/entr are essentially what goes into the resulting entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb package. Familiarizing yourself with the majority of the files in the original upstream source as well as all the resulting build artifacts is time consuming, but it is a necessary investment to get high-quality Debian packages. There are also tools such as Debcraft that automate generating the build artifacts in separate output directories for each build, thus making it easy to compare the changes to correlate what change in the Debian packaging led to what change in the resulting build artifacts.

Re-run the initial import with git-buildpackage When upstreams publish releases as tarballs, they should also be imported for optimal software supply-chain security, in particular if upstream also publishes cryptographic signatures that can be used to verify the authenticity of the tarballs. To achieve this, the files debian/watch, debian/upstream/signing-key.asc, and debian/gbp.conf need to be present with the correct options. In the gbp.conf file, ensure you have the correct options based on:

1. Does upstream release tarballs? If so, enforce pristine-tar = True.
2. Does upstream sign the tarballs? If so, configure explicit signature checking with upstream-signatures = on.
3. Does upstream have a git repository, and does it have release git tags? If so, configure the release git tag format, e.g. upstream-vcs-tag = %(version%~%.)s.

To validate that the above files are working correctly, run gbp import-orig with the current version explicitly defined:

shell Copy

$ gbp import-orig --uscan --upstream-version 5.6 gbp:info: Launching uscan... gpgv: Signature made 7. Aug 2024 07.43.27 PDT gpgv: using RSA key 519151D83E83D40A232B4D615C418B8631BC7C26 gpgv: Good signature from "Eric Radman <ericshane@eradman.com>" gbp:info: Using uscan downloaded tarball ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz gbp:info: Importing '../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream/latest'... gbp:info: Source package is entr gbp:info: Upstream version is 5.6 gbp:info: Replacing upstream source on 'debian/latest' gbp:info: Running Postimport hook gbp:info: Successfully imported version 5.6 of ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz

$ gbp import-orig --uscan --upstream-version 5.6
gbp:info: Launching uscan...
gpgv: Signature made 7. Aug 2024 07.43.27 PDT
gpgv: using RSA key 519151D83E83D40A232B4D615C418B8631BC7C26
gpgv: Good signature from "Eric Radman <ericshane@eradman.com>"
gbp:info: Using uscan downloaded tarball ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
gbp:info: Importing '../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream/latest'...
gbp:info: Source package is entr
gbp:info: Upstream version is 5.6
gbp:info: Replacing upstream source on 'debian/latest'
gbp:info: Running Postimport hook
gbp:info: Successfully imported version 5.6 of ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz

As the original packaging was done based on the upstream release git tag, the above command will fetch the tarball release, create the pristine-tar branch, and store the tarball delta on it. This command will also attempt to create the tag upstream/5.6 on the upstream/latest branch.

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

Build using git-buildpackage From this stage onwards you should build the package using gbp buildpackage, which will do a more comprehensive build.

shell Copy

gbp buildpackage -uc -us

gbp buildpackage -uc -us

The git-buildpackage build also includes running Lintian to find potential Debian policy violations in the sources or in the resulting .deb binary packages. Many Debian Developers run lintian -EviIL +pedantic after every build to check that there are no new nags, and to validate that changes intended to previous Lintian nags were correct.

Open a Merge Request on Salsa for Debian packaging review Getting everything perfectly right takes a lot of effort, and may require reaching out to an experienced Debian Developers for review and guidance. Thus, you should aim to publish your initial packaging work on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance, for review and feedback as early as possible. For somebody to be able to easily see what you have done, you should rename your debian/latest branch to another name, for example next/debian/latest, and open a Merge Request that targets the debian/latest branch on your Salsa fork, which still has only the unmodified upstream files. If you have followed the workflow in this post so far, you can simply run:

1. git checkout -b next/debian/latest
2. git push --set-upstream origin next/debian/latest
3. Open in a browser the URL visible in the git remote response
4. Write the Merge Request description in case the default text from your commit is not enough
5. Mark the MR as Draft using the checkbox
6. Publish the MR and request feedback

Once a Merge Request exists, discussion regarding what additional changes are needed can be conducted as MR comments. With an MR, you can easily iterate on the contents of next/debian/latest, rebase, force push, and request re-review as many times as you want. While at it, make sure the Settings > CI/CD page has under CI/CD configuration file the value debian/salsa-ci.yml so that the CI can run and give you immediate automated feedback. For an example of an initial packaging Merge Request, see https://salsa.debian.org/otto/entr-demo/-/merge_requests/1.

Open a Merge Request / Pull Request to fix upstream code Due to the high quality requirements in Debian, it is fairly common that while doing the initial Debian packaging of an open source project, issues are found that stem from the upstream source code. While it is possible to carry extra patches in Debian, it is not good practice to deviate too much from upstream code with custom Debian patches. Instead, the Debian packager should try to get the fixes applied directly upstream. Using git-buildpackage patch queues is the most convenient way to make modifications to the upstream source code so that they automatically convert into Debian patches (stored at debian/patches), and can also easily be submitted upstream as any regular git commit (and rebased and resubmitted many times over). First, decide if you want to work out of the upstream development branch and later cherry-pick to the Debian packaging branch, or work out of the Debian packaging branch and cherry-pick to an upstream branch. The example below starts from the upstream development branch and then cherry-picks the commit into the git-buildpackage patch queue:

shell Copy

git checkout -b bugfix-branch master nano entr.c make ./entr # verify change works as expected git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body" git push # submit upstream gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 git cherry-pick <commit id> git commit --amend # extend commit message with DEP-3 metadata gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b ./entr # verify change works as expected gbp pq export --drop --commit git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."

git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
nano entr.c
make
./entr # verify change works as expected
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
git push # submit upstream
gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # extend commit message with DEP-3 metadata
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."

The example below starts by making the fix on a git-buildpackage patch queue branch, and then cherry-picking it onto the upstream development branch:

shell Copy

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 nano entr.c git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body" gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b ./entr # verify change works as expected gbp pq export --drop --commit git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .." git checkout -b bugfix-branch master git cherry-pick <commit id> git commit --amend # prepare commit message for upstream submission git push # submit upstream

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
nano entr.c
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."
git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # prepare commit message for upstream submission
git push # submit upstream

The key git-buildpackage commands to enter and exit the patch-queue mode are:

shell Copy

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 gbp pq export --drop --commit

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
gbp pq export --drop --commit

%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'debian/latest'      %%
gitGraph
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial packaging"
branch patch-queue/debian/latest
checkout patch-queue/debian/latest
commit id: "Delete debian/patches/..."
commit id: "Patch 1 title"
commit id: "Patch 2 title"
commit id: "Patch 3 title"

These can be run at any time, regardless if any debian/patches existed prior, or if existing patches applied cleanly or not, or if there were old patch queue branches around. Note that the extra -b in gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b instructs to build only binary packages, avoiding any nags from dpkg-source that there are modifications in the upstream sources while building in the patches-applied mode.

Programming-language specific dh-make alternatives As each programming language has its specific way of building the source code, and many other conventions regarding the file layout and more, Debian has multiple custom tools to create new Debian source packages for specific programming languages.

• Go: dh-make-golang
• Haskell: cabal-debian
• Java: jh_makepkg
• JavaScript/Node.js: npm2deb
• Lua: dh-lua
• OCaml: dh-ocaml
• Perl: dh-make-perl
• PHP: pkg-php-tools
• Ruby: gem2deb

Notably, Python does not have its own tool, but there is an dh_make --python option for Python support directly in dh_make itself. The list is not complete and many more tools exist. For some languages, there are even competing options, such as for Go there is in addition to dh-make-golang also Gophian. When learning Debian packaging, there is no need to learn these tools upfront. Being aware that they exist is enough, and one can learn them only if and when one starts to package a project in a new programming language.

The difference between source git repository vs source packages vs binary packages As seen in earlier example, running gbp buildpackage on the Entr packaging repository above will result in several files:

Copy

entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz entr_5.6-1.dsc entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

The entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb is the binary package, which can be installed on a Debian/Ubuntu system. The rest of the files constitute the source package. To do a source-only build, run gbp buildpackage -S and note the files produced:

Copy

entr_5.6-1_source.changes entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz entr_5.6-1.dsc entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

entr_5.6-1_source.changes
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

The source package files can be used to build the binary .deb for amd64, or any architecture that the package supports. It is important to grasp that the Debian source package is the preferred form to be able to build the binary packages on various Debian build systems, and the Debian source package is not the same thing as the Debian packaging git repository contents.

flowchart LR
git[Git repository<br>branch debian/latest] --> gbp buildpackage -S  src[Source Package<br>.dsc + .tar.xz]
src --> dpkg-buildpackage  bin[Binary Packages<br>.deb]

If the package is large and complex, the build could result in multiple binary packages. One set of package definition files in debian/ will however only ever result in a single source package.

Option to repackage source packages with Files-Excluded lists in the debian/copyright file Some upstream projects may include binary files in their release, or other undesirable content that needs to be omitted from the source package in Debian. The easiest way to filter them out is by adding to the debian/copyright file a Files-Excluded field listing the undesired files. The debian/copyright file is read by uscan, which will repackage the upstream sources on-the-fly when importing new upstream releases. For a real-life example, see the debian/copyright files in the Godot package that lists:

debian Copy

Files-Excluded: platform/android/java/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar

Files-Excluded: platform/android/java/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar

The resulting repackaged upstream source tarball, as well as the upstream version component, will have an extra +ds to signify that it is not the true original upstream source but has been modified by Debian:

Copy

godot_4.3+ds.orig.tar.xz godot_4.3+ds-1_amd64.deb

godot_4.3+ds.orig.tar.xz
godot_4.3+ds-1_amd64.deb

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

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

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

In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling. Key elements of this workflow include:

• Using a Git fork/clone of the upstream repository as the starting point for creating Debian packaging repositories.
• Consistent use of the same git-buildpackage commands, with all package-specific options in gbp.conf.
• DEP-14 tag and branch names for an optimal Git packaging repository structure.
• Pristine-tar and upstream signatures for supply-chain security.
• Use of Files-Excluded in the debian/copyright file to filter out unwanted files in Debian.
• Patch queues to easily rebase and cherry-pick changes across Debian and upstream branches.
• Efficient use of Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance, for both automated feedback from CI systems and human feedback from peer reviews.

To make the instructions so concrete that anyone can repeat all the steps themselves on a real package, I demonstrate the steps by packaging the command-line tool Entr. It is written in C, has very few dependencies, and its final Debian source package structure is simple, yet exemplifies all the important parts that go into a complete Debian package:

1. Creating a new packaging repository and publishing it under your personal namespace on salsa.debian.org.
2. Using dh_make to create the initial Debian packaging.
3. Posting the first draft of the Debian packaging as a Merge Request (MR) and using Salsa CI to verify Debian packaging quality.
4. Running local builds efficiently and iterating on the packaging process.

Create new Debian packaging repository from the existing upstream project git repository First, create a new empty directory, then clone the upstream Git repository inside it:

shell Copy

mkdir debian-entr cd debian-entr git clone --origin upstreamvcs --branch master \ --single-branch https://github.com/eradman/entr.git

mkdir debian-entr
cd debian-entr
git clone --origin upstreamvcs --branch master \
 --single-branch https://github.com/eradman/entr.git

Using a clean directory makes it easier to inspect the build artifacts of a Debian package, which will be output in the parent directory of the Debian source directory. The extra parameters given to git clone lay the foundation for the Debian packaging git repository structure where the upstream git remote name is upstreamvcs. Only the upstream main branch is tracked to avoid cluttering git history with upstream development branches that are irrelevant for packaging in Debian. Next, enter the git repository directory and list the git tags. Pick the latest upstream release tag as the commit to start the branch upstream/latest. This latest refers to the upstream release, not the upstream development branch. Immediately after, branch off the debian/latest branch, which will have the actual Debian packaging files in the debian/ subdirectory.

shell Copy

cd entr git tag # shows the latest upstream release tag was '5.6' git checkout -b upstream/latest 5.6 git checkout -b debian/latest

cd entr
git tag # shows the latest upstream release tag was '5.6'
git checkout -b upstream/latest 5.6
git checkout -b debian/latest

%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'master'      %%
gitGraph:
checkout master
commit id: "Upstream 5.6 release" tag: "5.6"
branch upstream/latest
checkout upstream/latest
commit id: "New upstream version 5.6" tag: "upstream/5.6"
branch debian/latest
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial Debian packaging"
commit id: "Additional change 1"
commit id: "Additional change 2"
commit id: "Additional change 3"

At this point, the repository is structured according to DEP-14 conventions, ensuring a clear separation between upstream and Debian packaging changes, but there are no Debian changes yet. Next, add the Salsa repository as a new remote which called origin, the same as the default remote name in git.

shell Copy

git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:otto/entr-demo.git git push --set-upstream origin debian/latest

git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:otto/entr-demo.git
git push --set-upstream origin debian/latest

This is an important preparation step to later be able to create a Merge Request on Salsa that targets the debian/latest branch, which does not yet have any debian/ directory.

Launch a Debian Sid (unstable) container to run builds in To ensure that all packaging tools are of the latest versions, run everything inside a fresh Sid container. This has two benefits: you are guaranteed to have the most up-to-date toolchain, and your host system stays clean without getting polluted by various extra packages. Additionally, this approach works even if your host system is not Debian/Ubuntu.

shell Copy

cd .. podman run --interactive --tty --rm --shm-size=1G --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \ --env='DEB*' --volume=$PWD:/tmp/test --workdir=/tmp/test debian:sid bash

cd ..
podman run --interactive --tty --rm --shm-size=1G --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
 --env='DEB*' --volume=$PWD:/tmp/test --workdir=/tmp/test debian:sid bash

Note that the container should be started from the parent directory of the git repository, not inside it. The --volume parameter will loop-mount the current directory inside the container. Thus all files created and modified are on the host system, and will persist after the container shuts down. Once inside the container, install the basic dependencies:

shell Copy

apt update -q && apt install -q --yes git-buildpackage dpkg-dev dh-make

apt update -q && apt install -q --yes git-buildpackage dpkg-dev dh-make

Automate creating the debian/ files with dh-make To create the files needed for the actual Debian packaging, use dh_make:

shell Copy

# dh_make --packagename entr_5.6 --single --createorig Maintainer Name : Otto Kek l inen Email-Address : otto@debian.org Date : Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:17:51 +0000 Package Name : entr Version : 5.6 License : blank Package Type : single Are the details correct? [Y/n/q] Done. Please edit the files in the debian/ subdirectory now.

# dh_make --packagename entr_5.6 --single --createorig
Maintainer Name : Otto Kek l inen
Email-Address : otto@debian.org
Date : Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:17:51 +0000
Package Name : entr
Version : 5.6
License : blank
Package Type : single
Are the details correct? [Y/n/q]

Done. Please edit the files in the debian/ subdirectory now.

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

shell Copy

git add debian/ git commit -a -m "Initial Debian packaging"

git add debian/
git commit -a -m "Initial Debian packaging"

Review the files The full list of files after the above steps with dh_make would be:

Copy

-- entr -- LICENSE -- Makefile.bsd -- Makefile.linux -- Makefile.linux-compat -- Makefile.macos -- NEWS -- README.md -- configure -- data.h -- debian -- README.Debian -- README.source -- changelog -- control -- copyright -- gbp.conf -- entr-docs.docs -- entr.cron.d.ex -- entr.doc-base.ex -- manpage.1.ex -- manpage.md.ex -- manpage.sgml.ex -- manpage.xml.ex -- postinst.ex -- postrm.ex -- preinst.ex -- prerm.ex -- rules -- salsa-ci.yml.ex -- source -- format -- upstream -- metadata.ex -- watch.ex -- entr.1 -- entr.c -- missing -- compat.h -- kqueue_inotify.c -- strlcpy.c -- sys -- event.h -- status.c -- status.h -- system_test.sh -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.Debian
     -- README.source
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- gbp.conf
     -- entr-docs.docs
     -- entr.cron.d.ex
     -- entr.doc-base.ex
     -- manpage.1.ex
     -- manpage.md.ex
     -- manpage.sgml.ex
     -- manpage.xml.ex
     -- postinst.ex
     -- postrm.ex
     -- preinst.ex
     -- prerm.ex
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml.ex
     -- source
       -- format
     -- upstream
       -- metadata.ex
     -- watch.ex
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

You can browse these files in the demo repository. The mandatory files in the debian/ directory are:

• changelog,
• control,
• copyright,
• and rules.

All the other files have been created for convenience so the packager has template files to work from. The files with the suffix .ex are example files that won t have any effect until their content is adjusted and the suffix removed. For detailed explanations of the purpose of each file in the debian/ subdirectory, see the following resources:

• The Debian Policy Manual: Describes the structure of the operating system, the package archive and requirements for packages to be included in the Debian archive.
• The Developer s Reference: A collection of best practices and process descriptions Debian packagers are expected to follow while interacting with one another.
• Debhelper man pages: Detailed information of how the Debian package build system works, and how the contents of the various files in debian/ affect the end result.

As Entr, the package used in this example, is a real package that already exists in the Debian archive, you may want to browse the actual Debian packaging source at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/entr/-/tree/debian/latest/debian for reference. Most of these files have standardized formatting conventions to make collaboration easier. To automatically format the files following the most popular conventions, simply run wrap-and-sort -vast or debputy reformat --style=black.

Identify build dependencies The most common reason for builds to fail is missing dependencies. The easiest way to identify which Debian package ships the required dependency is using apt-file. If, for example, a build fails complaining that pcre2posix.h cannot be found or that libcre2-posix.so is missing, you can use these commands:

shell Copy

$ apt install -q --yes apt-file && apt-file update $ apt-file search pcre2posix.h libpcre2-dev: /usr/include/pcre2posix.h $ apt-file search libpcre2-posix.so libpcre2-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3 libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3.0.6

$ apt install -q --yes apt-file && apt-file update
$ apt-file search pcre2posix.h
libpcre2-dev: /usr/include/pcre2posix.h
$ apt-file search libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3
libpcre2-posix3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-posix.so.3.0.6

The output above implies that the debian/control should be extended to define a Build-Depends: libpcre2-dev relationship. There is also dpkg-depcheck that uses strace to trace the files the build process tries to access, and lists what Debian packages those files belong to. Example usage:

shell Copy

dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

Build the Debian sources to generate the .deb package After the first pass of refining the contents of the files in debian/, test the build by running dpkg-buildpackage inside the container:

shell Copy

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

The options -uc -us will skip signing the resulting Debian source package and other build artifacts. The -b option will skip creating a source package and only build the (binary) *.deb packages. The output is very verbose and gives a large amount of context about what is happening during the build to make debugging build failures easier. In the build log of entr you will see for example the line dh binary --buildsystem=makefile. This and other dh commands can also be run manually if there is a need to quickly repeat only a part of the build while debugging build failures. To see what files were generated or modified by the build simply run git status --ignored:

shell Copy

$ git status --ignored On branch debian/latest Untracked files: (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) debian/debhelper-build-stamp debian/entr.debhelper.log debian/entr.substvars debian/files Ignored files: (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed) Makefile compat.c compat.o debian/.debhelper/ debian/entr/ entr entr.o status.o

$ git status --ignored
On branch debian/latest

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

Ignored files:
 (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
 Makefile
 compat.c
 compat.o
 debian/.debhelper/
 debian/entr/
 entr
 entr.o
 status.o

Re-running dpkg-buildpackage will include running the command dh clean, which assuming it is configured correctly in the debian/rules file will reset the source directory to the original pristine state. The same can of course also be done with regular git commands git reset --hard; git clean -fdx. To avoid accidentally committing unnecessary build artifacts in git, a debian/.gitignore can be useful and it would typically include all four files listed as untracked above. After a successful build you would have the following files:

shell Copy

-- entr -- LICENSE -- Makefile -> Makefile.linux -- Makefile.bsd -- Makefile.linux -- Makefile.linux-compat -- Makefile.macos -- NEWS -- README.md -- compat.c -- compat.o -- configure -- data.h -- debian -- README.source.md -- changelog -- control -- copyright -- debhelper-build-stamp -- docs -- entr -- DEBIAN -- control -- md5sums -- usr -- bin -- entr -- share -- doc -- entr -- NEWS.gz -- README.md -- changelog.Debian.gz -- copyright -- man -- man1 -- entr.1.gz -- entr.debhelper.log -- entr.substvars -- files -- gbp.conf -- patches -- PR149-expand-aliases-in-system-test-script.patch -- series -- system-test-skip-no-tty.patch -- system-test-with-system-binary.patch -- rules -- salsa-ci.yml -- source -- format -- tests -- control -- upstream -- metadata -- signing-key.asc -- watch -- entr -- entr.1 -- entr.c -- entr.o -- missing -- compat.h -- kqueue_inotify.c -- strlcpy.c -- sys -- event.h -- status.c -- status.h -- status.o -- system_test.sh -- entr-dbgsym_5.6-1_amd64.deb -- entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz -- entr_5.6-1.dsc -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.buildinfo -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

 -- entr
   -- LICENSE
   -- Makefile -> Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.bsd
   -- Makefile.linux
   -- Makefile.linux-compat
   -- Makefile.macos
   -- NEWS
   -- README.md
   -- compat.c
   -- compat.o
   -- configure
   -- data.h
   -- debian
     -- README.source.md
     -- changelog
     -- control
     -- copyright
     -- debhelper-build-stamp
     -- docs
     -- entr
       -- DEBIAN
         -- control
         -- md5sums
       -- usr
       -- bin
         -- entr
       -- share
       -- doc
         -- entr
         -- NEWS.gz
         -- README.md
         -- changelog.Debian.gz
         -- copyright
       -- man
       -- man1
       -- entr.1.gz
     -- entr.debhelper.log
     -- entr.substvars
     -- files
     -- gbp.conf
     -- patches
       -- PR149-expand-aliases-in-system-test-script.patch
       -- series
       -- system-test-skip-no-tty.patch
       -- system-test-with-system-binary.patch
     -- rules
     -- salsa-ci.yml
     -- source
       -- format
     -- tests
       -- control
     -- upstream
       -- metadata
       -- signing-key.asc
     -- watch
   -- entr
   -- entr.1
   -- entr.c
   -- entr.o
   -- missing
     -- compat.h
     -- kqueue_inotify.c
     -- strlcpy.c
     -- sys
     -- event.h
   -- status.c
   -- status.h
   -- status.o
   -- system_test.sh
 -- entr-dbgsym_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
 -- entr_5.6-1.dsc
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.buildinfo
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
 -- entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
 -- entr_5.6.orig.tar.xz

The contents of debian/entr are essentially what goes into the resulting entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb package. Familiarizing yourself with the majority of the files in the original upstream source as well as all the resulting build artifacts is time consuming, but it is a necessary investment to get high-quality Debian packages. There are also tools such as Debcraft that automate generating the build artifacts in separate output directories for each build, thus making it easy to compare the changes to correlate what change in the Debian packaging led to what change in the resulting build artifacts.

Re-run the initial import with git-buildpackage When upstreams publish releases as tarballs, they should also be imported for optimal software supply-chain security, in particular if upstream also publishes cryptographic signatures that can be used to verify the authenticity of the tarballs. To achieve this, the files debian/watch, debian/upstream/signing-key.asc, and debian/gbp.conf need to be present with the correct options. In the gbp.conf file, ensure you have the correct options based on:

1. Does upstream release tarballs? If so, enforce pristine-tar = True.
2. Does upstream sign the tarballs? If so, configure explicit signature checking with upstream-signatures = on.
3. Does upstream have a git repository, and does it have release git tags? If so, configure the release git tag format, e.g. upstream-vcs-tag = %(version%~%.)s.

To validate that the above files are working correctly, run gbp import-orig with the current version explicitly defined:

shell Copy

$ gbp import-orig --uscan --upstream-version 5.6 gbp:info: Launching uscan... gpgv: Signature made 7. Aug 2024 07.43.27 PDT gpgv: using RSA key 519151D83E83D40A232B4D615C418B8631BC7C26 gpgv: Good signature from "Eric Radman <ericshane@eradman.com>" gbp:info: Using uscan downloaded tarball ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz gbp:info: Importing '../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream/latest'... gbp:info: Source package is entr gbp:info: Upstream version is 5.6 gbp:info: Replacing upstream source on 'debian/latest' gbp:info: Running Postimport hook gbp:info: Successfully imported version 5.6 of ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz

$ gbp import-orig --uscan --upstream-version 5.6
gbp:info: Launching uscan...
gpgv: Signature made 7. Aug 2024 07.43.27 PDT
gpgv: using RSA key 519151D83E83D40A232B4D615C418B8631BC7C26
gpgv: Good signature from "Eric Radman <ericshane@eradman.com>"
gbp:info: Using uscan downloaded tarball ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
gbp:info: Importing '../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream/latest'...
gbp:info: Source package is entr
gbp:info: Upstream version is 5.6
gbp:info: Replacing upstream source on 'debian/latest'
gbp:info: Running Postimport hook
gbp:info: Successfully imported version 5.6 of ../entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz

As the original packaging was done based on the upstream release git tag, the above command will fetch the tarball release, create the pristine-tar branch, and store the tarball delta on it. This command will also attempt to create the tag upstream/5.6 on the upstream/latest branch.

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

Build using git-buildpackage From this stage onwards you should build the package using gbp buildpackage, which will do a more comprehensive build.

shell Copy

gbp buildpackage -uc -us

gbp buildpackage -uc -us

The git-buildpackage build also includes running Lintian to find potential Debian policy violations in the sources or in the resulting .deb binary packages. Many Debian Developers run lintian -EviIL +pedantic after every build to check that there are no new nags, and to validate that changes intended to previous Lintian nags were correct.

Open a Merge Request on Salsa for Debian packaging review Getting everything perfectly right takes a lot of effort, and may require reaching out to an experienced Debian Developers for review and guidance. Thus, you should aim to publish your initial packaging work on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance, for review and feedback as early as possible. For somebody to be able to easily see what you have done, you should rename your debian/latest branch to another name, for example next/debian/latest, and open a Merge Request that targets the debian/latest branch on your Salsa fork, which still has only the unmodified upstream files. If you have followed the workflow in this post so far, you can simply run:

1. git checkout -b next/debian/latest
2. git push --set-upstream origin next/debian/latest
3. Open in a browser the URL visible in the git remote response
4. Write the Merge Request description in case the default text from your commit is not enough
5. Mark the MR as Draft using the checkbox
6. Publish the MR and request feedback

Once a Merge Request exists, discussion regarding what additional changes are needed can be conducted as MR comments. With an MR, you can easily iterate on the contents of next/debian/latest, rebase, force push, and request re-review as many times as you want. While at it, make sure the Settings > CI/CD page has under CI/CD configuration file the value debian/salsa-ci.yml so that the CI can run and give you immediate automated feedback. For an example of an initial packaging Merge Request, see https://salsa.debian.org/otto/entr-demo/-/merge_requests/1.

Open a Merge Request / Pull Request to fix upstream code Due to the high quality requirements in Debian, it is fairly common that while doing the initial Debian packaging of an open source project, issues are found that stem from the upstream source code. While it is possible to carry extra patches in Debian, it is not good practice to deviate too much from upstream code with custom Debian patches. Instead, the Debian packager should try to get the fixes applied directly upstream. Using git-buildpackage patch queues is the most convenient way to make modifications to the upstream source code so that they automatically convert into Debian patches (stored at debian/patches), and can also easily be submitted upstream as any regular git commit (and rebased and resubmitted many times over). First, decide if you want to work out of the upstream development branch and later cherry-pick to the Debian packaging branch, or work out of the Debian packaging branch and cherry-pick to an upstream branch. The example below starts from the upstream development branch and then cherry-picks the commit into the git-buildpackage patch queue:

shell Copy

git checkout -b bugfix-branch master nano entr.c make ./entr # verify change works as expected git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body" git push # submit upstream gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 git cherry-pick <commit id> git commit --amend # extend commit message with DEP-3 metadata gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b ./entr # verify change works as expected gbp pq export --drop --commit git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."

git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
nano entr.c
make
./entr # verify change works as expected
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
git push # submit upstream
gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # extend commit message with DEP-3 metadata
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."

The example below starts by making the fix on a git-buildpackage patch queue branch, and then cherry-picking it onto the upstream development branch:

shell Copy

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 nano entr.c git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body" gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b ./entr # verify change works as expected gbp pq export --drop --commit git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .." git checkout -b bugfix-branch master git cherry-pick <commit id> git commit --amend # prepare commit message for upstream submission git push # submit upstream

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
nano entr.c
git commit -a -m "Commit title" -m "Commit body"
gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b
./entr # verify change works as expected
gbp pq export --drop --commit
git commit --amend # Write commit message along lines "Add patch to .."
git checkout -b bugfix-branch master
git cherry-pick <commit id>
git commit --amend # prepare commit message for upstream submission
git push # submit upstream

The key git-buildpackage commands to enter and exit the patch-queue mode are:

shell Copy

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10 gbp pq export --drop --commit

gbp pq import --force --time-machine=10
gbp pq export --drop --commit

%% init:   'gitGraph':   'mainBranchName': 'debian/latest'      %%
gitGraph
checkout debian/latest
commit id: "Initial packaging"
branch patch-queue/debian/latest
checkout patch-queue/debian/latest
commit id: "Delete debian/patches/..."
commit id: "Patch 1 title"
commit id: "Patch 2 title"
commit id: "Patch 3 title"

These can be run at any time, regardless if any debian/patches existed prior, or if existing patches applied cleanly or not, or if there were old patch queue branches around. Note that the extra -b in gbp buildpackage -uc -us -b instructs to build only binary packages, avoiding any nags from dpkg-source that there are modifications in the upstream sources while building in the patches-applied mode.

Programming-language specific dh-make alternatives As each programming language has its specific way of building the source code, and many other conventions regarding the file layout and more, Debian has multiple custom tools to create new Debian source packages for specific programming languages.

• Go: dh-make-golang
• Haskell: cabal-debian
• Java: jh_makepkg
• JavaScript/Node.js: npm2deb
• Lua: dh-lua
• OCaml: dh-ocaml
• Perl: dh-make-perl
• PHP: pkg-php-tools
• Ruby: gem2deb

Notably, Python does not have its own tool, but there is an dh_make --python option for Python support directly in dh_make itself. The list is not complete and many more tools exist. For some languages, there are even competing options, such as for Go there is in addition to dh-make-golang also Gophian. When learning Debian packaging, there is no need to learn these tools upfront. Being aware that they exist is enough, and one can learn them only if and when one starts to package a project in a new programming language.

The difference between source git repository vs source packages vs binary packages As seen in earlier example, running gbp buildpackage on the Entr packaging repository above will result in several files:

Copy

entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz entr_5.6-1.dsc entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

entr_5.6-1_amd64.changes
entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

The entr_5.6-1_amd64.deb is the binary package, which can be installed on a Debian/Ubuntu system. The rest of the files constitute the source package. To do a source-only build, run gbp buildpackage -S and note the files produced:

Copy

entr_5.6-1_source.changes entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz entr_5.6-1.dsc entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

entr_5.6-1_source.changes
entr_5.6-1.debian.tar.xz
entr_5.6-1.dsc
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz
entr_5.6.orig.tar.gz.asc

The source package files can be used to build the binary .deb for amd64, or any architecture that the package supports. It is important to grasp that the Debian source package is the preferred form to be able to build the binary packages on various Debian build systems, and the Debian source package is not the same thing as the Debian packaging git repository contents.

flowchart LR
git[Git repository<br>branch debian/latest] --> gbp buildpackage -S  src[Source Package<br>.dsc + .tar.xz]
src --> dpkg-buildpackage  bin[Binary Packages<br>.deb]

If the package is large and complex, the build could result in multiple binary packages. One set of package definition files in debian/ will however only ever result in a single source package.

Option to repackage source packages with Files-Excluded lists in the debian/copyright file Some upstream projects may include binary files in their release, or other undesirable content that needs to be omitted from the source package in Debian. The easiest way to filter them out is by adding to the debian/copyright file a Files-Excluded field listing the undesired files. The debian/copyright file is read by uscan, which will repackage the upstream sources on-the-fly when importing new upstream releases. For a real-life example, see the debian/copyright files in the Godot package that lists:

debian Copy

Files-Excluded: platform/android/java/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar

Files-Excluded: platform/android/java/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar

The resulting repackaged upstream source tarball, as well as the upstream version component, will have an extra +ds to signify that it is not the true original upstream source but has been modified by Debian:

Copy

godot_4.3+ds.orig.tar.xz godot_4.3+ds-1_amd64.deb

godot_4.3+ds.orig.tar.xz
godot_4.3+ds-1_amd64.deb

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

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

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

This week, I reviewed the last available version of the Linux KMS Color API. Specifically, I explored the proposed API by Harry Wentland and Alex Hung (AMD), their implementation for the AMD display driver and tracked the parallel efforts of Uma Shankar and Chaitanya Kumar Borah (Intel) in bringing this plane color management to life. With this API in place, compositors will be able to provide better HDR support and advanced color management for Linux users. To get a hands-on feel for the API s potential, I developed a fork of drm_info compatible with the new color properties. This allowed me to visualize the display hardware color management capabilities being exposed. If you re curious and want to peek behind the curtain, you can find my exploratory work on the drm_info/kms_color branch. The README there will guide you through the simple compilation and installation process. Note: You will need to update libdrm to match the proposed API. You can find an updated version in my personal repository here. To avoid potential conflicts with your official libdrm installation, you can compile and install it in a local directory. Then, use the following command: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/" In this post, I invite you to familiarize yourself with the new API that is about to be released. You can start doing as I did below: just deploy a custom kernel with the necessary patches and visualize the interface with the help of drm_info. Or, better yet, if you are a userspace developer, you can start developing user cases by experimenting with it. The more eyes the better.

KMS Color API on AMD The great news is that AMD s driver implementation for plane color operations is being developed right alongside their Linux KMS Color API proposal, so it s easy to apply to your kernel branch and check it out. You can find details of their progress in the AMD s series. I just needed to compile a custom kernel with this series applied, intentionally leaving out the AMD_PRIVATE_COLOR flag. The AMD_PRIVATE_COLOR flag guards driver-specific color plane properties, which experimentally expose hardware capabilities while we don t have the generic KMS plane color management interface available. If you don t know or don t remember the details of AMD driver specific color properties, you can learn more about this work in my blog posts [1] [2] [3]. As driver-specific color properties and KMS colorops are redundant, the driver only advertises one of them, as you can see in AMD workaround patch 24. So, with the custom kernel image ready, I installed it on a system powered by AMD DCN3 hardware (i.e. my Steam Deck). Using my custom drm_info, I could clearly see the Plane Color Pipeline with eight color operations as below:

 "COLOR_PIPELINE" (atomic): enum  Bypass, Color Pipeline 258  = Bypass
     Bypass
     Color Pipeline 258
         Color Operation 258
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D Curve
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum  sRGB EOTF, PQ 125 EOTF, BT.2020 Inverse OETF  = sRGB EOTF
         Color Operation 263
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = Multiplier
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "MULTIPLIER" (atomic): range [0, UINT64_MAX] = 0
         Color Operation 268
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 3x4 Matrix
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
         Color Operation 273
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D Curve
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum  sRGB Inverse EOTF, PQ 125 Inverse EOTF, BT.2020 OETF  = sRGB Inverse EOTF
         Color Operation 278
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D LUT
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 4096
             "LUT1D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum  Linear  = Linear
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
         Color Operation 285
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 3D LUT
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 17
             "LUT3D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum  Tetrahedral  = Tetrahedral
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
         Color Operation 292
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D Curve
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum  sRGB EOTF, PQ 125 EOTF, BT.2020 Inverse OETF  = sRGB EOTF
         Color Operation 297
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D LUT
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 4096
             "LUT1D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum  Linear  = Linear
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0

Note that Gamescope is currently using AMD driver-specific color properties implemented by me, Autumn Ashton and Harry Wentland. It doesn t use this KMS Color API, and therefore COLOR_PIPELINE is set to Bypass. Once the API is accepted upstream, all users of the driver-specific API (including Gamescope) should switch to the KMS generic API, as this will be the official plane color management interface of the Linux kernel.

KMS Color API on Intel On the Intel side, the driver implementation available upstream was built upon an earlier iteration of the API. This meant I had to apply a few tweaks to bring it in line with the latest specifications. You can explore their latest work here. For a more simplified handling, combining the V9 of the Linux Color API, Intel s contributions, and my necessary adjustments, check out my dedicated branch. I then compiled a kernel from this integrated branch and deployed it on a system featuring Intel TigerLake GT2 graphics. Running my custom drm_info revealed a Plane Color Pipeline with three color operations as follows:

 "COLOR_PIPELINE" (atomic): enum  Bypass, Color Pipeline 480  = Bypass
     Bypass
     Color Pipeline 480
         Color Operation 480
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D LUT Mult Seg
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "HW_CAPS" (atomic, immutable): blob = 484
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
         Color Operation 487
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 3x3 Matrix
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
         Color Operation 492
             "TYPE" (immutable): enum  1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT  = 1D LUT Mult Seg
             "BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
             "HW_CAPS" (atomic, immutable): blob = 496
             "DATA" (atomic): blob = 0

Observe that Intel s approach introduces additional properties like HW_CAPS at the color operation level, along with two new color operation types: 1D LUT with Multiple Segments and 3x3 Matrix. It s important to remember that this implementation is based on an earlier stage of the KMS Color API and is awaiting review.

A Shout-Out to Those Who Made This Happen I m impressed by the solid implementation and clear direction of the V9 of the KMS Color API. It aligns with the many insightful discussions we ve had over the past years. A huge thank you to Harry Wentland and Alex Hung for their dedication in bringing this to fruition! Beyond their efforts, I deeply appreciate Uma and Chaitanya s commitment to updating Intel s driver implementation to align with the freshest version of the KMS Color API. The collaborative spirit of the AMD and Intel developers in sharing their color pipeline work upstream is invaluable. We re now gaining a much clearer picture of the color capabilities embedded in modern display hardware, all thanks to their hard work, comprehensive documentation, and engaging discussions. Finally, thanks all the userspace developers, color science experts, and kernel developers from various vendors who actively participate in the upstream discussions, meetings, workshops, each iteration of this API and the crucial code review process. I m happy to be part of the final stages of this long kernel journey, but I know that when it comes to colors, one step is completed for new challenges to be unlocked. Looking forward to meeting you in this year Linux Display Next hackfest, organized by AMD in Toronto, to further discuss HDR, advanced color management, and other display trends.

Toolboxes and Hammers Be YouEveryone has a story. We all started from somewhere, and we re all going somewhere.Ten years ago this summer, I first heard of Ubuntu. It took me time to learn how to properly pronounce the word, although I m glad I learned that early on. I was less fortunate when it came to the pronunciation of the acronym for the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. I had spent time and time again breaking my computer, and I d wanted to start fresh.I ve actually talked about this in an interview before, which you can find here (skip to 5:02 6:12 for my short explanation, I m in orange):https://medium.com/media/ad59becdbd06d230b875fb1512df1921/hrefI ve also done a few interviews over the years, here are some of the more recent ones:https://medium.com/media/83bda448d5f2a979f848e17f04376aa6/hrefAsk Noah Show 377Lastly, I did a few talks at SCaLE 21x (which the Ubuntu community donation funds helped me attend, thank you for that!):https://medium.com/media/0fbde7ef0ed83c2272a8653a5ea38b67/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/4d18f1770dc7eed6c7a9d711ff6a6e89/hrefMy story is fairly simple to summarize, if you don t have the time to go through all the clips.I started in the Ubuntu project at 13 years old, as a middle school student living in Green Bay, WI. I m now 23 years old, still living in Green Bay, but I became an Ubuntu Core Developer, Lubuntu s Release Manager, and worked up to a very great and comfortable spot.So, Simon, what advice would you give to someone at 13 who wants to do the same thing? Here are a few tips * Don t be afraid to be yourself. If you put on a mask, it hinders your growth, and you ll end up paying for it later anyway.
* Find a mentor. Someone who is okay working with someone your age, and ideally someone who works well with people your age (quick shoutout to Aaron Prisk and Walter Lapchynski for always being awesome to me and other folks starting out at high school.) This is probably the most important part.
* Ask questions. Tons of them. Ask questions until you re blue in the face. Ask questions until you get a headache so bad that your weekend needs to come early. Okay, maybe don t go that far, but at the very least, always stay curious.
* Own up to your mistakes. Even the most experienced people you know have made tons of mistakes. It s not about the mistake itself, it s about how you handle it and grow as a person.Now, after ten years, I ve seen many people come and go in Ubuntu. I was around for the transition from upstart to systemd. I was around for the transition from Unity to GNOME. I watched Kubuntu as a flavor recover from the arguments only a few years before I first started, only to jump in and help years later when the project started to trend downwards again.I have deep love, respect, and admiration for Ubuntu and its community. I also have deep love, respect, and admiration for Canonical as a company. It s all valuable work. That being said, I need to recognize where my own limits are, and it s not what you d think. This isn t some big burnout rant.Some of you may have heard rumors about an argument between me and the Ubuntu Community Council. I refuse to go into the private details of that, but what I ll tell you is this in retrospect, it was in good faith. The entire thing, from both my end and theirs, was to try to either help me as a person, or the entire community. If you think any part of this was bad faith from either side, you re fooling yourself. Plus, tons of great work and stories actually came out of this.The Ubuntu Community Council really does care. And so does Mark Shuttleworth.Now, I won t go into many specifics. If you want specifics, I d direct you to the Ubuntu Community Council who would be more than happy to answer any questions (actually they d probably stay silent. Nevermind.) That being said, I can t really talk about any of this without mentioning how great Mark has become.Remember, I was around for a few different major changes within the project. I ve heard and seen stories about Mark that actually match what Reddit says about him. But in 2025, out of the bottom of my heart, I m here to tell you that you re all wrong now.See, Mark didn t just side with somebody and be done with it. He actually listened, and I could tell, he cares very very deeply. I really enjoyed reading ogra s recent blog post, you should seriously check it out. Of course, I m only 23 years old, but I have to say, my experiences with Mark match that too.Now, as for what happens from here. I m taking a year off from Ubuntu. I talked this over with a wide variety of people, and I think it s the right decision. People who know me personally know that I m not one to make a major decision like this without a very good reason to. Well, I d like to share my reasons with you, because I think they d help.People who contribute time to open source find it to be very rewarding. Sometimes so rewarding, in fact, that no matter how many economics and finance books they read, they still haven t figured out how to balance that with a job that pays money. I m sure everyone deeply involved in this space has had the urge to quit their job at least once or twice to pursue their passions.Here s the other element too I ve had a handful of romantic relationships before, and they ve never really panned out. I found the woman that I truly believe I m going to marry. Is it going to be a rough road ahead of us? Absolutely, and to be totally honest, there is still a (small, at this point) chance it doesn t work out.That being said I remain optimistic. I m not taking a year off because I m in some kind of trouble. I haven t burned any bridge here except for one.You know who you are. You need help. I d be happy to reconnect with you once you realize that it s not okay to do what you did. An apology letter is all I want. I don t want Mutually Assured Destruction, I don t want to sit and battle on this for years on end. Seriously dude, just back off. Please.I hate having to take out the large hammer. But sometimes, you just have to do it. I ve quite enjoyed Louis Rossmann s (very not-safe-for-work) videos on BwE.https://medium.com/media/ab64411c41e65317f271058f56bb2aba/hrefI genuinely enjoy being nice to people. I want to see everyone be successful and happy, in that order (but with both being very important). I m not perfect, I m a 23-year-old who just happened to stumble into this space at the right time.To this specific person only, I tell you, please, let me go take my year off in peace. I don t wish you harm, and I won t make anything public, including your name, if you just back off.Whew. Okay. Time to be happy again.Again, I want to see people succeed. That goes for anyone in Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Canonical, you name it. I m going to remain detached from Ubuntu for at least a year. If circumstances change, or if I feel the timing just isn t right, I ll wait longer. My point is, I ll be back, the when of it will just never be public before it happens.In the meantime, you re welcome to reach out to me. It ll take me some time to bootstrap things, more than I originally thought, but I m hoping it ll be quick. After all, I ve had practice.I m also going to continue writing. About what? I don t know yet.But, I ll just keep writing. I want to share all of the useful tips I ve learned over the years. If you actually liked this post, or if you ve enjoyed my work in the Ubuntu project, please do subscribe to my personal blog, which will be here on Medium (unless someone can give me an open source alternative with a funding model). This being said, while I d absolutely take any donations people would like to provide, at the end of the day, I don t do this for the money. I do this for the people just like me, out of love.So you, just like me, can make your dreams happen.Don t give up, it ll come. Just be patient with yourself.As for me, I have business to attend to. What business is that, exactly? Read Walden, and you ll find out.I wish you all well, even the person I called out. I sincerely hope you find what you re looking for in life. It takes time. Sometimes you have to listen to some music to pass the time, so I created a conceptual mixtape if you want to listen to some of the same music as me.I ll do another blog post soon, don t worry.Be well. Much, much more to come.

On the way to Trixie, polkitd (Policy Kit Daemon) has lost the functionality to evaluate its .pkla (Polkit Local Authority) files.

$ zcat /usr/share/doc/polkitd/NEWS.Debian.gz 
policykit-1 (121+compat0.1-2) experimental; urgency=medium
  This version of polkit changes the syntax used for local policy rules:
  it is now the same JavaScript-based format used by the upstream polkit
  project and by other Linux distributions.
  System administrators can override the default security policy by
  installing local policy overrides into /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/*.rules,
  which can either make the policy more restrictive or more
  permissive. Some sample policy rules can be found in the
  /usr/share/doc/polkitd/examples directory. Please see polkit(8) for
  more details.
  Some Debian packages include security policy overrides, typically to
  allow members of the sudo group to carry out limited administrative
  actions without re-authenticating. These packages should install their
  rules as /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/*.rules. Typical examples can be
  found in packages like flatpak, network-manager and systemd.
  Older Debian releases used the "local authority" rules format from
  upstream version 0.105 (.pkla files with an .desktop-like syntax,
  installed into subdirectories of /etc/polkit-1/localauthority
  or /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority). The polkitd-pkla package
  provides compatibility with these files: if it is installed, they
  will be processed at a higher priority than most .rules files. If the
  polkitd-pkla package is removed, .pkla files will no longer be used.
 -- Simon McVittie   Wed, 14 Sep 2022 21:33:22 +0100

This applies now to the polkitd version 126-2 destined for Trixie. The most prominent issue is that you will get an error message: "Authentication is required to create a color profile" asking for the root(!) password every time you remotely log into a Debian Trixie system via RDP, x2go or the like. This used to be mendable with a .pkla file dropped into /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/ ... but these .pkla files are void now and need to be replace with a Javascript "rules" file. The background to his is quite a fascinating read ... 13 years later:
https://davidz25.blogspot.com/2012/06/authorization-rules-in-polkit.html The solution has been listed in DevAnswers as other distros (Fedora, ArchLinux, OpenSuse) have been faster to depreciate the .pkla files and require .rules files. I amended the solution given there with checking for root to be automatically authenticated, too. So, create a 50-color-manager.rules file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/: and run systemctl restart polkit. You should be good until polkit is rewritten in Rust.

Debian hard freeze on 2025-05-15? We bring you a new Grml release on top of that! 2025.05 codename Nudlaug. There s plenty of new stuff, check out our official release announcement for all the details. But I d like to highlight one feature that I particularly like: SSH service announcement with Avahi. The grml-full flavor ships Avahi, and when you enable SSH, it automatically announces the SSH service on your local network. So when f.e. booting Grml with boot option ssh=debian , you should be able to login on your Grml live system with ssh grml@grml.local and password debian :

% insecssh grml@grml.local
Warning: Permanently added 'grml.local' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
grml@grml.local's password: 
Linux grml 6.12.27-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.12.27-1 (2025-05-06) x86_64
Grml - Linux for geeks
grml@grml ~ %

Hint: grml-zshrc provides that useful shell alias insecssh , which is aliased to ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null . Using those options, you aren t storing the SSH host key of the (temporary) Grml live system (permanently) in your UserKnownHostsFile. BTW, you can run avahi-browse -d local _ssh._tcp resolve -t to discover the SSH services on your local network. Happy Grml-ing!

Welcome to our fourth report from the Reproducible Builds project in 2025. These monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. Lastly, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. reproduce.debian.net
2. Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security
3. 4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop
4. Mailing list updates
5. Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java
6. OSS Rebuild adds new TUI features
7. Distribution roundup
8. diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism
9. Website updates
10. Reproducibility testing framework
11. Upstream patches

---

reproduce.debian.net The last few months have seen the introduction, development and deployment of reproduce.debian.net. In technical terms, this is an instance of rebuilderd, our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results there. This month, however, we are pleased to announce that reproduce.debian.net now tests all the Debian trixie architectures except s390x and mips64el. The ppc64el architecture was added through the generous support of Oregon State University Open Source Laboratory (OSUOSL), and we can support the armel architecture thanks to CodeThink.

Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security Russ Cox has published a must-read article in ACM Queue on Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security. Subtitled, For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it s very real. , Russ article goes on to outline the history and original goals of software supply-chain security in the US military in the early 1970s, all the way to the XZ Utils backdoor of 2024. Through that lens, Russ explores the problem and how it has changed, and hasn t changed, over time. He concludes as follows:

We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it s very real. Modern programming environments such as Go, Node and Rust have made it trivial to reuse work by others, but our instincts about responsible behaviors have not yet adapted to this new reality. We all have more work to do.

4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop Convened as part of the CHAINS research project at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, the 4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop occurred during April. During the workshop, there were a number of relevant workshops, including:

• Signature, Attestations and Reproducible Builds
• Does Functional Package Management Enable Reproducible Builds at Scale?
• Causes and Mitigations of Unreproducible Builds in Java [paper]
• Fixing Breaking Dependency Updates Using LLMs
• The caveats of vulnerability analysis
• maven-lockfile (Lockfiles for Java and Maven)
• observer (Generating SBOMs for C/C++)
• dirty-waters (Transparency checks for software supply chains)
• A supply chain competition. Martin Schwaighofer, the winner, created a recap video (20m43s).
• Finally, 8 posters on dependency introspection, diverse double compilation, dependency management, VEX and SBOM.

The full listing of the agenda is available on the workshop s website.

Mailing list updates On our mailing list this month:

• Luca DiMaio of Chainguard posted to the list reporting that they had successfully implemented reproducible filesystem images with both ext4 and an EFI system partition. They go on to list the various methods, and the thread generated at least fifteen replies.
• David Wheeler announced that the OpenSSF is building a glossary of sorts in order that they consistently use the same meaning for the same term and, moreover, that they have drafted a definition for reproducible build . The thread generated a significant number of replies on the definition, leading to a potential update to the Reproducible Build s own definition.
• Lastly, kpcyrd posted to the list with a timely reminder and update on their repro-env tool. As first reported in our July 2023 report, kpcyrd mentions that:

  My initial interest in reproducible builds was how do I distribute pre-compiled binaries on GitHub without people raising security concerns about them . I ve cycled back to this original problem about 5 years later and built a tool that is meant to address this. [ ]

Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java Aman Sharma, Benoit Baudry and Martin Monperrus have published a new scholarly study related to reproducible builds within Java. Titled Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java, the article s abstract is as follows:

[ ] Achieving reproducibility at scale remains difficult, especially in Java, due to a range of non-deterministic factors and caveats in the build process. In this work, we focus on reproducibility in Java-based software, archetypal of enterprise applications. We introduce a conceptual framework for reproducible builds, we analyze a large dataset from Reproducible Central and we develop a novel taxonomy of six root causes of unreproducibility. We study actionable mitigations: artifact and bytecode canonicalization using OSS-Rebuild and jNorm respectively. Finally, we present Chains-Rebuild, a tool that raises reproducibility success from 9.48% to 26.89% on 12,283 unreproducible artifacts. To sum up, our contributions are the first large-scale taxonomy of build unreproducibility causes in Java, a publicly available dataset of unreproducible builds, and Chains-Rebuild, a canonicalization tool for mitigating unreproducible builds in Java.

A full PDF of their article is available from arXiv.

OSS Rebuild adds new TUI features OSS Rebuild aims to automate rebuilding upstream language packages (e.g. from PyPI, crates.io and npm registries) and publish signed attestations and build definitions for public use. OSS Rebuild ships a text-based user interface (TUI) for viewing, launching, and debugging rebuilds. While previously requiring ownership of a full instance of OSS Rebuild s hosted infrastructure, the TUI now supports a fully local mode of build execution and artifact storage. Thanks to Giacomo Benedetti for his usage feedback and work to extend the local-only development toolkit. Another feature added to the TUI was an experimental chatbot integration that provides interactive feedback on rebuild failure root causes and suggests fixes.

Distribution roundup In Debian this month:

• Roland Clobus posted another status report on reproducible ISO images on our mailing list this month, with the summary that all live images build reproducibly from the online Debian archive .
• Debian developer Simon Josefsson published another two reproducibility-related blog posts this month, the first on the topic of Verified Reproducible Tarballs. Simon sardonically challenges the reader as follows: Do you want a supply-chain challenge for the Easter weekend? Pick some well-known software and try to re-create the official release tarballs from the corresponding Git checkout. Is anyone able to reproduce anything these days? After that, they also published a blog post on Building Debian in a GitLab Pipeline using their multi-stage rebuild approach.
• Roland also posted to our mailing list to highlight that there is now another tool in Debian that generates reproducible output, equivs . This is a tool to create trivial Debian packages that might Depend on other packages. As Roland writes, building the [equivs] package has been reproducible for a while, [but] now the output of the [tool] has become reproducible as well .
• Lastly, 9 reviews of Debian packages were added, 10 were updated and 10 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues.

The IzzyOnDroid Android APK repository made more progress in April. Thanks to funding by NLnet and Mobifree, the project was also to put more time into their tooling. For instance, developers can now easily run their own verification builder in less than 5 minutes . This currently supports Debian-based systems, but support for RPM-based systems is incoming.

• The rbuilder_setup tool can now setup the entire framework within less than five minutes. The process is configurable, too, so everything from just the basics to verify builds up to a fully-fledged RB environment is also possible.
• This tool works on Debian, RedHat and Arch Linux, as well as their derivates. The project has received successful reports from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and some Arch Linux derivates so far.
• Documentation on how to work with reproducible builds (making apps reproducible, debugging unreproducible packages, etc) is available in the project s wiki page.
• Future work is also in the pipeline, including documentation, guidelines and helpers for debugging.

NixOS defined an Outreachy project for improving build reproducibility. In the application phase, NixOS saw some strong candidates providing contributions, both on the NixOS side and upstream: guider-le-ecit analyzed a libpinyin issue. Tessy James fixed an issue in arandr and helped analyze one in libvlc that led to a proposed upstream fix. Finally, 3pleX fixed an issue which was accepted in upstream kitty, one in upstream maturin, one in upstream python-sip and one in the Nix packaging of python-libbytesize. Sadly, the funding for this internship fell through, so NixOS were forced to abandon their search. Lastly, in openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for their work there.

diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading a number of versions to Debian:

• Use the --walk argument over the potentially dangerous alternative --scan when calling out to zipdetails(1). [ ]
• Correct a longstanding issue where many >-based version tests used in conditional fixtures were broken. This was used to ensure that specific tests were only run when the version on the system was newer than a particular number. Thanks to Colin Watson for the report (Debian bug #1102658) [ ]
• Address a long-hidden issue in the test_versions testsuite as well, where we weren t actually testing the greater-than comparisons mentioned above, as it was masked by the tests for equality. [ ]
• Update copyright years. [ ]

In strip-nondeterminism, however, Holger Levsen updated the Continuous Integration (CI) configuration in order to use the standard Debian pipelines via debian/salsa-ci.yml instead of using .gitlab-ci.yml. [ ]

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

• Aman Sharma added OSS-Rebuild s stabilize tool to the Tools page. [ ][ ]
• Chris Lamb added a configure.ac (GNU Autotools) example for using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]. Chris also updated the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH snippet and move the archive metadata to a more suitable location. [ ]
• Denis Carikli added GNU Boot to our ever-evolving Projects page.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In April, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

• reproduce.debian.net-related:
  • Add armel.reproduce.debian.net to support the armel architecture. [ ][ ]
  • Add a new ARM node, codethink05. [ ][ ]
  • Add ppc64el.reproduce.debian.net to support testing of the ppc64el architecture. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the reproduce.debian.net front page. [ ][ ]
  • Make various changes to the ppc64el nodes. [ ][ ]9[ ][ ]
  • Make various changes to the arm64 and armhf nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Various changes related to the rebuilderd-worker entry point. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Create and deploy a pkgsync script. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Fix the monitoring of the riscv64 architecture. [ ][ ]
  • Make a number of changes related to starting the rebuilderd service. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Backup-related:
  • Backup the rebuilder databases every week. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the node health checks. [ ][ ]
• Misc:
  • Re-use existing connections to the SSH proxy node on the riscv64 nodes. [ ][ ]
  • Node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]

In addition:

• Jochen Sprickerhof fixed the risvc64 host names [ ] and requested access to all the rebuilderd nodes [ ].
• Mattia Rizzolo updated the self-serve rebuild scheduling tool, replacing the deprecated SSO -style authentication with OpenIDC which authenticates against salsa.debian.org. [ ][ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus updated the configuration for the osuosl3 node to designate 4 workers for bigger builds. [ ]

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann
  • lout
  • mpiP
  • libabigail
  • cython
  • mpiP
  • godot
  • gnome-text-editor
  • clisp
  • rpm
  • Fiona
  • qtdoc
• Chris Hofstaedtler:
  • #1104512 filed against command-not-found.
  • #1104517 filed against command-not-found.
  • #1104535 filed against cc65.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1102659 filed against vcsh.
  • #1103797 filed against schism.
  • #1103798 filed against magic-wormhole-mailbox-server.
  • #1103800 filed against openvpn3-client.
• James Addison:
  • #1102760 filed against apg.
• Jochen Sprickerhof:
  • #1103288 filed against courier.
  • #1103563 filed against cross-toolchain-base.

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

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

After my previous posts related to Argo CD (one about argocd-autopilot and another with some usage examples) I started to look into Kluctl (I also plan to review Flux, but I m more interested on the kluctl approach right now). While reading an entry on the project blog about Cluster API somehow I ended up on the vCluster site and decided to give it a try, as it can be a valid way of providing developers with on demand clusters for debugging or run CI/CD tests before deploying things on common clusters or even to have multiple debugging virtual clusters on a local machine with only one of them running at any given time. On this post I will deploy a vcluster using the k3d_argocd kubernetes cluster (the one we created on the posts about argocd) as the host and will show how to:

Creating the virtual cluster

Installing the vcluster applicationTo create the virtual clusters we need the vcluster command, we can install it with arkade:

  arkade get vcluster

The vcluster.yaml fileTo create the cluster we are going to use the following vcluster.yaml file (you can find the documentation about all its options here):

controlPlane:
  proxy:
    # Extra hostnames to sign the vCluster proxy certificate for
    extraSANs:
    - my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net
exportKubeConfig:
  context: my-vcluster_k3d-argocd
  server: https://my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443
  secret:
    name: my-vcluster-kubeconfig
sync:
  toHost:
    ingresses:
      enabled: true
    serviceAccounts:
      enabled: true
  fromHost:
    ingressClasses:
      enabled: true
    nodes:
      enabled: true
      clearImageStatus: true
    secrets:
      enabled: true
      mappings:
        byName:
          # sync all Secrets from the 'my-vcluster-default' namespace to the
          # virtual "default" namespace.
          "my-vcluster-default/*": "default/*"
          # We could add other namespace mappings if needed, i.e.:
          # "my-vcluster-kube-system/*": "kube-system/*"

On the controlPlane section we ve added the proxy.extraSANs entry to add an extra host name to make sure it is added to the cluster certificates if we use it from an ingress. The exportKubeConfig section creates a kubeconfig secret on the virtual cluster namespace using the provided host name; the secret can be used by GitOps tools or we can dump it to a file to connect from our machine. On the sync section we enable the synchronization of Ingress objects and ServiceAccounts from the virtual to the host cluster:

• We copy the ingress definitions to use the ingress server that runs on the host to make them work from the outside world.
• The service account synchronization is not really needed, but we enable it because if we test this configuration with EKS it would be useful if we use IAM roles for the service accounts.

On the opposite direction (from the host to the virtual cluster) we synchronize:

• The IngressClass objects, to be able to use the host ingress server(s).
• The Nodes (we are not using the info right now, but it could be interesting if we want to have the real information of the nodes running pods of the virtual cluster).
• The Secrets from the my-vcluster-default host namespace to the default of the virtual cluster; that synchronization allows us to deploy SealedSecrets on the host that generate secrets that are copied automatically to the virtual one. Initially we only copy secrets for one namespace but if the virtual cluster needs others we can add namespaces on the host and their mappings to the virtual one on the vcluster.yaml file.

Creating the virtual clusterTo create the virtual cluster we run the following command:

vcluster create my-vcluster --namespace my-vcluster --upgrade --connect=false \
  --values vcluster.yaml

It creates the virtual cluster on the my-vcluster namespace using the vcluster.yaml file shown before without connecting to the cluster from our local machine (if we don t pass that option the command adds an entry on our kubeconfig and launches a proxy to connect to the virtual cluster that we don t plan to use).

Adding an ingress TCP route to connect to the vcluster apiAs explained before, we need to create an IngressTcpRoute object to be able to connect to the vcluster API, we use the following definition:

apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1
kind: IngressRouteTCP
metadata:
  name: my-vcluster-api
  namespace: my-vcluster
spec:
  entryPoints:
    - websecure
  routes:
    - match: HostSNI( my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net )
      services:
        - name: my-vcluster
          port: 443
  tls:
    passthrough: true

Once we apply those changes the cluster API will be available on the https://my-cluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443 URL using its own self signed certificate (we have enabled TLS passthrough) that includes the hostname we use (we adjusted it on the vcluster.yaml file, as explained before).

Getting the kubeconfig for the vclusterOnce the vcluster is running we will have its kubeconfig available on the my-vcluster-kubeconfig secret on its namespace on the host cluster. To dump it to the ~/.kube/my-vcluster-config we can do the following:

  kubectl get -n my-vcluster secret/my-vcluster-kubeconfig \
    --template=" .data.config "   base64 -d > ~/.kube/my-vcluster-config

Once available we can define the vkubectl alias to adjust the KUBECONFIG variable to access it:

alias vkubectl="KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/my-vcluster-config kubectl"

Or we can merge the configuration with the one on the KUBECONFIG variable and use kubectx or a similar tool to change the context (for our vcluster the context will be my-vcluster_k3d-argocd). If the KUBECONFIG variable is defined and only has the PATH to a single file the merge can be done running the following:

KUBECONFIG="$KUBECONFIG:~/.kube/my-vcluster-config" kubectl config view \
  --flatten >"$KUBECONFIG.new"
mv "$KUBECONFIG.new" "$KUBECONFIG"

On the rest of this post we will use the vkubectl alias when connecting to the virtual cluster, i.e. to check that it works we can run the cluster-info subcommand:

  vkubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443
CoreDNS is running at https://my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

Installing the dummyhttpd applicationTo test the virtual cluster we are going to install the dummyhttpd application using the following kustomization.yaml file:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
resources:
  - https://forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/argocd-applications.git//dummyhttp/?ref=dummyhttp-v1.0.0
# Add the config map
configMapGenerator:
  - name: dummyhttp-configmap
    literals:
      - CM_VAR="Vcluster Test Value"
    behavior: create
    options:
      disableNameSuffixHash: true
patches:
  # Change the ingress host name
  - target:
      kind: Ingress
      name: dummyhttp
    patch:  -
      - op: replace
        path: /spec/rules/0/host
        value: vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net
  # Add reloader annotations -- it will only work if we install reloader on the
  # virtual cluster, as the one on the host cluster doesn't see the vcluster
  # deployment objects
  - target:
      kind: Deployment
      name: dummyhttp
    patch:  -
      - op: add
        path: /metadata/annotations
        value:
          reloader.stakater.com/auto: "true"
          reloader.stakater.com/rollout-strategy: "restart"

It is quite similar to the one we used on the Argo CD examples but uses a different DNS entry; to deploy it we run kustomize and vkubectl:

  kustomize build .   vkubectl apply -f -
configmap/dummyhttp-configmap created
service/dummyhttp created
deployment.apps/dummyhttp created
ingress.networking.k8s.io/dummyhttp created

We can check that everything worked using curl:

  curl -s https://vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net:8443/   jq -cM .
 "c": "Vcluster Test Value","s": "" 

The objects available on the vcluster now are:

  vkubectl get all,configmap,ingress
NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/dummyhttp-55569589bc-9zl7t   1/1     Running   0          24s
NAME                 TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
service/dummyhttp    ClusterIP   10.43.51.39    <none>        80/TCP    24s
service/kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.43.153.12   <none>        443/TCP   14m

NAME                        READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/dummyhttp   1/1     1            1           24s
NAME                                   DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/dummyhttp-55569589bc   1         1         1       24s
NAME                            DATA   AGE
configmap/dummyhttp-configmap   1      24s
configmap/kube-root-ca.crt      1      14m
NAME                                CLASS   HOSTS                             ADDRESS                          PORTS AGE
ingress.networking.k8s.io/dummyhttp traefik vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net 172.20.0.2,172.20.0.3,172.20.0.4 80    24s

While we have the following ones on the my-vcluster namespace of the host cluster:

  kubectl get all,configmap,ingress -n my-vcluster
NAME                                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/coredns-bbb5b66cc-snwpn-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster   1/1     Running   0          18m
pod/dummyhttp-55569589bc-9zl7t-x-default-x-my-vcluster    1/1     Running   0          45s
pod/my-vcluster-0                                         1/1     Running   0          19m
NAME                                           TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                  AGE
service/dummyhttp-x-default-x-my-vcluster      ClusterIP   10.43.51.39     <none>        80/TCP                   45s
service/kube-dns-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster   ClusterIP   10.43.91.198    <none>        53/UDP,53/TCP,9153/TCP   18m
service/my-vcluster                            ClusterIP   10.43.153.12    <none>        443/TCP,10250/TCP        19m
service/my-vcluster-headless                   ClusterIP   None            <none>        443/TCP                  19m
service/my-vcluster-node-k3d-argocd-agent-1    ClusterIP   10.43.189.188   <none>        10250/TCP                18m

NAME                           READY   AGE
statefulset.apps/my-vcluster   1/1     19m
NAME                                                     DATA   AGE
configmap/coredns-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster            2      18m
configmap/dummyhttp-configmap-x-default-x-my-vcluster    1      45s
configmap/kube-root-ca.crt                               1      19m
configmap/kube-root-ca.crt-x-default-x-my-vcluster       1      11m
configmap/kube-root-ca.crt-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster   1      18m
configmap/vc-coredns-my-vcluster                         1      19m
NAME                                                        CLASS   HOSTS                             ADDRESS                          PORTS AGE
ingress.networking.k8s.io/dummyhttp-x-default-x-my-vcluster traefik vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net 172.20.0.2,172.20.0.3,172.20.0.4 80    45s

As shown, we have copies of the Service, Pod, Configmap and Ingress objects, but there is no copy of the Deployment or ReplicaSet.

Creating a sealed secret for dummyhttpdTo use the hosts sealed secrets controller with the virtual cluster we will create the my-vcluster-default namespace and add there the sealed secrets we want to have available as secrets on the default namespace of the virtual cluster:

  kubectl create namespace my-vcluster-default
  echo -n "Vcluster Boo"   kubectl create secret generic "dummyhttp-secret" \
    --namespace "my-vcluster-default" --dry-run=client \
    --from-file=SECRET_VAR=/dev/stdin -o yaml >dummyhttp-secret.yaml
  kubeseal -f dummyhttp-secret.yaml -w dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml
  kubectl apply -f dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml
  rm -f dummyhttp-secret.yaml dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml

After running the previous commands we have the following objects available on the host cluster:

  kubectl get sealedsecrets.bitnami.com,secrets -n my-vcluster-default
NAME                                        STATUS   SYNCED   AGE
sealedsecret.bitnami.com/dummyhttp-secret            True     34s
NAME                      TYPE     DATA   AGE
secret/dummyhttp-secret   Opaque   1      34s

And we can see that the secret is also available on the virtual cluster with the content we expected:

  vkubectl get secrets
NAME               TYPE     DATA   AGE
dummyhttp-secret   Opaque   1      34s
  vkubectl get secret/dummyhttp-secret --template=" .data.SECRET_VAR " \
    base64 -d
Vcluster Boo

But the output of the curl command has not changed because, although we have the reloader controller deployed on the host cluster, it does not see the Deployment object of the virtual one and the pods are not touched:

  curl -s https://vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net:8443/   jq -cM .
 "c": "Vcluster Test Value","s": "" 

Installing the reloader applicationTo make reloader work on the virtual cluster we just need to install it as we did on the host using the following kustomization.yaml file:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
namespace: kube-system
resources:
- github.com/stakater/Reloader/deployments/kubernetes/?ref=v1.4.2
patches:
# Add flags to reload workloads when ConfigMaps or Secrets are created or deleted
- target:
    kind: Deployment
    name: reloader-reloader
  patch:  -
    - op: add
      path: /spec/template/spec/containers/0/args
      value:
        - '--reload-on-create=true'
        - '--reload-on-delete=true'
        - '--reload-strategy=annotations'

We deploy it with kustomize and vkubectl:

  kustomize build .   vkubectl apply -f -
serviceaccount/reloader-reloader created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/reloader-reloader-role created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/reloader-reloader-role-binding created
deployment.apps/reloader-reloader created

As the controller was not available when the secret was created the pods linked to the Deployment are not updated, but we can force things removing the secret on the host system; after we do that the secret is re-created from the sealed version and copied to the virtual cluster where the reloader controller updates the pod and the curl command shows the new output:

  kubectl delete -n my-vcluster-default secrets dummyhttp-secret
secret "dummyhttp-secret" deleted
  sleep 2
  vkubectl get pods
NAME                         READY   STATUS        RESTARTS   AGE
dummyhttp-78bf5fb885-fmsvs   1/1     Terminating   0          6m33s
dummyhttp-c68684bbf-nx8f9    1/1     Running       0          6s
  curl -s https://vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net:8443/   jq -cM .
 "c":"Vcluster Test Value","s":"Vcluster Boo" 

If we change the secret on the host systems things get updated pretty quickly now:

  echo -n "New secret"   kubectl create secret generic "dummyhttp-secret" \
    --namespace "my-vcluster-default" --dry-run=client \
    --from-file=SECRET_VAR=/dev/stdin -o yaml >dummyhttp-secret.yaml
  kubeseal -f dummyhttp-secret.yaml -w dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml
  kubectl apply -f dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml
  rm -f dummyhttp-secret.yaml dummyhttp-sealed-secret.yaml
  curl -s https://vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net:8443/   jq -cM .
 "c":"Vcluster Test Value","s":"New secret" 

Pause and restore the vclusterThe status of pods and statefulsets while the virtual cluster is active can be seen using kubectl:

  kubectl get pods,statefulsets -n my-vcluster
NAME                                                                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/coredns-bbb5b66cc-snwpn-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster              1/1     Running   0          127m
pod/dummyhttp-587c7855d7-pt9b8-x-default-x-my-vcluster               1/1     Running   0          4m39s
pod/my-vcluster-0                                                    1/1     Running   0          128m
pod/reloader-reloader-7f56c54d75-544gd-x-kube-system-x-my-vcluster   1/1     Running   0          60m
NAME                           READY   AGE
statefulset.apps/my-vcluster   1/1     128m

Pausing the vclusterIf we don t need to use the virtual cluster we can pause it and after a small amount of time all Pods are gone because the statefulSet is scaled down to 0 (note that other resources like volumes are not removed, but all the objects that have to be scheduled and consume CPU cycles are not running, which can translate in a lot of savings when running on clusters from cloud platforms or, in a local cluster like the one we are using, frees resources like CPU and memory that now can be used for other things):

  vcluster pause my-vcluster
11:20:47 info Scale down statefulSet my-vcluster/my-vcluster...
11:20:48 done Successfully paused vcluster my-vcluster/my-vcluster
  kubectl get pods,statefulsets -n my-vcluster
NAME                           READY   AGE
statefulset.apps/my-vcluster   0/0     130m

Now the curl command fails:

  curl -s https://vcluster-dummyhttp.localhost.mixinet.net:8443
404 page not found

Although the ingress is still available (it returns a 404 because there is no pod behind the service):

  kubectl get ingress -n my-vcluster
NAME                                CLASS     HOSTS                               ADDRESS                            PORTS   AGE
dummyhttp-x-default-x-my-vcluster   traefik   vcluster-dummyhttp.lo.mixinet.net   172.20.0.2,172.20.0.3,172.20.0.4   80      120m

In fact, the same problem happens when we try to connect to the vcluster API; the error shown by kubectl is related to the TLS certificate because the 404 page uses the wildcard certificate instead of the self signed one:

  vkubectl get pods
Unable to connect to the server: tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority
  curl -s https://my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443/api/v1/
404 page not found
  curl -v -s https://my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net:8443/api/v1/ 2>&1   grep subject
*  subject: CN=lo.mixinet.net
*  subjectAltName: host "my-vcluster-api.lo.mixinet.net" matched cert's "*.lo.mixinet.net"

Resuming the vclusterWhen we want to use the virtual cluster again we just need to use the resume command:

  vcluster resume my-vcluster
12:03:14 done Successfully resumed vcluster my-vcluster in namespace my-vcluster

Once all the pods are running the virtual cluster goes back to its previous state, although all of them were started, of course.

Cleaning upThe virtual cluster can be removed using the delete command:

  vcluster delete my-vcluster
12:09:18 info Delete vcluster my-vcluster...
12:09:18 done Successfully deleted virtual cluster my-vcluster in namespace my-vcluster
12:09:18 done Successfully deleted virtual cluster namespace my-vcluster
12:09:18 info Waiting for virtual cluster to be deleted...
12:09:50 done Virtual Cluster is deleted

That removes everything we used on this post except the sealed secrets and secrets that we put on the my-vcluster-default namespace because it was created by us. If we delete the namespace all the secrets and sealed secrets on it are also removed:

  kubectl delete namespace my-vcluster-default
namespace "my-vcluster-default" deleted

ConclusionsI believe that the use of virtual clusters can be a good option for two of the proposed use cases that I ve encountered in real projects in the past:

• need of short lived clusters for developers or teams,
• execution of integration tests from CI pipelines that require a complete cluster (the tests can be run on virtual clusters that are created on demand or paused and resumed when needed).

For both cases things can be set up using the Apache licensed product, although maybe evaluating the vCluster Platform offering could be interesting. In any case when everything is not done inside kubernetes we will also have to check how to manage the external services (i.e. if we use databases or message buses as SaaS instead of deploying them inside our clusters we need to have a way of creating, deleting or pause and resume those services).

Debian Contributions: 2025-04 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.

DebConf 25 Preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 25 preparations continue. In April, the bursary team reviewed and ranked bursary applications. Santiago Ruano Rinc n examined the current state of the conference s finances, to see if we could allocate any more money to bursaries. Stefano Rivera supported the bursary team s work with infrastructure and advice and added some metrics to assist Santiago s budget review. Santiago was also involved in different parts of the organization, including Content team matters, as reviewing the first of proposals, preparing public information about the new Academic Track; or coordinating different aspects of the Day trip activities and the Conference Dinner.

PyPA tools updates, by Stefano Rivera Around the beginning of the freeze (in retrospect, definitely too late) Stefano looked at updating setuptools in the archive to 78.1.0. This brings support for more comprehensive license expressions (PEP-639), that people are expected to adopt soon upstream. While the reverse-autopkgtests all passed, it all came with some unexpected complications, and turned into a mini-transition. The new setuptools broke shebangs for scripts (pypa/setuptools#4952). It also required a bump of wheel to 0.46 and wheel 0.46 now has a dependency outside the standard library (it de-vendored packaging). This meant it was no longer suitable to distribute a standalone wheel.whl file to seed into new virtualenvs, as virtualenv does by default. The good news here is that setuptools doesn t need wheel any more, it included its own implementation of the bdist_wheel command, in 70.1. But the world hadn t adapted to take advantage of this, yet. Stefano scrambled to get all of these issues resolved upstream and in Debian:

• pip: Don t check for wheel when invoked with --no-use-pep517 (pypa/pip#13330), automatically do --no-use-pep517 builds without wheel (pypa/pip#13358, rejected).
• virtualenv: Don t include wheel (pypa/virtualenv#2868) except on Python 3.8 (pypa/virtualenv#2876) as pip dropped Python 3.8 support in the same release that included #13330.
• python3.13: Update bundled setuptools in test.wheeldata (python/cpython#132415).
• python-cffi: No need to install wheel any more (python-cffi/cffi#165).

We re now at the point where python3-wheel-whl is no longer needed in Debian unstable, and it should migrate to trixie.

Removing libcrypt-dev from build-essential, by Helmut Grohne The crypt function was originally part of glibc, but it got separated to libxcrypt. As a result, libc6-dev now depends on libcrypt-dev. This poses a cycle during architecture cross bootstrap. As the number of packages actually using crypt is relatively small, Helmut proposed removing the dependency. He analyzed an archive rebuild kindly performed by Santiago Vila (not affiliated with Freexian) and estimated the necessary changes. It looks like we may complete this with modifications to less than 300 source packages in the forky cycle. Half of the bugs have been filed at this time. They are tracked with libcrypt-* usertags.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles uploaded a new version of simplemonitor.
• Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci-team/pipeline regarding piuparts arguments.
• Carles closed an FTBFS on gcc-15 on qnetload.
• Carles worked on Catalan translations using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 57 translations and created their merge requests in salsa, created 59 bug reports for packages that didn t merge in more than 30 days. Followed-up merge requests and comments in bug reports. Managed some translations manually for packages that are not in Salsa.
• Lucas did some work on the DebConf Content and Bursary teams.
• Lucas fixed multiple CVEs and bugs involving the upgrade from bookworm to trixie in ruby3.3.
• Lucas fixed a CVE in valkey in unstable.
• Stefano updated beautifulsoup4, python-authlib, python-html2text, python-packaging, python-pip, python-soupsieve, and unidecode.
• Stefano packaged python-dependency-groups, a new vendored library in python-pip.
• During an afternoon Bug Squashing Party in Montevideo, Santiago uploaded a couple of packages fixing RC bugs #1057226 and #1102487. The latter was a sponsored upload.
• Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of brlaser, ptouch-driver and sane-airscan to get the latest upstream bug fixes into Trixie.
• Rapha l filed an upstream bug on zim for a graphical glitch that he has been experiencing.
• Colin Watson upgraded openssh to 10.0p1 (also known as 10.0p2), and debugged various follow-up bugs. This included adding riscv64 support to vmdb2 in passing, and enabling native wtmpdb support so that wtmpdb last now reports the correct tty for SSH connections.
• Colin fixed dput-ng s override option, which had never previously worked.
• Colin fixed a security bug in debmirror.
• Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team: 21 packages upgraded to new upstream versions, 8 CVEs fixed, and about 25 release-critical bugs fixed.
• Helmut filed patches for 21 cross build failures.
• Helmut uploaded a new version of debvm featuring a new tool debefivm-create to generate EFI-bootable disk images compatible with other tools such as libvirt or VirtualBox. Much of the work was prototyped in earlier months. This generalizes mmdebstrap-autopkgtest-build-qemu.
• Helmut continued reporting undeclared file conflicts and suggested package removals from unstable.
• Helmut proposed build profiles for libftdi1 and gnupg2. To deal with recently added dependencies in the architecture cross bootstrap package set.
• Helmut managed the /usr-move transition. He worked on ensuring that systemd would comply with Debian s policy. Dumat continues to locate problems here and there yielding discussion occasionally. He sent a patch for an upgrade problem in zutils.
• Anupa worked with the Debian publicity team to publish Micronews and Bits posts.
• Anupa worked with the DebConf 25 content team to review talk and event proposals for DebConf 25.

Dear Debian community, This is bits from the DPL for April. End of 10 I am sure I was speaking in the interest of the whole project when joining the "End of 10" campaign. Here is what I wrote to the initiators:

Hi Joseph and all drivers of the "End of 10" campaign, On behalf of the entire Debian project, I would like to say that we proudly join your great campaign. We stand with you in promoting Free Software, defending users' freedoms, and protecting our planet by avoiding unnecessary hardware waste. Thank you for leading this important initiative.

Andreas Tille Debian Project Leader

I have some goals I would like to share with you for my second term. Ftpmaster delegation This splits up into tasks that can be done before and after Trixie release. Before Trixie: 1. Reducing Barriers to DFSG Compliance Checks Back in 2002, Debian established a way to distribute cryptographic software in the main archive, whereas such software had previously been restricted to the non-US archive. One result of this arrangement which influences our workflow is that all packages uploaded to the NEW queue must remain on the server that hosts it. This requirement means that members of the ftpmaster team must log in to that specific machine, where they are limited to a restricted set of tools for reviewing uploaded code. This setup may act as a barrier to participation--particularly for contributors who might otherwise assist with reviewing packages for DFSG compliance. I believe it is time to reassess this limitation and work toward removing such hurdles. In October last year, we had some initial contact with SPI's legal counsel, who noted that US regulations around cryptography have been relaxed somewhat in recent years (as of 2021). This suggests it may now be possible to revisit and potentially revise the conditions under which we manage cryptographic software in the NEW queue. I plan to investigate this further. If you have expertise in software or export control law and are interested in helping with this topic, please get in touch with me. The ultimate goal is to make it easier for more people to contribute to ensuring that code in the NEW queue complies with the DFSG. 2. Discussing Alternatives My chances to reach out to other distributions remained limited. However, regarding the processing of new software, I learned that OpenSUSE uses a Git-based workflow that requires five "LGTM" approvals from a group of trusted developers. As far as I know, Fedora follows a similar approach. Inspired by this, a recent community initiative--the Gateway to NEW project--enables peer review of new packages for DFSG compliance before they enter the NEW queue. This effort allows anyone to contribute by reviewing packages and flagging potential issues in advance via Git. I particularly appreciate that the DFSG review is coupled with CI, allowing for both license and technical evaluation. While this process currently results in some duplication of work--since final reviews are still performed by the ftpmaster team--it offers a valuable opportunity to catch issues early and improve the overall quality of uploads. If the community sees long-term value in this approach, it could serve as a basis for evolving our workflows. Integrating it more closely into DAK could streamline the process, and we've recently seen that merge requests reflecting community suggestions can be accepted promptly. For now, I would like to gather opinions about how such initiatives could best complement the current NEW processing, and whether greater consensus on trusted peer review could help reduce the burden on the team doing DFSG compliance checks. Submitting packages for review and automated testing before uploading can improve quality and encourage broader participation in safeguarding Debian's Free Software principles. My explicit thanks go out to the Gateway to NEW team for their valuable and forward-looking contribution to Debian. 3. Documenting Critical Workflows Past ftpmaster trainees have told me that understanding the full set of ftpmaster workflows can be quite difficult. While there is some useful documentation thanks in particular to Sean Whitton for his work on documenting NEW processing rules many other important tasks carried out by the ftpmaster team remain undocumented or only partially so. Comprehensive and accessible documentation would greatly benefit current and future team members, especially those onboarding or assisting in specific workflows. It would also help ensure continuity and transparency in how critical parts of the archive are managed. If such documentation already exists and I have simply overlooked it, I would be happy to be corrected. Otherwise, I believe this is an area where we need to improve significantly. Volunteers with a talent for writing technical documentation are warmly invited to contact me--I'd be happy to help establish connections with ftpmaster team members who are willing to share their knowledge so that it can be written down and preserved. Once Trixie is released (hopefully before DebConf): 4. Split of the Ftpmaster Team into DFSG and Archive Teams As discussed during the "Meet the ftpteam" BoF at DebConf24, I would like to propose a structural refinement of the current Ftpmaster team by introducing two different delegated teams:

1. DFSG Team
2. Archive Team (responsible for DAK maintenance and process tooling, including releases)

(Alternative name suggestions are, of course, welcome.) The primary task of the DFSG team would be the processing of the NEW queue and ensuring that packages comply with the DFSG. The Archive team would focus on maintaining DAK and handling the technical aspects of archive management. I am aware that, in the recent past, the ftpmaster team has decided not to actively seek new members. While I respect the autonomy of each team, the resulting lack of a recruitment pipeline has led to some friction and concern within the wider community, including myself. As Debian Project Leader, it is my responsibility to ensure the long-term sustainability and resilience of our project, which includes fostering an environment where new contributors can join and existing teams remain effective and well-supported. Therefore, even if the current team does not prioritize recruitment, I will actively seek and encourage new contributors for both teams, with the aim of supporting openness and collaboration. This proposal is not intended as criticism of the current team's dedication or achievements--on the contrary, I am grateful for the hard work and commitment shown, often under challenging circumstances. My intention is to help address the structural issues that have made onboarding and specialization difficult and to ensure that both teams are well-supported for the future. I also believe that both teams should regularly inform the Debian community about the policies and procedures they apply. I welcome any suggestions for a more detailed description of the tasks involved, as well as feedback on how best to implement this change in a way that supports collaboration and transparency. My intention with this proposal is to foster a more open and effective working environment, and I am committed to working with all involved to ensure that any changes are made collaboratively and with respect for the important work already being done. I'm aware that the ideas outlined above touch on core parts of how Debian operates and involve responsibilities across multiple teams. These are not small changes, and implementing them will require thoughtful discussion and collaboration. To move this forward, I've registered a dedicated BoF for DebConf. To make the most of that opportunity, I'm looking for volunteers who feel committed to improving our workflows and processes. With your help, we can prepare concrete and sensible proposals in advance--so the limited time of the BoF can be used effectively for decision-making and consensus-building. In short: I need your help to bring these changes to life. From my experience in my last term, I know that when it truly matters, the Debian community comes together--and I trust that spirit will guide us again. Please also note: we had a "Call for volunteers" five years ago, and much of what was written there still holds true today. I've been told that the response back then was overwhelming--but that training such a large number of volunteers didn't scale well. This time, I hope we can find a more sustainable approach: training a few dedicated people first, and then enabling them to pass on their knowledge. This will also be a topic at the DebCamp sprint. Dealing with Dormant Packages Debian was founded on the principle that each piece of software should be maintained by someone with expertise in it--typically a single, responsible maintainer. This model formed the historical foundation of Debian's packaging system and helped establish high standards of quality and accountability. However, as the project has grown and the number of packages has expanded, this model no longer scales well in all areas. Team maintenance has since emerged as a practical complement, allowing multiple contributors to share responsibility and reduce bottlenecks--depending on each team's internal policy. While working on the Bug of the Day initiative, I observed a significant number of packages that have not been updated in a long time. In the case of team-maintained packages, addressing this is often straightforward: team uploads can be made, or the team can be asked whether the package should be removed. We've also identified many packages that would fit well under the umbrella of active teams, such as language teams like Debian Perl and Debian Python, or blends like Debian Games and Debian Multimedia. Often, no one has taken action--not because of disagreement, but simply due to inattention or a lack of initiative. In addition, we've found several packages that probably should be removed entirely. In those cases, we've filed bugs with pre-removal warnings, which can later be escalated to removal requests. When a package is still formally maintained by an individual, but shows signs of neglect (e.g., no uploads for years, unfixed RC bugs, failing autopkgtests), we currently have three main tools:

1. The MIA process, which handles inactive or unreachable maintainers.
2. Package Salvaging, which allows contributors to take over maintenance if conditions are met.
3. Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs), which are limited to specific, well-defined fixes (which do not include things like migration to Salsa).

These mechanisms are important and valuable, but they don't always allow us to react swiftly or comprehensively enough. Our tools for identifying packages that are effectively unmaintained are relatively weak, and the thresholds for taking action are often high. The Package Salvage team is currently trialing a process we've provisionally called "Intend to NMU" (ITN). The name is admittedly questionable--some have suggested alternatives like "Intent to Orphan"--and discussion about this is ongoing on debian-devel. The mechanism is intended for situations where packages appear inactive but aren't yet formally orphaned, introducing a clear 21-day notice period before NMUs, similar in spirit to the existing ITS process. The discussion has sparked suggestions for expanding NMU rules. While it is crucial not to undermine the autonomy of maintainers who remain actively involved, we also must not allow a strict interpretation of this autonomy to block needed improvements to obviously neglected packages. To be clear: I do not propose to change the rights of maintainers who are clearly active and invested in their packages. That model has served us well. However, we must also be honest that, in some cases, maintainers stop contributing--quietly and without transition plans. In those situations, we need more agile and scalable procedures to uphold Debian's high standards. To that end, I've registered a BoF session for DebConf25 to discuss potential improvements in how we handle dormant packages. These discussions will be prepared during a sprint at DebCamp, where I hope to work with others on concrete ideas. Among the topics I want to revisit is my proposal from last November on debian-devel, titled "Barriers between packages and other people". While the thread prompted substantial discussion, it understandably didn't lead to consensus. I intend to ensure the various viewpoints are fairly summarised--ideally by someone with a more neutral stance than myself--and, if possible, work toward a formal proposal during the DebCamp sprint to present at the DebConf BoF. My hope is that we can agree on mechanisms that allow us to act more effectively in situations where formerly very active volunteers have, for whatever reason, moved on. That way, we can protect both Debian's quality and its collaborative spirit. Building Sustainable Funding for Debian Debian incurs ongoing expenses to support its infrastructure--particularly hardware maintenance and upgrades--as well as to fund in-person meetings like sprints and mini-DebConfs. These investments are essential to our continued success: they enable productive collaboration and ensure the robustness of the operating system we provide to users and derivative distributions around the world. While DebConf benefits from generous sponsorship, and we regularly receive donated hardware, there is still considerable room to grow our financial base--especially to support less visible but equally critical activities. One key goal is to establish a more constant and predictable stream of income, helping Debian plan ahead and respond more flexibly to emerging needs. This presents an excellent opportunity for contributors who may not be involved in packaging or technical development. Many of us in Debian are engineers first--and fundraising is not something we've been trained to do. But just like technical work, building sustainable funding requires expertise and long-term engagement. If you're someone who's passionate about Free Software and has experience with fundraising, donor outreach, sponsorship acquisition, or nonprofit development strategy, we would deeply value your help. Supporting Debian doesn't have to mean writing code. Helping us build a steady and reliable financial foundation is just as important--and could make a lasting impact. Kind regards Andreas. PS: In April I also planted my 5000th tree and while this is off-topic here I'm proud to share this information with my fellow Debian friends.

Release 0.2.8 of our RcppSMC package arrived at CRAN yesterday. RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package now also features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021. This release is somewhat procedural and contains solely maintenance, either for items now highlighted by the R and CRAN package checks, or to package internals. We had made those changes at the GitHub repo over time since the last release two years ago, and it seemed like a good time to get them to CRAN now. The release is summarized below.

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.8 (2025-05-10)

• Updated continuous integration script
• Updated package metadata now using Authors@R
• Corrected use of itemized list in one manual page

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More information is on the RcppSMC page and the repo. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

It's that time of the year again: the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 happened last weekend in Istanbul. This year was my third time attending what has quickly become one of my favourite events of the year simply due to the concentration of friends and other like-minded nerds in a single location.¹ This year I did a short presentation about the MediaWiki packages in Debian (slides), which is something I do but I suspect is fairly obscure to most people in the MediaWiki community. I was hoping to do some work on reproducibility of MediaWiki releases, but other interests (plus lack of people involved in the release process at the hackathon) meant that I didn't end up getting any work done on that (assuming this does not count). Other long-standing projects did end up getting some work done! MusikAnimal and I ended up fixing the Commons deletion notification bot, which had been broken for well over two years at that point (and was at some point in the hackathon plans for last year for both of us). Other projects that I made progress on include supporting multiple types of two-factor devices, and LibraryUpgrader which gained support for rebasing and updating existing patches². In addition to hacking, the other highlight of these events is the hallway track. Some of the crowd is people who I've seen at previous events and/or interact very frequently with, but there are also significant parts of the community and the Foundation that I don't usually get to interact with outside of these events. (Although it still feels extremely weird to heard from various mostly-WMF people with whom I haven't spoken with before that they've heard various (usually positive) rumours stories about me.) Unfortunately we did not end up having a Cuteness Association meetup this year, but we had an impromptu PGP key signing party which is basically almost as good, right? However, I did continue a tradition from last year: I ended up nominating Chlod, a friend of mine, to receive +2 access to mediawiki/* during the hackathon. The request is due to be closed sometime tomorrow. (Usual disclosure: My travel was funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. Thank you! This is my personal blog and these are my own opinions.) Now that you've read this post, maybe check out posts from others?