Search Results: "manuel"

9 January 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Tracker.debian.org updates, Salsa CI improvements, Coinstallable build-essential, Python 3.13 transition, Ruby 3.3 transition and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph, Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-12 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.

Tracker.debian.org updates, by Rapha l Hertzog Profiting from end-of-year vacations, Rapha l prepared for tracker.debian.org to be upgraded to Debian 12 bookworm by getting rid of the remnants of python3-django-jsonfield in the code (it was superseded by a Django-native field). Thanks to Philipp Kern from the Debian System Administrators team, the upgrade happened on December 23rd. Rapha l also improved distro-tracker to better deal with invalid Maintainer fields which recently caused multiples issues in the regular data updates (#1089985, MR 105). While working on this, he filed #1089648 asking dpkg tools to error out early when maintainers make such mistakes. Finally he provided feedback to multiple issues and merge requests (MR 106, issues #21, #76, #77), there seems to be a surge of interest in distro-tracker lately. It would be nice if those new contributors could stick around and help out with the significant backlog of issues (in the Debian BTS, in Salsa).

Salsa CI improvements, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Given that the Debian buildd network now relies on sbuild using the unshare backend, and that Salsa CI s reproducibility testing needs to be reworked (#399), Santiago resumed the work for moving the build job to use sbuild. There was some related work a few months ago that was focused on sbuild with the schroot and the sudo backends, but those attempts were stalled for different reasons, including discussions around the convenience of the move (#296). However, using sbuild and unshare avoids all of the drawbacks that have been identified so far. Santiago is preparing two merge requests: !568 to introduce a new build image, and !569 that moves all the extract-source related tasks to the build job. As mentioned in the previous reports, this change will make it possible for more projects to use the pipeline to build the packages (See #195). Additional advantages of this change include a more optimal way to test if a package builds twice in a row: instead of actually building it twice, the Salsa CI pipeline will configure sbuild to check if the clean target of debian/rules correctly restores the source tree, saving some CPU cycles by avoiding one build. Also, the images related to Ubuntu won t be needed anymore, since the build job will create chroots for different distributions and vendors from a single common build image. This will save space in the container registry. More changes are to come, especially those related to handling projects that customize the pipeline and make use of the extract-source job.

Coinstallable build-essential, by Helmut Grohne Building on the gcc-for-host work of last December, a notable patch turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same became feasible. Whilst the change is small, its implications and foundations are not. We still install crossbuild-essential-$ARCH for cross building and due to a britney2 limitation, we cannot have it depend on the host s C library. As a result, there are workarounds in place for sbuild and pbuilder. In turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same, we may actually express these dependencies directly as we install build-essential:$ARCH instead. The crossbuild-essential-$ARCH packages will continue to be available as transitional dummy packages.

Python 3.13 transition, by Colin Watson and Stefano Rivera Building on last month s work, Colin, Stefano, and other members of the Debian Python team fixed 3.13 compatibility bugs in many more packages, allowing 3.13 to now be a supported but non-default version in testing. The next stage will be to switch to it as the default version, which will start soon. Stefano did some test-rebuilds of packages that only build for the default Python 3 version, to find issues that will block the transition. The default version transition typically shakes out some more issues in applications that (unlike libraries) only test with the default Python version. Colin also fixed Sphinx 8.0 compatibility issues in many packages, which otherwise threatened to get in the way of this transition.

Ruby 3.3 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro The Debian Ruby team decided to ship Ruby 3.3 in the next Debian release, and Lucas took the lead of the interpreter transition with the assistance of the rest of the team. In order to understand the impact of the new interpreter in the ruby ecosystem, ruby-defaults was uploaded to experimental adding ruby3.3 as an alternative interpreter, and a mass rebuild of reverse dependencies was done here. Initially, a couple of hundred packages were failing to build, after many rounds of rebuilds, adjustments, and many uploads we are down to 30 package build failures, of those, 21 packages were asked to be removed from testing and for the other 9, bugs were filled. All the information to track this transition can be found here. Now, we are waiting for PHP 8.4 to finish to avoid any collision. Once it is done the Ruby 3.3 transition will start in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Enrico Zini redesigned the way nm.debian.org stores historical audit logs and personal data backups.
  • Carles Pina submitted a new package (python-firebase-messaging) and prepared updates for python3-ring-doorbell.
  • Carles Pina developed further po-debconf-manager: better state transition, fixed bugs, automated assigning translators and reviewers on edit, updating po header files automatically, fixed bugs, etc.
  • Carles Pina reviewed, submitted and followed up the debconf templates translation (more than 20 packages) and translated some packages (about 5).
  • Santiago continued to work on DebConf 25 organization related tasks, including handling the logo survey and results. Stefano spent time on DebConf 25 too.
  • Santiago continued the exploratory work about linux livepatching with Emmanuel Arias. Santiago and Emmanuel found a challenge since kpatch won t fully support linux in trixie and newer, so they are exploring alternatives such as klp-build.
  • Helmut maintained the /usr-move transition filing bugs in e.g. bubblewrap, e2fsprogs, libvpd-2.2-3, and pam-tmpdir and corresponding on related issues such as kexec-tools and live-build. The removal of the usrmerge package unfortunately broke debootstrap and was quickly reverted. Continued fallout is expected and will continue until trixie is released.
  • Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures and worked with Sandro Knau on stuck Qt/KDE patches related to cross building.
  • Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap removing the need to build gnu-efi in the process.
  • Helmut collaborated with Emanuele Rocca and Jochen Sprickerhof on an interesting adventure in diagnosing why gcc would FTBFS in recent sbuild.
  • Helmut proposed supporting build concurrency limits in coreutils s nproc. As it turns out nproc is not a good place for this functionality.
  • Colin worked with Sandro Tosi and Andrej Shadura to finish resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, as mentioned last month.
  • Colin upgraded 48 Python packages to new upstream versions, fixing four CVEs and a number of compatibility bugs with recent Python versions.
  • Colin issued an openssh bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which had been quite broken in bookworm.
  • Stefano fixed a minor bug in debian-reimbursements that was disallowing combination PDFs containing JAL tickets, encoded in UTF-16.
  • Stefano uploaded a stable update to PyPy3 in bookworm, catching up with security issues resolved in cPython.
  • Stefano fixed a regression in the eventlet from his Python 3.13 porting patch.
  • Stefano continued discussing a forwarded patch (renaming the sysconfigdata module) with cPython upstream, ending in a decision to drop the patch from Debian. This will need some continued work.
  • Anupa participated in the Debian Publicity team meeting in December, which discussed the team activities done in 2024 and projects for 2025.

29 December 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: Accessing Atari ST disk images on Linux

This post leverages support for Atari Hard Disk Interface Partition (AHDI) partition tables in the Linux kernel, activated by default in Debian, and in the parted partition editor. Accessing the content of a partition using a user mounted loop device This is the easiest procedure and should be tried to first. Depending if your Linux kernel has support for AHDI partition tables, and the size of the FAT system on the partition, this procedure might not work. In that case, try the procedure using mtools further below. Attach a disk image called hd80mb.image to a loop device: 
$ udisksctl loop-setup --file hd80mb.image
Mapped file hd80mb.image as /dev/loop0
Notice how the kernel detected the partition table: 
$ dmesg   grep loop0
[160892.151941] loop0: detected capacity change from 0 to 164138
[160892.171061]  loop0: AHDI p1 p2 p3 p4
Inspect the block devices created for each partition: 
$ lsblk   grep loop0
If the partitions are not already mounted by udisks2 under /media/, mount them manually: 
$ sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/
$ ls /mnt/
SHDRIVER.SYS
When you are finished copying data, unmount the partition, and detach the loop device. 
$ sudo umount /mnt
$ udisksctl loop-delete --block-device /dev/loop0
Accessing the content of a partition using mtools and parted This procedure uses the mtools package and the support for the AHDI partition scheme in the parted partition editor. Display the partition table, with partitions offsets in bytes: 
$ parted st_mint-1.5.img -- unit B print
...
Partition Table: atari
Disk Flags: 
Number  Start       End         Size        Type     File system  Flags
 1      1024B       133170175B  133169152B  primary               boot
 2      133170176B  266339327B  133169152B  primary
 3      266339328B  399508479B  133169152B  primary
 4      399508480B  532676607B  133168128B  primary
Set some Atari-friendly mtools options: 
$ export MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
$ export MTOOLS_NO_VFAT=1
List the content of the partition, passing as parameter the offset in bytes of the partition: For instance here we are interested in the second partition, and the parted output above indicates that this partition starts at byte offset 133170176 in the disk image. 
$ mdir -s -i st_mint-1.5.img@@133170176
 Volume in drive : has no label
Directory for ::/
demodata          2024-08-27  11:43 
        1 file                    0 bytes
Directory for ::/demodata
We can also use the command mcopy with a similar syntax to copy data from and to the disk image. For instance we copy a file named file.zip to the root directory of the second partition: 
$ mcopy -s -i st_mint-1.5.img@@133170176 file.zip ::
Recompiling mtools to access large partitions With disk images having large AHDI partitions (well considered large in 1992 ), you might encounter the error 
mdir -s -i cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img@@1024
init: sector size too big
Cannot initialize '::'
This error is caused by the non-standard large logical sectors that the TOS uses for large FAT partitions (see the Atari Hard Disk Filesystem reference on page 41, TOS partitions size) We can inspect the logical sector size using fsck tools: 
$ udiskctl loop-setup --file cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img
$ sudo fsck.fat -Anv /dev/loop0p1
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
...
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
16384 bytes per logical sector
To access the partition, you need to patch mtools, so that it supports a logical sector size of 16384 bytes. For this you need to change the MAX_SECTOR macro from 8192 to 16384 in msdos.h in the mtools distribution and recompile. A rebuilt mtools is then able to access the partition: 
$ /usr/local/bin/mdir -s -i cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img@@1024
 Volume in drive : has no label
Directory for ::/
CECILE   SYS      8462 1998-03-27  22:42 
NEWDESK  INF       804 2024-09-09   9:23 
        2 files               9 266 bytes
                      1 072 463 872 bytes free

13 December 2024

Emanuele Rocca: Murder Mystery: GCC Builds Failing After sbuild Refactoring

This is the story of an investigation conducted by Jochen Sprickerhof, Helmut Grohne, and myself. It was true teamwork, and we would have not reached the bottom of the issue working individually. We think you will find it as interesting and fun as we did, so here is a brief writeup. A few of the steps mentioned here took several days, others just a few minutes. What is described as a natural progression of events did not always look very obvious at the moment at all.
Let us go through the Six Stages of Debugging together.

Stage 1: That cannot happen
Official Debian GCC builds start failing on multiple architectures in late November.
The build error happens on the build servers when running the testuite, but we know this cannot happen. GCC builds are not meant to fail in case of testsuite failures! Return codes are not making the build fail, make is being called with -k, it just cannot happen.
A lot of the GCC tests are always failing in fact, and an extensive log of the results is posted to the debian-gcc mailing list, but the packages always build fine regardless.
On the build daemons, build failures take several hours.

Stage 2: That does not happen on my machine
Building on my machine running Bookworm is just fine. The Build Daemons run Bookworm and use a Sid chroot for the build environment, just like I am. Same kernel.
Debian packages are built by a network of autobuilding machines using a program called sbuild. In my last blog post I mentioned the transition from the schroot backend to a new one based on unshare.
The only obvious difference between my setup and the Debian buildds is that I am using sbuild 0.85.0 from bookworm, and the buildds have 0.86.3~bpo12+1 from bookworm-backports. Trying again with 0.86.3~bpo12+1, the build fails on my system too. The build daemons were updated to the bookworm-backports version of sbuild at some point in late November. Ha.

Stage 3: That should not happen
There are quite a few sbuild versions in between 0.85.0 and 0.86.3~bpo12+1, but looking at recent sbuild bugs shows that sbuild 0.86.0 was breaking "quite a number of packages". Indeed, with 0.86.0 the build still fails. Trying the version immediately before, 0.85.11, the build finishes correctly. This took more time than it sounds, one run including the tests takes several hours. We need a way to shorten this somehow.
The Debian packaging of GCC allows to specify which languages you may want to skip, and by default it builds Ada, Go, C, C++, D, Fortran, Objective C, Objective C++, M2, and Rust. When running the tests sequentially, the build logs stop roughly around the tests of a runtime library for D, libphobos. So can we still reproduce the failure by skipping everything except for D? With DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nolang=ada,go,c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++,m2,rust the build still fails, and it fails faster than before. Several minutes, not hours. This is progress, and time to file a bug. The report contains massive spoilers, so no link. :-)

Stage 4: Why does that happen?
Something is causing the build to end prematurely. It s not the OOM killer, and the kernel does not have anything useful to say in the logs. Can it be that the D language tests are sending signals to some process, and that is what s killing make ? We start tracing signals sent with bpftrace by writing the following script, signals.bt: 
tracepoint:signal:signal_generate  
    printf("%s PID %d (%s) sent signal %d to PID %d\n", comm, pid, args->sig, args->pid);
And executing it with sudo bpftrace signals.bt.
The build takes its sweet time, and it fails. Looking at the trace output there s a suspicious process.exe terminating stuff. 
process.exe (PID: 2868133) sent signal 15 to PID 711826
That looks interesting, but we have no clue what PID 711826 may be. Let s change the script a bit, and trace signals received as well. 
tracepoint:signal:signal_generate  
    printf("PID %d (%s) sent signal %d to %d\n", pid, comm, args->sig, args->pid);
 
tracepoint:signal:signal_deliver  
    printf("PID %d (%s) received signal %d\n", pid, comm, args->sig);
The working version of sbuild was using dumb-init, whereas the new one features a little init in perl. We patch the current version of sbuild by making it use dumb-init instead, and trace two builds: one with the perl init, one with dumb-init.
Here are the signals observed when building with dumb-init. 
PID 3590011 (process.exe) sent signal 2 to 3590014
PID 3590014 (sleep) received signal 9
PID 3590011 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3590063
PID 3590063 (std.process tem) received signal 9
PID 3590011 (process.exe) sent signal 9 to 3590065
PID 3590065 (std.process tem) received signal 9
And this is what happens with the new init in perl: 
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 2 to 3589291
PID 3589291 (sleep) received signal 9
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3589338
PID 3589338 (std.process tem) received signal 9
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 9 to 3589340
PID 3589340 (std.process tem) received signal 9
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3589341
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3589323
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3589320
PID 3589274 (process.exe) sent signal 15 to 3589274
PID 3589274 (process.exe) received signal 9
PID 3589341 (sleep) received signal 9
PID 3589273 (sbuild-usernsex) sent signal 9 to 3589320
PID 3589273 (sbuild-usernsex) sent signal 9 to 3589323
There are a few additional SIGTERM being sent when using the perl init, that s helpful. At this point we are fairly convinced that process.exe is worth additional inspection. The source code of process.d shows something interesting: 
1221 @system unittest
1222  
[...]
1247     auto pid = spawnProcess(["sleep", "10000"],
[...]
1260     // kill the spawned process with SIGINT
1261     // and send its return code
1262     spawn((shared Pid pid)  
1263         auto p = cast() pid;
1264         kill(p, SIGINT);
So yes, there s our sleep and the SIGINT (signal 2) right in the unit tests of process.d, just like we have observed in the bpftrace output.
Can we study the behavior of process.exe in isolation, separatedly from the build? Indeed we can. Let s take the executable from a failed build, and try running it under /usr/libexec/sbuild-usernsexec.
First, we prepare a chroot inside a suitable user namespace: 
unshare --map-auto --setuid 0 --setgid 0 mkdir /tmp/rootfs
cd /tmp/rootfs
cat /home/ema/.cache/sbuild/unstable-arm64.tar   unshare --map-auto --setuid 0 --setgid 0 tar xf  -
unshare --map-auto --setuid 0 --setgid 0 mkdir /tmp/rootfs/whatever
unshare --map-auto --setuid 0 --setgid 0 cp process.exe /tmp/rootfs/
Now we can run process.exe on its own using the perl init, and trace signals at will: 
/usr/libexec/sbuild-usernsexec --pivotroot --nonet u:0:100000:65536  g:0:100000:65536 /tmp/rootfs ema /whatever -- /process.exe
We can compare the behavior of the perl init vis-a-vis the one using dumb-init in milliseconds instead of minutes.

Stage 5: Oh, I see.
Why does process.exe send more SIGTERMs when using the perl init is now the big question. We have a simple reproducer, so this is where using strace becomes possible. 
sudo strace --user ema --follow-forks -o sbuild-dumb-init.strace ./sbuild-usernsexec-dumb-init --pivotroot --nonet u:0:100000:65536  g:0:100000:65536 /tmp/dumbroot ema /whatever -- /process.exe
We start comparing the strace output of dumb-init with that of perl-init, looking in particular for different calls to kill.
Here is what process.exe does under dumb-init: 
3593883 kill(-2, SIGTERM)               = -1 ESRCH (No such process)
No such process. Under perl-init instead: 
3593777 kill(-2, SIGTERM <unfinished ...>
The process is there under perl-init!
That is a kill with negative pid. From the kill(2) man page: 
If pid is less than -1, then sig is sent to every process in the process group whose ID is -pid.
It would have been very useful to see this kill with negative pid in the output of bpftrace, why didn t we? The tracepoint used, tracepoint:signal:signal_generate, shows when signals are actually being sent, and not the syscall being called. To confirm, one can trace tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_kill and see the negative PIDs, for example: 
PID 312719 (bash) sent signal 2 to -312728
The obvious question at this point is: why is there no process group 2 when using dumb-init?

Stage 6: How did that ever work?
We know that process.exe sends a SIGTERM to every process in the process group with ID 2. To find out what this process group may be, we spawn a shell with dumb-init and observe under /proc PIDs 1, 16, and 17. With perl-init we have 1, 2, and 17. When running dumb-init, there are a few forks before launching the program, explaining the difference. Looking at /proc/2/cmdline we see that it s bash, ie. the program we are running under perl-init. When building a package, that is dpkg-buildpackage itself.
The test is accidentally killing its own process group.
Now where does this -2 come from in the test? 
2363     // Special values for _processID.
2364     enum invalid = -1, terminated = -2;
Oh. -2 is used as a special value for PID, meaning "terminated". And there s a call to kill() later on: 
2694     do   s = tryWait(pid);   while (!s.terminated);
[...]
2697     assertThrown!ProcessException(kill(pid));
What sets pid to terminated you ask?
Here is tryWait: 
2568 auto tryWait(Pid pid) @safe
2569  
2570     import std.typecons : Tuple;
2571     assert(pid !is null, "Called tryWait on a null Pid.");
2572     auto code = pid.performWait(false);
And performWait: 
2306         _processID = terminated;
The solution, dear reader, is not to kill.
PS: the bug report with spoilers for those interested is #1089007.

10 December 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: Too many open files in Minikube Pod

Right now playing with minikube, to run a three nodes highly available Kubernetes control plane. I am using the docker driver of minikube, so each Kubernetes node component is running inside a docker container, instead of using full blown VMs. In my experience this works better than Kind, as using Kind you cannot correctly restart a cluster deployed in highly available mode. This is the topology of the cluster: 
$ minikube node list 
minikube        192.168.49.2
minikube-m02    192.168.49.3
minikube-m03    192.168.49.4
Each kubernetes node is actually a docker container: 
$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                 COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS         PORTS                                                                                                                                  NAMES
977046487e5e   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32812->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32811->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32810->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32809->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32808->32443/tcp   minikube-m03
8be3549f0c4c   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32807->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32806->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32805->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32804->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32803->32443/tcp   minikube-m02
4b39f1c47c23   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32802->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32801->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32800->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32799->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32798->32443/tcp   minikube
The whole list of pods running in the cluster is as this: 
$ minikube kubectl -- get pods --all-namespaces
kube-system   coredns-6f6b679f8f-85n9l               0/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m32s
kube-system   coredns-6f6b679f8f-pnhxv               0/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m32s
kube-system   etcd-minikube                          1/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m37s
kube-system   etcd-minikube-m02                      1/1     Running   1 (42s ago)   3m21s
...
kube-system   kube-proxy-84gm6                       0/1     Error     1 (31s ago)   3m4s
There is this container in Error status, let us check the logs 
$ minikube kubectl -- logs -n kube-system kube-proxy-84gm6
E1210 11:50:42.117036       1 run.go:72] "command failed" err="failed complete: too many open files"
This can be fixed by increasing the number of inotify watchers: 
# cat > /etc/sysctl.d/minikube.conf <<EOF
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512
EOF

# sysctl --system
...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/minikube.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.conf ...
...
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512
Restart the cluster 
$ minikube stop
$ minikube start 
$ minikube kubectl -- get pods --all-namespaces   grep Error
$

1 December 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in November 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Conferences I attended MiniDebConf Toulouse 2024, and the MiniDebCamp before it. Most of my time was spent with the Freexian folks working on debusine; Stefano gave a talk about its current status with a live demo (frantically fixed up over the previous couple of days, as is traditional) and with me and others helping to answer questions at the end. I also caught up with some people I haven t seen in ages, ate a variety of delicious cheeses, and generally had a good time. Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors! After the conference, Freexian collaborators spent a day and a half doing some planning for next year, and then went for an afternoon visiting the Cit de l espace. Rust team I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions, as part of upgrading pydantic and rpds-py: Python team Last month, I mentioned that we still need to work out what to do about the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728). We eventually managed to come up with an agreed plan; Sandro has uploaded a renamed binary package to experimental, and I ve begun work on converting reverse-dependencies (asgi-csrf, fastapi, python-curies, and starlette done so far). There s a bit more still to do, but I expect we can finish it soon. I fixed problems related to adding Python 3.13 support in: I fixed some packaging problems that resulted in failures any time we add a new Python version to Debian: I fixed other build/autopkgtest failures in: I packaged python-quart-trio, needed for a new upstream version of python-urllib3, and contributed a small packaging tweak upstream. I backported a twisted fix that caused problems in other packages, including breaking debusine s tests. I disentangled some upstream version confusion in python-catalogue, and upgraded to the current upstream version. I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: Other small fixes I contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream. In response to Helmut s Cross building talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse, I fixed libfilter-perl to support cross-building (5b4c2e10, f9788c27). I applied a patch to move aliased files from / to /usr in iprutils (#1087733). I adjusted debconf to use the new /usr/lib/apt/apt-extracttemplates path (#1087523). I upgraded putty to 0.82.

26 November 2024

Emanuele Rocca: Building Debian packages The Right Way

There is more than one way to do it, but it seems that The Right Way to build Debian packages today is using sbuild with the unshare backend. The most common backend before the rise of unshare was schroot.
The official Debian Build Daemons have recently transitioned to using sbuild with unshare, providing a strong motivation to consider making the switch. Additionally the new approach means: (1) no need to configure schroot, and (2) no need to run the build as root.
Here are my notes about moving to the new setup, for future reference and in case they may be useful to others.
First I installed the required packages: 
apt install sbuild mmdebstrap uidmap
Then I created the following script to update my chroots every night: 
#!/bin/bash
for arch in arm64 armhf armel; do
    HOME=/tmp mmdebstrap --quiet --arch=$arch --include=ca-certificates --variant=buildd unstable \
        ~/.cache/sbuild/unstable-$arch.tar http://127.0.0.1:3142/debian
done
In the script, I m calling mmdebstrap with --quiet because I don t want to get any output on succesful execution. The script is running in cron with email notifications, and I only want to get a message if something goes south. I m setting HOME=/tmp for a similar reason: the unshare user does not have access to my actual home directory, and by default dpkg tries to use $HOME/.dpkg.cfg as the configuration file. By overriding HOME I avoid the following message to standard error: 
dpkg: warning: failed to open configuration file '/home/ema/.dpkg.cfg' for reading: Permission denied
Then I added the following to my sbuild configuration file (~/.sbuildrc): 
$chroot_mode = 'unshare';
$unshare_tmpdir_template = '/dev/shm/tmp.sbuild.XXXXXXXXXX';
The first option sets the sbuild backend to unshare, whereas unshare_tmpdir_template is needed on Bookworm to ensure that the build process runs in memory rather than on disk for performance reasons. Starting with Trixie, /tmp is by default a tmpfs so the setting won t be needed anymore.
Packages for different architectures can now be built as follows: 
# Tarball used: ~/.cache/sbuild/unstable-arm64.tar
$ sbuild --dist=unstable hello
# Tarball used: ~/.cache/sbuild/unstable-armhf.tar
$ sbuild --dist=unstable --arch=armhf hello
If you have any comments or suggestions about any of this, please let me know.

24 October 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: back to blogging and running a feed reader as a containerized systemd service

After reading about Jonathan McDowell feed reader install and the back to blogging initiative, I decided to install a feed reader to follow all those nice blog posts. With a feed reader you can compose your own feed of news based on blog posts, websites, mastodon toots. And then you are independant from ad oriented ranking algorithms of social networks. Since Jonathan used FreshRSS as a feed reader, I started with the same software. On a quick glance on its github page, it sounded like a good project:
  • active contributions
  • different channels for stable and latest version of the software
  • container images pointing to the stable release
  • support multiple databases for storage, including PostgreSQL
  • correct documentation mentioning security caveats
I prefer to do the container image installation using podman since:
  • upgrades from FreshRSS are easy to do and can be done separately from operating system upgrades
  • I do not mess my based operating system with php (subjective) and in case of a compromized freshrss, the freshrss/apache install would be still restrained to its own Linux namespaces, separated from the rest of the system.
Podman is image compatible with Docker as they both implement the OCI runtime specification, and have a nearly identical command line interface. This installation will be done on a Debian server, but should work too on any Linux distribution. Initial setup
  • start a container image based on the start command provided by the FreshRSS project. The podman command line is nearly identical to the docker command line, excepts that podman expects the fully qualified domain name associated with the container image, and I chose to run the freshrss container on the localhost interface only. I also use a defined version tag, because using the latest tag makes it complicated to track which exact ersion I have installed.
# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1
# podman run --detach --restart unless-stopped --log-opt max-size=10m \
  --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:80 \
  --env TZ=Europe/Paris \
  --env 'CRON_MIN=1,31' \
  --volume freshrss_data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data \
  --volume freshrss_extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions \
  --name freshrss \
  docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1
  • verify where the podman volumes have been created. This is where the user data of freshrss will be stored.
# podman volume ls
# podman volume inspect freshrss_data
  • now that freshrss is installed, you can start its configuration wizard at localhost:8081. You should keep the default sqlite choice
  • finally after running the wizard, you can login again and add some feeds
  • verify that your config has been stored outside the container, and inside the volume (so that it will not be erased in case of upgrages)
# ls -l /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/
  • verify the state of sqlite database
echo '.tables'  sqlite3  /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/<your freshrss user>/db.sqlite 
category  entry     entrytag  entrytmp  feed      tag
Going with FreshRSS in Production Podman has this very nice feature that it can generate a systemd unit from a running container, and use systemd to start a container on boot. This is in contrary to docker where the docker daemon does the stop/start of containers on boot. I prefer the systemd approach as it treats containers the same way as other system services. Once the freshrss container is running we can generate a systemd unit of it with: 
# podman generate systemd --new --name freshrss   tee /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service
Let s stop the container we started previously, and use systemd to manage it: 
# podman stop freshrss
# systemctl enable --now container-freshrss.service
We can verify that we have a listening socket on the localhost interface, on the source port 8081 
# systemctl status container-freshrss.service
  ...
# ss --listening --numeric --process '( sport = 8081 )'
Netid         State           Recv-Q          Send-Q                   Local Address:Port                   Peer Address:Port         Process         
tcp           LISTEN          0               4096                         127.0.0.1:8081                        0.0.0.0:*             users:(("conmon",pid=4464,fd=5))
Nota Bene: conmon (8) is the process managing the network namespace in which fresh-rss is running, hence it is displayed as the process owning the listening socket Exposing FreshRSS to the external world We have now a running service, but we need to make it reachable from the internet. The simplest, classical way, is to create a subdomain and a VirtualHost configured as a reverse proxy to access the service at 127.0.0.1:8081. Fortunately the FreshRSS authors have documented this setup in https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/tree/edge/Docker#alternative-reverse-proxy-using-apache and those steps are no different from a standard application behind a web reverse proxy. Upgrading freshrss container to a newer version A documentation showing how to install a piece of software is nothing when it does not show how to upgrade that said software. Installing is easy, upgrading is where the challenge is. Fortunately to the good stateless design of freshrss (everything is in the sqlite database, which is backed by a non-epheremal volume in our setup), switchting versions is a peace of cake. 
# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2
# systemctl stop container-freshrss.service
# sed -i 's,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2,' /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl start container-freshrss.service
If you need to rollback, you just need to revert version numbers in the instruction above. Enjoy your own reader feed ! I will add the following feeds of blogs I like, let us see if I follow them better with a feed reader !

1 October 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in September 2024

Almost all of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Pydantic My main Debian project for the month turned out to be getting Pydantic back into a good state in Debian testing. I ve used Pydantic quite a bit in various projects, most recently in Debusine, so I have an interest in making sure it works well in Debian. However, it had been stalled on 1.10.17 for quite a while due to the complexities of getting 2.x packaged. This was partly making sure everything else could cope with the transition, but in practice mostly sorting out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo R hling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck. Learning Rust is on my to-do list, but merely not knowing a language hasn t stopped me before. So I learned how the Debian Rust team s packaging works, upgraded a few packages to new upstream versions (including rust-half and upstream rust-idna test fixes), and packaged rust-jiter. After a lot of waiting around for various things and chasing some failures in other packages I was eventually able to get current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing. I m looking forward to being able to drop our clunky v1 compatibility code once debusine can rely on running on trixie! OpenSSH I upgraded the Debian packaging to OpenSSH 9.9p1. YubiHSM I upgraded python-yubihsm, yubihsm-connector, and yubihsm-shell to new upstream versions. I noticed that I could enable some tests in python-yubihsm and yubihsm-shell; I d previously thought the whole test suite required a real YubiHSM device, but when I looked closer it turned out that this was only true for some tests. I fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures (upstream PRs #431, #432), and also made it build reproducibly. Thanks to Helmut Grohne, I fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed. As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes. Python team setuptools 72.0.0 removed the venerable setup.py test command. This caused some fallout in Debian, some of which was quite non-obvious as packaging helpers sometimes fell back to different ways of running test suites that didn t quite work. I fixed django-guardian, manuel, python-autopage, python-flask-seeder, python-pgpdump, python-potr, python-precis-i18n, python-stopit, serpent, straight.plugin, supervisor, and zope.i18nmessageid. As usual for new language versions, the addition of Python 3.13 caused some problems. I fixed psycopg2, python-time-machine, and python-traits. I fixed build/autopkgtest failures in keymapper, python-django-test-migrations, python-rosettasciio, routes, transmissionrpc, and twisted. buildbot was in a bit of a mess due to being incompatible with SQLAlchemy 2.0. Fortunately by the time I got to it upstream had committed a workable set of patches, and the main difficulty was figuring out what to cherry-pick since they haven t made a new upstream release with all of that yet. I figured this out and got us up to 4.0.3. Adrian Bunk asked whether python-zipp should be removed from trixie. I spent some time investigating this and concluded that the answer was no, but looking into it was an interesting exercise anyway. On the other hand, I looked into flask-appbuilder, concluded that it should be removed, and filed a removal request. I upgraded some embedded CSS files in nbconvert. I upgraded importlib-resources, ipywidgets, jsonpickle, pydantic-settings, pylint (fixing a test failure), python-aiohttp-session, python-apptools, python-asyncssh, python-django-celery-beat, python-django-rules, python-limits, python-multidict, python-persistent, python-pkginfo, python-rt, python-spur, python-zipp, stravalib, transmissionrpc, vulture, zodbpickle, zope.exceptions (adopting it), zope.i18nmessageid, zope.proxy, and zope.security to new upstream versions. debmirror The experimental and *-proposed-updates suites used to not have Contents-* files, and a long time ago debmirror was changed to just skip those files in those suites. They were added to the Debian archive some time ago, but debmirror carried on skipping them anyway. Once I realized what was going on, I removed these unnecessary special cases (#819925, #1080168).

11 September 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In August, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 44.5h (out of 46.5h assigned and 53.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 55.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 21.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 12.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 22.25h (out of 6.5h assigned and 53.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 37.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 11.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 11.5h (out of 58.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 48.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 14.5h (out of 4.0h assigned and 20.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.25h (out of 5.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 21.5h (out of 11.5h assigned and 10.0h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 4.0h (out of 2.25h assigned and 3.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 42.0h (out of 46.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 2.5h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In August, we have released 1 DLAs. During the month of August Debian 11 "bullseye" officially transitioned to the responsibility of the LTS team (on 2024-08-15). However, because the final point release (11.11) was not made until 2024-08-31, LTS contributors were prevented from uploading packages to bullseye until after the point release had been made. That said, the team was not at all idle, and was busy at work on a variety of tasks which impacted both LTS and the broader Debian community, as well as preparing uploads which will be released during the month of September. Of particular note, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s prepared updates of the putty and cacti packages for bookworm (1 2) and bullseye (1 2), which were accepted by the old-stable release managers for the August point releases. He also analysed several security regressions in the apache2 package. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort worked on the Rust toolchain in bookworm and bullseye, which will be needed to support the upcoming Firefox ESR and Thunderbird ESR releases from the Mozilla project. Additionally, LTS contributor Thorsten Alteholz prepared bookworm and bullseye updates of the cups package (1 2), which were accepted by the old-stable release managers for the August point releases. LTS contributor Markus Koschany collaborated with Emmanuel Bourg, co-maintainer of the tomcat packages in Debian. Regressions in a proposed security fix necessitated the updating of the tomcat10 package in Debian to the latest upstream release. LTS contributors Bastien and Santiago Ruano Rinc n collaborated with the upstream developers and the Debian maintainer (Bernhard Schmidt) of the FreeRADIUS project towards addressing the BlastRADIUS vulnerability in the bookworm and bullseye versions of the freeradius package. If you use FreeRADIUS in Debian bookworm or bullseye, we encourage you to test the packages following the instructions found in the call for testers to help identifying any possible regression that could be introduced with these updates. Testing is an important part of the work the LTS Team does, and in that vein LTS contributor Sean Whitton worked on improving the documentation and tooling around creating test filesystems which can be used for testing a variety of package update scenarios.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

12 August 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: autopkgtest/incus builds, live-patching, Salsa CI, Python 3.13 (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-07 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.

autopkgtest/Incus build streamlining, by Colin Watson Colin contributed a change to allow maintaining Incus container and VM images in parallel. Both of these are useful (containers are faster, but some tests need full machine isolation), and the build tools previously didn t handle that very well. This isn t yet in unstable, but once it is, keeping both flavours of unstable images up to date will be a simple matter of running this regularly: 
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus images:debian/trixie
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus --vm images:debian/trixie

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago continued the work on the support for applying security fixes to the Linux kernel in Debian, without the need to reboot the machine. As mentioned in the previous month report, kpatch 0.9.9-1 (and 0.9.9-2 afterwards) was uploaded to unstable in July, closing the Intent to Salvage (ITS) bug. With this upload, the remaining RC bugs were solved, and kpatch was able to transition to Debian testing recently. Kpatch is expected to be an important component in the live-patching support, since it makes it easy to build a patch as a kernel module. Emmanuel and Santiago continued to work on the design for Linux live-patching and presented the current status in the DebConf24 presentation.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n To be able to add RISC-V support and to avoid using tools not packaged in Debian (See #331), the Salsa CI pipeline first needed to move away from kaniko to build the images used by the pipeline. Santiago created a merge request to use buildah instead, and it was merged last month. Santiago also prepared a couple of more MRs related to how the images are built: initial RISC-V support, that should be merged after improving how built images are tested. The switch to buildah introduced a regression in the work-in-progress MR that adds new build image so the build job can run sbuild. Santiago hopes to address this regression and continue with the sbuild-related MRs in August. Additionally, Santiago also contributed to the install docker-cli instead of docker.io in the piuparts image MR, and reviewed others such as reprotest: Add append-build-command option, fix failure at manual pipeline run when leaving RELEASE variable empty and Fix image not found error on image building stage.

Python 3.13 Betas, by Stefano Rivera As Python 3.13 is approaching the first release, Stefano has been uploading the beta releases to Debian unstable. Most of these have uncovered small bugs that needed to be investigated and fixed. Stefano also took the time to review the current patch set against cPython in Debian. Python 3.13 isn t marked as a supported Python release in Debian s Python tooling, yet, so nothing has been built against it, yet. Now that the Python 3.12 transition has completed, the next task will be to start trying to build Debian s Python module packages against Python 3.13, to estimate the work required to transition to 3.13 in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles Pina updated the packages python-asyncclick, python-pyaarlo and prepared updates for python-ring-doorbell and simplemonitor.
  • Carles Pina updated (reviewing or translating) Catalan translations for adduser, apt-listchanges, debconf and shadow.
  • Colin merged OpenSSH 9.8, and prepared a corresponding release note for DSA support now being disabled. This version included some substantial changes to split the server into a listener binary and a per-session binary, and those required some corresponding changes in the GSS-API key exchange patch. Sorting out the details of this and getting it to work again took some time.
  • Colin upgraded 11 Python packages to new upstream versions, and modernized the build process and/or added non-superficial autopkgtests to several more.
  • Rapha l Hertzog tweaked tracker.debian.org s debci task to work around changes in the JSON output. He also improved tracker.debian.org s ability to detect bounces due to spam to avoid unsubscribing emails that are not broken, but that are better than Debian at rejecting spam.
  • Helmut Grohne monitored the /usr-move transition with few incidents. A notable one is that some systems have ended up with aliasing links that don t match the ones installed by base-files which could lead to an unpack error from dpkg. This is now prevented by having base-files.preinst error out.
  • Helmut investigated toolchain bootstrap failures with gcc-14 in rebootstrap but would only discover the cause in August.
  • Helmut sent a MR for the cross-exe-wrapper requested by Simon McVittie for gobject-introspection. It is a way of conditionally requesting qemu-user when emulation is required for execution during cross compilation.
  • Helmut sent three patches for cross build failures.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded packages lprint and magicfilter to fix RC-bugs that appeared due to the introduction of gcc-14.
  • Santiago continued to work on activities related to the DebConf24 Content Team, including reviewing the schedule and handling updates on it.
  • Santiago worked on preparations for the DebConf25, to be held in Brest, France, next year. A video of the BoF presented during DebConf24 can be found here.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf24, and helped to run the event.

10 July 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: YubiHSM packaging, unschroot, live-patching, and more! (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-06 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.

YubiHSM packaging, by Colin Watson Freexian is starting to use YubiHSM devices (hardware security modules) as part of some projects, and we wanted to have the supporting software directly in Debian rather than needing to use third-party repositories. Since Yubico publish everything we need under free software licences, Colin packaged yubihsm-connector, yubihsm-shell, and python-yubihsm from https://developers.yubico.com/, in some cases based partly on the upstream packaging, and got them all into Debian unstable. Backports to bookworm will be forthcoming once they ve all reached testing.

unschroot by Helmut Grohne Following an in-person discussion at MiniDebConf Berlin, Helmut attempted splitting the containment functionality of sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare into a dedicated tool interfacing with sbuild as a variant of --chroot-mode=schroot providing a sufficiently compatible interface. While this seemed technically promising initially, a discussion on debian-devel indicated a desire to rely on an existing container runtime such as podman instead of using another Debian-specific tool with unclear long term maintenance. None of the existing container runtimes meet the specific needs of sbuild, so further advancing this matter implies a compromise one way or another.

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is working on the development of linux live-patching for Debian. For the moment, this is in an exploratory phase, that includes how to handle the different patches that will need to be provided. kpatch could help significantly in this regard. However, kpatch was removed from unstable because there are some RC bugs affecting the version that was present in Debian unstable. Santiago packaged the most recent upstream version (0.9.9) and filed an Intent to Salvage bug. Santiago is waiting for an ACK by the maintainer, and will upload to unstable after July 10th, following the package salvaging rules. While kpatch 0.9.9 fixes the main issues, it still needs some work to properly support Debian and the Linux kernel versions packaged in our distribution. More on this in the report next month.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n The work by Santiago in Salsa CI this month includes a merge request to ease testing how the production images are built from the changes introduced by future merge requests. By default, the pipelines triggered by a merge request build a subset of the images built for production, to reduce the use of resources, and because most of the time the subset of staging images is enough to test the proposed modifications. However, sometimes it is needed to test how the full set of production images is built, and the above mentioned MR helps to do that. The changes include documentation, so hopefully this will make it easier to test future contributions. Also, for being able to include support for RISC-V, Salsa CI needs to replace kaniko as the tool used to build the images. Santiago tested buildah, but there are some issues when pushing built images for non-default platform architectures (i386, armhf, armel) to the container registry. Santiago will continue to work on this to find a solution.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera prepared updates for a number of Python modules.
  • Stefano uploaded the latest point release of Python 3.12 and the latest Python 3.13 beta. Both uncovered upstream regressions that had to be addressed.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf 24.
  • Stefano helped SPI to reconcile their financial records for DebConf 23.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 36 packages to new upstream versions (including fixes for four CVEs in python-aiohttp), fixing RC bugs in ipykernel, ipywidgets, khard, and python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, and packaging zope.deferredimport which was needed for a new upstream version of python-persistent.
  • Colin removed the user_readenv option from OpenSSH s PAM configuration (#1018260), and prepared a release note.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cups.
  • Nicholas Skaggs updated xmacro to support reproducible builds (#1014428), DEP-3 and DEP-5 compatibility, along with utilizing hardening build flags. Helmut supported and uploaded package.
  • As a result of login having become non-essential, Helmut uploaded debvm to unstable and stable and fixed a crossqa.debian.net worker.
  • Santiago worked on the Content Team activities for DebConf24. Together with other DebConf25 team members, Santiago wrote a document for the head of the venue to describe the project of the conference.

8 June 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2024

Welcome to the May 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. A peek into build provenance for Homebrew
  2. Distribution news
  3. Mailing list news
  4. Miscellaneous news
  5. Two new academic papers
  6. diffoscope
  7. Website updates
  8. Upstream patches
  9. Reproducibility testing framework

A peek into build provenance for Homebrew Joe Sweeney and William Woodruff on the Trail of Bits blog wrote an extensive post about build provenance for Homebrew, the third-party package manager for MacOS. Their post details how each bottle (i.e. each release):
[ ] built by Homebrew will come with a cryptographically verifiable statement binding the bottle s content to the specific workflow and other build-time metadata that produced it. [ ] In effect, this injects greater transparency into the Homebrew build process, and diminishes the threat posed by a compromised or malicious insider by making it impossible to trick ordinary users into installing non-CI-built bottles.
The post also briefly touches on future work, including work on source provenance:
Homebrew s formulae already hash-pin their source artifacts, but we can go a step further and additionally assert that source artifacts are produced by the repository (or other signing identity) that s latent in their URL or otherwise embedded into the formula specification.

Distribution news In Debian this month, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (aka josch) noticed that the Debian binary package bash version 5.2.15-2+b3 was uploaded to the archive twice. Once to bookworm and once to sid but with differing content. This is problem for reproducible builds in Debian due its assumption that the package name, version and architecture triplet is unique. However, josch highlighted that
This example with bash is especially problematic since bash is Essential:yes, so there will now be a large portion of .buildinfo files where it is not possible to figure out with which of the two differing bash packages the sources were compiled.
In response to this, Holger Levsen performed an analysis of all .buildinfo files and found that this needs almost 1,500 binNMUs to fix the fallout from this bug. Elsewhere in Debian, Vagrant Cascadian posted about a Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU) sprint to take place during early June, and it was announced that there is now a #debian-snapshot IRC channel on OFTC to discuss the creation of a new source code archiving service to, perhaps, replace snapshot.debian.org. Lastly, 11 reviews of Debian packages were added, 15 were updated and 48 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated by Chris Lamb as well. [ ][ ]
Elsewhere in the world of distributions, deep within a larger announcement from Colin Percival about the release of version 14.1-BETA2, it was mentioned that the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly.
In Fedora, however, the change proposal mentioned in our report for April 2024 was approved, so, per the ReproduciblePackageBuilds wiki page, the add-determinism tool is now running in new builds for Fedora 41 ( rawhide ). The add-determinism tool is a Rust program which, as its name suggests, adds determinism to files that are given as input by attempting to standardize metadata contained in binary or source files to ensure consistency and clamping to $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in all instances . This is essentially the Fedora version of Debian s strip-nondeterminism. However, strip-nondeterminism is written in Perl, and Fedora did not want to pull Perl in the buildroot for every package. The add-determinism tool eliminates many causes of non-determinism and work is ongoing to continue the scope of packages it can operate on.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month, regular contributor kpcyrd wrote to the list with an update on their source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. The whatsrc.org project, which was launched last month in response to the XZ Utils backdoor, now contains and indexes almost 250,000 unique source code archives. In their post, kpcyrd gives an example of its intended purpose, noting that it shown that whilst there seems to be consensus about [the] source code for zsh 5.9 in various Linux distributions, it does not align with the contents of the zsh Git repository . Holger Levsen also posted to the list with a pre-announcement of sorts for the 2024 Reproducible Builds summit. In particular:
[Whilst] the dates and location are not fixed yet, however if you don help us with finding a suitable location soon, it is very likely that we ll meet again in Hamburg in the 2nd half of September 2024 [ ].
Lastly, Frederic-Emmanuel Picca wrote to the list asking for help understanding the non-reproducible status of the Debian silx package and received replies from both Vagrant Cascadian and Chris Lamb.

Miscellaneous news strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. This month strip-nondeterminism version 1.14.0-1 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb chiefly to incorporate a change from Alex Muntada to avoid a dependency on Sub::Override to perform monkey-patching and break circular dependencies related to debhelper [ ]. Elsewhere in our tooling, Jelle van der Waa modified reprotest because the pipes module will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].
It was also noticed that a new blog post by Daniel Stenberg detailing How to verify a Curl release mentions the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. This is because:
The [curl] release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Furthermore, Fay Stegerman filed a bug against the Signal messenger app for Android to report that their reproducible builds cannot, in fact, be reproduced. However, Fay is quick to note that she has:
found zero evidence of any kind of compromise. Some differences are yet unexplained but everything I found seems to be benign. I am disappointed that Reproducible Builds have been broken for months but I have zero reason to doubt Signal s security in any way.

Lastly, it was observed that there was a concise and diagrammatic overview of supply chain threats on the SLSA website.

Two new academic papers Two new scholarly papers were published this month. Firstly, Mathieu Acher, Beno t Combemale, Georges Aaron Randrianaina and Jean-Marc J z quel of University of Rennes on Embracing Deep Variability For Reproducibility & Replicability. The authors describe their approach as follows:
In this short [vision] paper we delve into the application of software engineering techniques, specifically variability management, to systematically identify and explicit points of variability that may give rise to reproducibility issues (e.g., language, libraries, compiler, virtual machine, OS, environment variables, etc.). The primary objectives are: i) gaining insights into the variability layers and their possible interactions, ii) capturing and documenting configurations for the sake of reproducibility, and iii) exploring diverse configurations to replicate, and hence validate and ensure the robustness of results. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to address the complexities associated with reproducibility and replicability in modern software systems and environments, facilitating a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on these critical aspects.
(A PDF of this article is available.)
Secondly, Ludovic Court s, Timothy Sample, Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli have collaborated to publish a paper on Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment. Their paper was motivated because:
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.
(A PDF of this article is also available.)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 266, 267, 268 and 269 to Debian, making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Use xz --list to supplement output when comparing .xz archives; essential when metadata differs. (#1069329)
    • Include xz --verbose --verbose (ie. double) output. (#1069329)
    • Strip the first line from the xz --list output. [ ]
    • Only include xz --list --verbose output if the xz has no other differences. [ ]
    • Actually append the xz --list after the container differences, as it simplifies a lot. [ ]
  • Testing improvements:
    • Allow Debian testing to fail right now. [ ]
    • Drop apktool from Build-Depends; we can still test APK functionality via autopkgtests. (#1071410)
    • Add a versioned dependency for at least version 5.4.5 for the xz tests as they fail under (at least) version 5.2.8. (#374)
    • Fix tests for 7zip 24.05. [ ][ ]
    • Fix all tests after additon of xz --list. [ ][ ]
  • Misc:
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
In addition, James Addison fixed an issue where the HTML output showed only the first difference in a file, while the text output shows all differences [ ][ ][ ], Sergei Trofimovich amended the 7zip version test for older 7z versions that include the string [64] [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian relaxed the versioned dependency to allow version 5.4.1 for the xz tests [ ] and proposed updates to guix for versions 267, 268 and pushed version 269 to Guix. Furthermore, Eli Schwartz updated the diffoscope.org website in order to explain how to install diffoscope on Gentoo [ ].

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb making the print CSS stylesheet nicer [ ]. Fay Stegerman made a number of updates to the page about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ][ ][ ] and Holger Levsen added some of their presentations to the Resources page. Furthermore, IOhannes zm lnig stipulated support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in clang version 16.0.0+ [ ], Jan Zerebecki expanded the Formal definition page and fixed a number of typos on the Buy-in page [ ] and Simon Josefsson fixed the link to Trisquel GNU/Linux on the Projects page [ ].

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a number of patches to fix specific reproducibility issues, including:

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 May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Enable the rebuilder-snapshot API on osuosl4. [ ]
    • Schedule the i386 architecture a bit more often. [ ]
    • Adapt cleanup_nodes.sh to the new way of running our build services. [ ]
    • Add 8 more workers for the i386 architecture. [ ]
    • Update configuration now that the infom07 and infom08 nodes have been reinstalled as real i386 systems. [ ]
    • Make diffoscope timeouts more visible on the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ]
    • Mark the cbxi4a-armhf node as down. [ ][ ]
    • Only install the hdmi2usb-mode-switch package only on Debian bookworm and earlier [ ] and only install the haskell-platform package on Debian bullseye [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Install the ntpdate utility as we need it later. [ ]
    • Document the progress on the i386 architecture nodes at Infomaniak. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated and unnoticed notice. [ ]
    • Add live_setup_schroot to the list of so-called zombie jobs. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo reinstalled the infom07 and infom08 nodes [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4a node as online [ ].
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:

7 June 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf Bursaries, /usr-move, sbuild, and more! (by Stefano Rivera)

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 Bursary updates, by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh is the bursaries team lead for DebConf 24. Bursary requests are dispatched to a team of volunteers to review. The results are collated, adjusted and merged to produce priority lists of requests to fund. Utkarsh raised the team, coordinated the review, and issued bursaries to attendees.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne More and more, the /usr-move transition is being carried out by multiple contributors and many performed around a hundred of the requested uploads. Of these, Helmut contributed five patches and two uploads. As a result, there are less than 350 packages left to be converted, and all of the non-trivial cases have patches. We started with three times that number. Thanks to everyone involved for supporting this effort. For people interested in background information of this transition, Helmut gave a presentation at MiniDebConf Berlin 2024 (slides).

sbuild, by Helmut Grohne While unshare mode of sbuild has existed for quite a while, it is now getting significant use in Debian, and new problems are popping up. Helmut looked into an apparmor-related failure and provided a diagnosis. While relevant code would detect the chroot nature of a schroot backend and skip apparmor tests, the unshare environment would be just good enough to run and fail the test. As sbuild exposes fewer special kernel filesystems, the tests will be skipped again. Another problem popped up when gobject-introspection added a dependency on the host architecture Python interpreter in a cross build environment. sbuild would prefer installing (and failing) a host architecture Python to installing the qemu alternative. Attempts to fix this would result in systemd killing sbuild. ischroot as used by libc6.postinst would not classify the unshare environment as a chroot. Therefore libc6.postinst would run telinit which would kill the build process. This is a complex interaction problem that shall eventually be solved by providing triggers from libc6 to be implemented by affected init systems.

Salsa CI updates, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Several issues arose about Salsa CI last month, and it is probably worth mentioning part of the challenges of defining its framework in YAML. With the upcoming end-of-support of Debian 10 buster as LTS, armel was removed from deb.debian.org, making the jobs that build images for buster/armel to fail. While the removal of buster/armel from the repositories is a natural change, it put some light on the flaws in the Salsa CI design regarding the support of the different Debian releases. Currently, the images are defined like these (from .images-debian.yml): 
.all-supported-releases: &all-supported-releases
  - stretch
  - stretch-backports
  - buster
  - bullseye
  - bullseye-backports
  - bookworm
  - bookworm-backports
  - trixie
  - sid
  - experimental
And from them, different images are built according to the different jobs and how they are supported, for example: 
images-prod-arm:
  stage: build
  extends: .build_template
  tags:
    - $SALSA_CI_ARM_RUNNER_TAG
  parallel:
    matrix:
      # Base image, all releases, all arches
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v5
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE: *all-supported-releases
The removal of buster/armel could be easily reflected as: 
images-prod-arm:
  stage: build
  extends: .build_template
  tags:
    - $SALSA_CI_ARM_RUNNER_TAG
  parallel:
    matrix:
      # Base image, fully supported releases, all arches
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v5
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE:
          - stretch
          - buster
          - bullseye
          - bullseye-backports
          - bookworm
          - bookworm-backports
          - trixie
          - sid
          - experimental
      # buster only supports armhf and arm64
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE: buster
Evidently, this increases duplication of the release support data, which is of course not optimal and it is error prone when changing the data about supported releases. A better approach would be to have two different YAML lists, such as: 
# releases that have partial support. E.g.: buster is transitioning to
# Debian LTS, and buster armel is no longer found in deb.debian.org
.old-releases: &old-releases
  - stretch
  - buster

.currently-supported-releases: &currently-supported-releases
  - bullseye
  - bullseye-backports
  - bookworm
  - bookworm-backports
  - trixie
  - sid
  - experimental
and then a unified list: 
.all-supported-releases: &all-supported-releases
  - *old-releases
  - *currently-supported-releases
that could be used in the matrix of the jobs that build all the images available in the pipeline container registry. However, due to limitations in GitLab, it is not possible to expand the variables or mapping values in a parallel:matrix context. At least not in an elegant fashion. This is the kind of issue that recently arose and that Santiago is currently working to solve, in the simplest possible way. Astute readers would notice that stretch is listed in the fully supported releases. And there is no problem with stretch, because it is built from archive.debian.org. Otto actually has tried to fix the broken image build job doing the same, but it is still incorrect, because the security repository is not (yet) available in archive.debian.org. Additionally, Santiago has also worked on other merge requests, such as:
  1. support branch/tags as target head in the test projects,
  2. build autopkgtest image on top of stable
  3. Add .yamllint and make it happy in the autopkgtest-lxc project
  4. enable FF_SCRIPT_SECTIONS to log multiline commands, among others.

Archiving DebConf Websites, by Stefano Rivera DebConf, the annual Debian conference, has its own new website every year. These are typically complex dynamic web applications (featuring registration, call for papers, scheduling, etc.) Once the conference is over, there is no need to keep maintaining these applications, so we archive the sites off as static HTML, and serve them from Debian s static CDN. Stefano archived the websites for the last two DebConfs. The schedule system behind DebConf 14 and 15 s websites was a derivative of Canonical s summit system. This was only used for a couple of years before migrating to wafer, the current system. Archiving summit content has been on the nice to have list for years, but nobody has ever tackled it. The machine that served the sites went away a couple of years ago. After much digging, a backup of the database was found, and Stefano got this code running on an ancient Python 2.7. Recently Stefano put this all together and hooked in an archive export to finally get this content preserved.

Python 3.x and pypy3 security bug triage, by Stefano Rivera Stefano Rivera triaged all the open security bugs against the Python 3.x and PyPy3 packages for Debian s stable and LTS releases. Several had been fixed but this wasn t recorded in the security tracker.

Linux livepatching support for Debian, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago filed ITP bug #1070494. As stated in the bug, more than an Intent to Package, it is an Intent to Design and Implement live patching support for the Linux kernel in Debian. For now, Emmanuel and Santiago have done exploratory work and they are working to understand the different possibilities to implement livepatching. One possible direction is to rely on kpatch, and the other is to package the modules using regular packaging tools. Also, it is needed to evaluate if it is possible to rely on distributing the modules via packages, or instead as a service, as it is done by some commercial distributions.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups-bjnp to improve packaging.
  • Colin Watson tracked down a baffling CI issue in openssh to unblock several merge requests, removed the user_readenv=1 option from its PAM configuration, and started on the first stage of his plan to split out GSS-API key exchange support to separate packages.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 26 packages to new upstream versions, and cherry-picking an upstream PR to fix a pytest 8 incompatibility in ipywidgets.
  • Colin NMUed a couple of packages to reduce the need for explicit overrides in Packages-arch-specific, and removed some other obsolete entries from there.
  • Emilio managed various library transitions, and helped finish a few of the remaining t64 transitions.
  • Helmut sent a patch for enabling piuparts to work as a regular user building on earlier work.
  • Helmut sent patches for 7 cross build failures, 6 other debian bugs and fixed an infrastructure problem in crossqa.debian.net.
  • Nicholas worked on a sponsored package upload, and discovered the blhc tool for diagnosing build hardening.
  • Stefano Rivera started and completed the re2 transition. The release team suggested moving to a virtual package scheme that includes the absl ABI (as re2 now depends on it). Adopted this.
  • Stefano continued to work on DebConf 24 planning.
  • Santiago continued to work on DebConf24 Content tasks as well as Debconf25 organisation.

5 April 2024

Emanuele Rocca: PGP keys on Yubikey, with a side of Mutt

Here are my notes about copying PGP keys to external hardware devices such as Yubikeys. Let me begin by saying that the gpg tools are pretty bad at this.
MAKE A COUPLE OF BACKUPS OF ~/.gnupg/ TO DIFFERENT ENCRYPTED USB STICKS BEFORE YOU START. GPG WILL MESS UP YOUR KEYS. SERIOUSLY.
For example, would you believe me if I said that saving changes results in the removal of your private key? Well check this out.
Now that you have multiple safe, offline backups of your keys, here are my notes. 
apt install yubikey-manager scdaemon
Plug the Yubikey in, see if it s recognized properly: 
ykman list
gpg --card-status
Change the default PIN (123456) and Admin PIN (12345678): 
gpg --card-edit
gpg/card> admin
gpg/card> passwd
Look at the openpgp information and change the maximum number of retries, if you like. I have seen this failing a couple of times, unplugging the Yubikey and putting it back in worked. 
ykman openpgp info
ykman openpgp access set-retries 7 7 7
Copy your keys. MAKE A BACKUP OF ~/.gnupg/ BEFORE YOU DO THIS. 
gpg --edit-key $KEY_ID
gpg> keytocard # follow the prompts to copy the first key
Now choose the next key and copy that one too. Repeat till all subkeys are copied. 
gpg> key 1
gpg> keytocard
Typing gpg --card-status you should be able to see all your keys on the Yubikey now.

Using the key on another machine
How do you use your PGP keys on the Yubikey on other systems?
Go to another system, if it does have a ~/.gnupg directory already move it somewhere else. 
apt install scdaemon
Import your public key: 
gpg -k
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys $KEY_ID
Check the fingerprint and if it is indeed your key say you trust it: 
gpg --edit-key $KEY_ID
> trust
> 5
> y
> save
Now try gpg --card-status and gpg --list-secret-keys, you should be able to see your keys. Try signing something, it should work. 
gpg --output /tmp/x.out --sign /etc/motd
gpg --verify /tmp/x.out

Using the Yubikey with Mutt
If you re using mutt with IMAP, there is a very simple trick to safely store your password on disk. Create an encrypted file with your IMAP password: 
echo SUPERSECRET   gpg --encrypt > ~/.mutt_password.gpg
Add the following to ~/.muttrc: 
set imap_pass= gpg --decrypt ~/.mutt_password.gpg
With the above, mutt now prompts you to insert the Yubikey and type your PIN in order to connect to the IMAP server.

26 March 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: Adding a private / custom Certificate Authority to the firefox trust store

Today at $WORK I needed to add the private company Certificate Authority (CA) to Firefox, and I found the steps were unnecessarily complex. Time to blog about that, and I also made a Debian wiki article of that post, so that future generations can update the information, when Firefox 742 is released on Debian 17. The cacert certificate authority is not included in Debian and Firefox, and is thus a good example of adding a private CA. Note that this does not mean I specifically endorse that CA.
  • Test that SSL connections to a site signed by the private CA is failing
$ gnutls-cli wiki.cacert.org:443
...
- Status: The certificate is NOT trusted. The certificate issuer is unknown. 
*** PKI verification of server certificate failed...
*** Fatal error: Error in the certificate.
  • Download the private CA
$ wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/root_X0F.crt
  • test that a connection works with the private CA
$ gnutls-cli --x509cafile root_X0F.crt wiki.cacert.org:443
...
- Status: The certificate is trusted. 
- Description: (TLS1.2-X.509)-(ECDHE-SECP256R1)-(RSA-SHA256)-(AES-256-GCM)
- Session ID: 37:56:7A:89:EA:5F:13:E8:67:E4:07:94:4B:52:23:63:1E:54:31:69:5D:70:17:3C:D0:A4:80:B0:3A:E5:22:B3
- Options: safe renegotiation,
- Handshake was completed
...
  • add the private CA to the Debian trust store located in /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
$ sudo cp root_X0F.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/cacert-org-root-ca.crt
$ sudo update-ca-certificates --verbose
...
Adding debian:cacert-org-root-ca.pem
...
  • verify that we can connect without passing the private CA on the command line
$ gnutls-cli wiki.cacert.org:443
... 
 - Status: The certificate is trusted.
  • At that point most applications are able to connect to systems with a certificate signed by the private CA (curl, Gnome builtin Browser ). However Firefox is using its own trust store and will still display a security error if connecting to https://wiki.cacert.org. To make Firefox trust the Debian trust store, we need to add a so called security device, in fact an extra library wrapping the Debian trust store. The library will wrap the Debian trust store in the PKCS#11 industry format that Firefox supports.
  • install the pkcs#11 wrapping library and command line tools 
$ sudo apt install p11-kit p11-kit-modules
  • verify that the private CA is accessible via PKCS#11
$ trust list   grep --context 2 'CA Cert'
pkcs11:id=%16%B5%32%1B%D4%C7%F3%E0%E6%8E%F3%BD%D2%B0%3A%EE%B2%39%18%D1;type=cert
    type: certificate
    label: CA Cert Signing Authority
    trust: anchor
    category: authority
  • now we need to add a new security device in Firefox pointing to the pkcs11 trust store. The pkcs11 trust store is located in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/p11-kit-trust.so
$ dpkg --listfiles p11-kit-modules   grep trust
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/p11-kit-trust.so
  • in Firefox (tested in version 115 esr), go to Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Security -> Security Devices.
    Then click Load , in the popup window use My local trust as a module name, and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/p11-kit-trust.so as a module filename. After adding the module, you should see it in the list of Security Devices, having /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt as a description.
  • now restart Firefox and you should be able to browse https://wiki.cacert.org without security errors

18 March 2024

Gunnar Wolf: After miniDebConf Santa Fe

Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province, Argentina just across the river from Paran , where I have spent almost six beautiful months I will never forget. Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paran are separated by the beautiful and majestic Paran river, which flows from Brazil, marks the Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the litoral region of the country, until it merges with the Uruguay river (you guessed right the river marking the Eastern border of Argentina, first with Brazil and then with Uruguay), and they become the R o de la Plata. This was a short miniDebConf: we were lent the APUL union s building for the weekend (thank you very much!); during Saturday, we had a cycle of talks, and on sunday we had more of a hacklab logic, having some unstructured time to work each on their own projects, and to talk and have a good time together. We were five Debian people attending: santiago debacle eamanu dererk gwolf @debian.org. My main contact to kickstart organization was Mart n Bayo. Mart n was for many years the leader of the Technical Degree on Free Software at Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where I was also a teacher for several years. Together with Leo Mart nez, also a teacher at the tecnicatura, they contacted us with Guillermo and Gabriela, from the APUL non-teaching-staff union of said university. We had the following set of talks (for which there is a promise to get electronic record, as APUL was kind enough to record them! of course, I will push them to our usual conference video archiving service as soon as I get them)
Hour Title (Spanish) Title (English) Presented by
10:00-10:25 Introducci n al Software Libre Introduction to Free Software Mart n Bayo
10:30-10:55 Debian y su comunidad Debian and its community Emanuel Arias
11:00-11:25 Por qu sigo contribuyendo a Debian despu s de 20 a os? Why am I still contributing to Debian after 20 years? Santiago Ruano
11:30-11:55 Mi identidad y el proyecto Debian: Qu es el llavero OpenPGP y por qu ? My identity and the Debian project: What is the OpenPGP keyring and why? Gunnar Wolf
12:00-13:00 Explorando las masculinidades en el contexto del Software Libre Exploring masculinities in the context of Free Software Gora Ortiz Fuentes - Jos Francisco Ferro
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-14:55 Debian para el d a a d a Debian for our every day Leonardo Mart nez
15:00-15:25 Debian en las Raspberry Pi Debian in the Raspberry Pi Gunnar Wolf
15:30-15:55 Device Trees Device Trees Lisandro Dami n Nicanor Perez Meyer (videoconferencia)
16:00-16:25 Python en Debian Python in Debian Emmanuel Arias
16:30-16:55 Debian y XMPP en la medici n de viento para la energ a e lica Debian and XMPP for wind measuring for eolic energy Martin Borgert
As it always happens DebConf, miniDebConf and other Debian-related activities are always fun, always productive, always a great opportunity to meet again our decades-long friends. Lets see what comes next!

12 February 2024

Emanuele Rocca: Enabling Kernel Settings in Debian

This time it s about enabling new kernel config options in the official Debian kernel packages. A few dependencies are needed to run the various scripts used by the Debian kernel folks, as well as to build the kernel itself: 
apt install git gpg python3-debian python3-dacite
apt build-dep linux
With that in place, fetch the linux and kernel-team repos: 
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/kernel-team
So far you ve only got the Debian-specific bits. Fetch the actual kernel sources now. In the likely case that you re building a stable kernel, run the following from within the linux directory: 
debian/bin/genorig.py https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
Use the torvalds repo if you re building an RC version instead: 
debian/bin/genorig.py https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
Now generate the upstream tarball as well as debian/control. The first command will take a bit, and the second command will fail: but that s success just as the output says. 
debian/rules orig
debian/rules debian/control
Now generate patched sources with: 
debian/rules source
Time to edit the Kconfig and enable/disable whatever setting you wanted to change. Take a look around the files under debian/config/ to see where your changes should go. If it s a setting shared among multiple architectures that may be debian/config/config. For x86-specific things, the file is debian/config/amd64/config. On aarch64 debian/config/arm64/config. If in doubt, you could try asking #debian-kernel on IRC.
It may look like you need to figure out where exactly in the file the setting should be placed. That is not the case. There s a helpful script fixing things up for you: 
../kernel-team/utils/kconfigeditor2/process.py .
The above will fail if you forgot to run debian/rules source. The debian/build/source_rt/Kconfig file is needed by the script: 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/linux/../kernel-team/utils/kconfigeditor2/process.py", line 19, in __init__
    menu = fs_menu[featureset or 'none']
           ~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
KeyError: 'rt'
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
[...]
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: './debian/build/source_rt/Kconfig'
If that happens, run: 
debian/rules source
Now process.py should work fine and fix your config file.
Excellent, now the config is updated and we re ready to build the kernel. Off we go: 
export MAKEFLAGS=-j$(nproc)
export DEB_BUILD_PROFILES='pkg.linux.nokerneldbg pkg.linux.nokerneldbginfo pkg.linux.notools nodoc'
dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc -uc

11 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently, the first job in a Salsa CI pipeline is the extract-source job, used to produce a debianize source tree of the project. This job was introduced to make it possible to build the projects on different architectures, on the subsequent build jobs. However, that extract-source approach is sub-optimal: not only it increases the execution time of the pipeline by some minutes, but also projects whose source tree is too large are not able to use the pipeline. The debianize source tree is passed as an artifact to the build jobs, and for those large projects, the size of their source tree exceeds the Salsa s limits. This is specific issue is documented as issue #195, and the proposed solution is to get rid of the extract-source job, relying on sbuild in the very build job (see issue #296). Switching to sbuild would also help to improve the build source job, solving issues such as #187 and #298. The current work-in-progress is very preliminary, but it has already been possible to run the build (amd64), build-i386 and build-source job using sbuild with the unshare mode. The image on the right shows a pipeline that builds grep. All the test jobs use the artifacts of the new build job. There is a lot of remaining work, mainly making the integration with ccache work. This change could break some things, it will also be important to test how the new pipeline works with complex projects. Also, thanks to Emmanuel Arias, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2024 project to improve Salsa CI. As part of the ongoing work in preparation for the GSoC 2024 project, Santiago has proposed a merge request to make more efficient how contributors can test their changes on the Salsa CI pipeline.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In January, we sent most of the moving patches for the set of packages involved with debootstrap. Notably missing is glibc, which turns out harder than anticipated via dumat, because it has Conflicts between different architectures, which dumat does not analyze. Patches for diversion mitigations have been updated in a way to not exhibit any loss anymore. The main change here is that packages which are being diverted now support the diverting packages in transitioning their diversions. We also supported a few packages with non-trivial changes such as netplan.io. dumat has been enhanced to better support derivatives such as Ubuntu.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Python 3.12 migration trundles on. Stefano Rivera helped port several new packages to support 3.12.
  • Stefano updated the Sphinx configuration of DebConf Video Team s documentation, which was broken by Sphinx 7.
  • Stefano published the videos from the Cambridge MiniDebConf to YouTube and PeerTube.
  • DebConf 24 planning has begun, and Stefano & Utkarsh have started work on this.
  • Utkarsh re-sponsored the upload of golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter for Lena.
  • Colin Watson added Incus support to autopkgtest.
  • Colin discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of his packages, including debconf.
  • Colin did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
  • Colin figured out how to update the mirror size documentation in debmirror, last updated in 2010. It should now be much easier to keep it up to date regularly.
  • Colin issued a man-db buster update to clean up some irritations due to strict sandboxing.
  • Thorsten Alteholz adopted two more packages, magicfilter and ifhp, for the debian-printing team. Those packages are the last ones of the latest round of adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don t hesitate to contact Thorsten.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
  • Helmut sent patches for 16 cross build failures.
  • Helmut supported Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) with adding -for-host support to gcc-defaults.
  • Helmut uploaded dput-ng enabling dcut migrate and merging two MRs of Ben Hutchings.
  • Santiago took part in the discussions relating to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Debian public statement that was published last year. He participated in a meeting with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Marcel Kolaja and Karen Melchior, and their teams to clarify some points about the impact of the CRA and Debian and downstream projects, and the improvements in the last version of the proposed regulation.

27 November 2023

Andrew Cater: 20231123 - UEFI install on a Raspberry Pi 4 - step by step instructions to a modified d-i

Motivation
Andy (RattusRattus) and I have been formalising instructions for using Pete Batard's version of Tianocore (and therefore UEFI booting) for the Raspberry Pi 4 together with a Debian arm64 netinst to make a modified Debian installer on a USB stick which "just works" for a Raspberry Pi 4.
Thanks also to Steve McIntyre for initial notes that got this working for us and also to Emmanuele Rocca for putting up some useful instructions for copying.

Recipe

Plug in a USB stick - use dmesg or your favourite method to see how it is identified.

Make a couple of mount points under /mnt - /mnt/data and /mnt/cdrom


1. Grab a USB stick, Partition using MBR. Make a single VFAT
partition, type 0xEF (i.e. EFI System Partition)

For a USB stick (identified as sdX) below:
$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mklabel msdos $ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mkpart primary fat32 0% 100% $ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1 $ sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/data/

Download an arm64 netinst.iso

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/arm64/iso-cd/debian-12.2.0-arm64-netinst.iso

2. Copy the complete contents of partition *1* from a Debian arm64
installer image into the filesystem (partition 1 is the installer
stuff itself) on the USB stick, in /

$ sudo kpartx -v -a debian-12.2.0-arm64-netinst.iso # Mount the first partition on the ISO and copy its contents to the stick $ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/cdrom/ $ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/ $ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom

3. Copy the complete contents of partition *2* from that Debian arm64
installer image into that filesystem (partition 2 is the ESP) on
the USB stick, in /

# Same story with the second partition on the ISO

$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt/cdrom/

$ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/ $ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom

$ sudo kpartx -d debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso $ sudo umount /mnt/data


4. Grab the rpi edk2 build from https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases
(I used 1.35) and extract it. I copied the files there into *2*
places for now on the USB stick:

/ (so the Pi will boot using it)
/rpi4 (so we can find the files again later)

5. Add the preseed.cfg file (attached) into *both* of the two initrd
files on the USB stick

- /install.a64/initrd.gz and
- /install.a64/gtk/initrd.gz

cpio is an awful tool to use :-(. In each case:

$ cp /path/to/initrd.gz .
$ gunzip initrd.gz
$ echo preseed.cfg cpio -H newc -o -A -F initrd

$ gzip -9v initrd

$ cp initrd.gz /path/to/initrd.gz

If you look at the preseed file, it will do a few things:

- Use an early_command to unmount /media (to work around Debian bug
#1051964)

- Register a late_command call for /cdrom/finish-rpi (the next
file - see below) to run at the end of the installation.

- Force grub installation also to the EFI removable media path,
needed as the rpi doesn't store EFI boot variables.

- Stop the installer asking for firmware from removable media (as
the rpi4 will ask for broadcom bluetooth fw that we can't
ship. Can be ignored safely.)

6. Copy the finish-rpi script (attached) into / on the USB stick. It
will be run at the end of the installation, triggered via the
preseed. It does a couple of things:

- Copy the edk2 firmware files into the ESP on the system that's
just been installer

- Remove shim-signed from the installed systems, as there's a bug
that causes it to fail on rpi4. I need to dig into this to see
what the issue is.

That's it! Run the installer as normal, all should Just Work (TM).

BlueTooth didn't quite work : raspberrypi-firmware didn't install until adding a symlink for boot/efi to /boot/firmware

20231127 - This may not be necessary because raspberrypi-firmware path has been fixed

Preseed.cfg
# The preseed file itself causes a problem - the installer medium is
# left mounted on /medis so things break in cdrom-detect. Let's see if
# we can fix that!
d-i preseed/early_command string umount /media true

# Run our command to do rpi setup before reboot
d-i preseed/late_command string /cdrom/finish-rpi

# Force grub installation to the RM path
grub-efi-arm64 grub2/force_efi_extra_removable boolean true

# Don't prompt for missing firmware from removable media,
# e.g. broadcom bluetooth on the rpi.
d-i hw-detect/load_firmware boolean false

Finish.rpi
!/bin/sh

set -x

grep -q -a RPI4 /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/CSRT
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Not running on a Pi 4, exit!"
exit 0
fi

# Copy the rpi4 firmware binaries onto the installed system.
# Assumes the installer media is mounted on /cdrom.
cp -vr /cdrom/rpi4/. /target/boot/efi/.

# shim-signed doesn't seem happy on rpi4, so remove it
mount --bind /sys /target/sys
mount --bind /proc /target/proc
mount --bind /dev /target/dev

in-target apt-get remove --purge --autoremove -y shim-signed




25 November 2023

Andrew Cater: Laptop with ARM, mobile phone BoF - MiniDebConf Cambridge day 1

So following Emanuele's talk on a Lenovo X13s, we're now at the Debian on Mobile BoF (Birds of a feather) discussion session from Arnaud Ferraris
Discussion and questions on how best to support many variants of mobile phones: the short answer seems to be "it's still *hard* - too many devices around to add individual tweaks for every phone and manufacturer.One thing that may not have been audible in the video soundtrack - lots of laughter in the room prompted as someone's device said, audibly "You are not allowed to do that without unlocking your device"Upstream and downstream packages for hardware enablement are also hard: basic support is sometimes easy but that might even include non-support for charging, for example.Much discussion around the numbers of kernels and kernel image proliferation there could be. Debian tends to prefer *one* way of doing things with kernels.Abstracting hardware is the hardest thing but leads to huge kernels - there's no easy trade-off. Simple/feasible in multiple end user devices/supportable - pick one

Next.