Our Debian User Group met on September 27^th for our first meeting since our summer hiatus. As always, it was fun and productive! Here's what we did: pollo:

• reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
  • salsa MR !623
  • salsa MR !624
  • salsa MR !625
  • BTS patch #1077709
  • BTS patch #1065870
• triaged lintian bugs #960909, #1014162 and #978552

sergiodj:

• worked on the following bugs:
  • #1097457
  • #1097487
  • #1097969
  • #1097995
  • #1096367
  • #1096478
  • #1096503
  • #1097445
  • #1097460

LeLutin:

• switched from sbuild-qemu to sbuild-unshare
• worked on the following bugs:
  • #1092937
  • #996824
  • #1112079
  • #1110355

tvaz:

• answered applicants (usual Application Manager stuff) as part of the New Member team
• dealt with less pleasant stuff as part of the Community team
• learned about aibohphobia!

viashimo:

• looked at hardware on PCPartPicker
• starting to port a zig version of soundscraper from zig 0.12 to 0.15.1

tassia:

• set up a local instance of openQA for functionality tests of Debian images
• test-drove said instance and suggested improvements to the new documentation based on a Trixie VM

Pictures This time again, we were hosted at La Balise (formely ATS ). It's nice to see this community project continuing to improve: the social housing apartments on the top floors should be opening this month! Lots of construction work was also ongoing to make the Espace des Possibles more accessible from the street level. Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

If you are like me that you are installing machines with testing and then go and flip them over to the current stable for a while using APT::Default-Release, you might not be receiving all relevant updates. In fact this setting is kind of discouraged in favor of more extensive pinning configuration.However, the field does support regexps, so instead of just specifying, say, "trixie", you can put this in place: APT::Default-Release "/^trixie( -security -proposed-updates -updates)$/";That should bring the security and stable updates back in.It feels like we are recently learning a lot about the drawbacks of these overlays and how they need to be configured properly...

In the last past weeks, I have done something I had been meaning to do for a while but always pushed back at the bottom of my TODO pile: prepare for my death. I am still quite young and perfectly healthy (mentally and physically) and I do plan to live a long and full life, but death is something that comes from us all and can strike anytime. Having witnessed friends and colleagues who lost loved ones who did not prepare adequately for their passing, dealing with all this legal stuff ahead of time seems like the best gift you can leave them. Writing my will was the easiest part of this "preparation for death" process. I have few material possessions and I'm leaving everything to my SO. As for the copyright for my code, I have decided everything I wrote will be licensed under CC0 (public domain) when I die. Quebec where I live also accepts holograph wills, which means I didn't have to hire a notary. Apart from the will, I also wrote a protection mandate¹, filled out Quebec's organ donation form², took a contract for prearranged funeral services³ and finally, wrote a disaster recovery plan. This recovery plan was by far the longest and most tedious part of this entire ordeal. If all your machines use full-disk encryption and you die or forget your passwords (for example after a head injury), can your data be recovered? How do you arbitrate between easy recovery and data security? If all your local devices burn down and you also pass away in the process, how will your next of kin access your remote backups and extract the relevant data (in my case, my password manager)? I had to ask myself many complex questions in this process and although I won't be sharing my disaster recovery plan here (security through obscurity), I urge you to take the time to do something similar yourself and make sure you will leave a house in order when you go away.

Welcome to post 48 in the R⁴ series, and to video 8 in this series. Last week I had the honour of giving the opening talk at the 11eme Rencontres R at the Universit de Mons in Belgium as an invited plenary talk. Big thanks again to Philippe Grosjean and Kathy Huet for the invitation, and for organising a lovely conference. Being the opening talk, we were still sorting out projector issues when I started so I forgot to set a timer, and consequently ran out of time like a newbie. It occured to me that I could simply re-record the talk in front of my slides just as I do for my STAT 447 students. So I sat down this morning and did this, and the video is now online:

The slides are available as well. For questions or other feedback, please consider using the r2u GitHub repo issues section.

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

Hello, hello, hello! This report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal on March 28-29th is very late ... but better late than never? We're now at our fifth BSP in a row¹, which is both nice and somewhat terrifying. Have I really been around for five Debian releases already? Geez... This year, around 13 different people showed up, including some brand new folks! All in all, we ended up working on 77 bugs, 61 of which have since been closed. This is somewhat skewed by the large number of Lintian bugs I closed by merging and releasing the very many patches submitted by Maytham Alsudany (hello Maytham!), but that was still work :D For our past few events, we have been renting a space at Ateliers de la transition socio- cologique. This building used to be nunnery (thus the huge cross on the top floor), but has since been transformed into a multi-faceted project. BSPs are great and this one was no exception. You should try to join an upcoming event or to organise one if you can. It is loads of fun and you will be helping the Debian project release its next stable version sooner! As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue. Pictures Here are a bunch of pictures of the BSP, mixed in with some other pictures I took at this venue during a previous event.

Debian Contributions: 2025-01 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.

Python 3.13 is now the default Python 3 version in Debian, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson The Python 3.13 as default transition has now completed. The next step is to remove Python 3.12 from the archive, which should be very straightforward, it just requires rebuilding C extension packages in no particular order. Stefano fixed some miscellaneous bugs blocking the completion of the 3.13 as default transition.

Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, by Helmut Grohne While Qt5 used to use qmake to query installation properties, Qt6 is moving more and more to CMake and to ease that transition it relies on more qtpaths. Since this tool is not naturally aware of the architecture it is called for, it tends to produce results for the build architecture. Therefore, more than 100 packages were picking up a multiarch directory for the build architecture during cross builds. In collaboration with the Qt/KDE team and Sandro Knau in particular (none affiliated with Freexian), we added an architecture-specific wrapper script in the same way qmake has one for Qt5 and Qt6 already. The relevant CMake module has been updated to prefer the triplet-prefixed wrapper. As a result, most of the KDE packages now cross build on unstable ready in time for the trixie release.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In December, Emil S dergren reported that a live-build was not working for him and in January, Colin Watson reported that the proposed mitigation for debian-installer-utils would practically fail. Both failures were to be attributed to a wrong understanding of implementation-defined behavior in dpkg-divert. As a result, all M18 mitigations had to be reviewed and many of them replaced. Many have been uploaded already and all instances have received updated patches. Even though dumat has been in operation for more than a year, it gained recent changes. For one thing, analysis of architectures other than amd64 was requested. Chris Hofstaedler (not affiliated with Freexian) kindly provided computing resources for repeatedly running it on the larger set. Doing so revealed various cross-architecture undeclared file conflicts in gcc, glibc, and binutils-z80, but it also revealed a previously unknown /usr-move issue in rpi.rpi-common. On top of that, dumat produced false positive diagnostics and wrongly associated Debian bugs in some cases, both of which have now been fixed. As a result, a supposedly fixed python3-sepolicy issue had to be reopened.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne As much as we think of our base system as stable, it is changing a lot and the architecture cross bootstrap tooling is very sensitive to such changes requiring permanent maintenance. A problem that recently surfaced was that building a binutils cross toolchain would result in a binutils-for-host package that would not be practically installable as it would depend on a binutils-common package that was not built. This turned into an examination of binutils-common and noticing that it actually differed across architectures even though it should not. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (not affiliated with Freexian) and Colin Watson kindly helped brainstorm possible solutions. Eventually, Helmut provided a patch to move gprofng bits out of binutils-common. Independently, Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) split out binutils-gold into a separate source package. As a result, binutils-common is now equal across architectures and can be marked Multi-Arch: foreign resolving the initial problem.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago continued the work about the sbuild support for Salsa CI, that was mentioned in the previous month report. The !568 merge request that created the new build image was merged, making it easier to test !569 with external projects. Santiago used a fork of the debusine repo to try the draft !569, and some issues were spotted, and part of them fixed. This is the last debusine pipeline run with the current !569: https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/debusine/-/pipelines/794233. One of the last improvements relates to how to enable projects to customize the pipeline, in an equivalent way than they currently do in the extract-source and build jobs. While this is work-in-progress, the results are rather promising. Next steps include deciding on introducing schroot support for bookworm, bookworm-security, and older releases, as they are done in the official debian buildd.

DebConf preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf will be happening in Brest, France, in July. Santiago continued the DebConf 25 organization work, looking for catering providers. Both Stefano and Santiago have been reaching out to some potential sponsors. DebConf depends on sponsors to cover the organization cost, if your company depends on Debian, please consider sponsoring DebConf. Stefano has been winding up some of the finances from previous DebConfs. Finalizing reimbursements to team members from DebConf 23, and handling some outstanding issues from DebConf 24. Stefano and the rest of the DebConf committee have been reviewing bids for DebConf 26, to select the next venue.

Ruby 3.3 is now the default Ruby interpreter, by Lucas Kanashiro Ruby 3.3 is about to become the default Ruby interpreter for Trixie. Many bugs were fixed by Lucas and the Debian Ruby team during the sprint hold in Paris during Jan 27-31. The next step is to remove support of Ruby 3.1, which is the alternative Ruby interpreter for now. Thanks to the Debian Release team for all the support, especially Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

Rails 7 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro Rails 6 has been shipped by Debian since Bullseye, and as a WEB framework, many issues (especially security related issues) have been encountered and the maintainability of it becomes harder and harder. With that in mind, during the Debian Ruby team sprint last month, the transition to Rack 3 (an important dependency of rails containing many breaking changes) was started in Debian unstable, it is ongoing. Once it is done, the Rails 7 transition will take place, and Rails 7 should be shipped in Debian Trixie.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano improved a poor ImportError for users of the turtle module on Python 3, who haven t installed the python3-tk package.
• Stefano updated several packages to new upstream releases.
• Stefano added the Python extension to the re2 package, allowing for the use of the Google RE2 regular expression library as a direct replacement for the standard library re module.
• Stefano started provisioning a new physical server for the debian.social infrastructure.
• Carles improved simplemonitor (documentation on systemd integration, worked with upstream for fixing a bug).
• Carles upgraded packages to new upstream versions: python-ring-doorbell and python-asyncclick.
• Carles did po-debconf translations to Catalan: reviewed 44 packages and submitted translations to 90 packages (via salsa merge requests or bugtracker bugs).
• Carles maintained po-debconf-manager with small fixes.
• Rapha l worked on some outstanding DEP-14 merge request and participated in the associated discussion. The discussions have been more contentious than anticipated, somewhat exacerbated by Otto s desire to conclude fast while the required tool support is not yet there.
• Rapha l, with the help of Philipp Kern from the DSA team, upgraded tracker.debian.org to use Django 4.2 (from bookworm-backports) which in turn enabled him to configure authentication via salsa.debian.org. It s now possible to login to tracker.debian.org with your salsa credentials!
• Rapha l updated zim a nice desktop wiki that is very handy to organize your day-to-day digital life to the latest upstream version (0.76).
• Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures.
• Helmut continued working on a tool for memory-based concurrency limit of builds.
• Helmut NMUed libtool, opensysusers and virtualbox.
• Enrico tried to support Helmut in working out tricky usrmerge situations
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of brlaser.
• Colin Watson upgraded 33 Python packages to new upstream versions, including fixes for CVE-2024-42353, CVE-2024-47532, and CVE-2025-22153.
• Emilio Pozuelo managed various transitions, and fixed various RC bugs (telepathy-glib, xorg, xserver-xorg-video-vesa, apitrace, mesa).
• Anupa attended the monthly team meeting for Debian publicity team and shared the social media stats.
• Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud in the point release announcement for Debian 12.9 and published the Micronews.
• Anupa took part in multiple Debian publicity team discussions regarding our presence in social media platforms.

20 years ago, I got my Debian Developer account. I was 18 at the time, it was Shrove Tuesday and - as is customary - I was drunk when I got the email. There was so much that I did not know - which is also why the process took 1.5 years from the time I applied. I mostly only maintained a package or two. I'm still amazed that Christian Perrier and Joerg Jaspert put sufficient trust in me at that time. Nevertheless now feels like a good time for a personal reflection of my involvement in Debian.
During my studies I took on more things. In January 2008 I joined the Release Team as an assistant, which taught me a lot of code review. I have been an Application Manager on the side.
Going to my first Debconf was really a turning point. My first one was Mar del Plata in Argentina in August 2008, when I was 21. That was quite an excitement, traveling that far from Germany for the first time. The personal connections I made there made quite the difference. It was also a big boost for motivation. I attended 8 (Argentina), 9 (Spain), 10 (New York), 11 (Bosnia and Herzegovina), 12 (Nicaragua), 13 (Switzerland), 14 (Portland), 15 (Germany), 16 (South Africa), and hopefully I'll make it to this year's in Brest. At all of them I did not see much of the countries as I prioritized all of my time focused on Debian, even skipping some of the day trips in favor of team meetings. Yet I am very grateful to the project (and to my employer) for shipping me there.I ended up as Stable Release Manager for a while, from August 2008 - when Martin Zobel-Helas moved into DSA - until I got dropped in March 2020. I think my biggest achievements were pushing for the creation of -updates in favor of a separate volatile archive and a change of the update policy to allow for more common sense updates in the main archive vs. the very strict "breakage or security" policy we had previously. I definitely need to call out Adam D. Barratt for being the partner in crime, holding up the fort for even longer.In 2009 I got too annoyed at the existing wanna-build team not being responsive anymore and pushed for the system to be given to a new team. I did not build it and significant contributions were done by other people (like Andreas Barth and Joachim Breitner, and later Aurelien Jarno). I mostly reworked the way the system was triggered, investigated when it broke and was around when people wanted things merged.
In the meantime I worked sys/netadmin jobs while at university, both paid and as a volunteer with the students' council. For a year or two I was the administrator of a System z mainframe IBM donated to my university. We had a mainframe course and I attended two related conferences. That's where my s390(x) interest came from, although credit for the port needs to go to Aurelien Jarno.
Since completing university in 2013 I have been working for a company for almost 12 years. Debian experience was very relevant to the job and I went on maintaining a Linux distro or two at work - before venturing off into security hardening. People in megacorps - in my humble opinion - disappear from the volunteer projects because a) they might previously have been studying and thus had a lot more time on their hands and b) the job is too similar to the volunteer work and thus the same brain cells used for work are exhausted and can't be easily reused for volunteer work. I kept maintaining a couple of things (buildds, some packages) - mostly because of a sense of commitment and responsibility, but otherwise kind of scaled down my involvement. I also felt less connected as I dropped off IRC.Last year I finally made it to Debian events again: MiniDebconf in Berlin, where we discussed the aftermath of the xz incident, and the Debian BSP in Salzburg. I rejoined IRC using the Matrix bridge. That also rekindled my involvement, with me guiding a new DD through NM and ending up in DSA. To be honest, only in the last two or three years I felt like a (more) mature old-timer.
I have a new gig at work lined up to start soon and next to that I have sysadmining for Debian. It is pretty motivating to me that I can just get things done - something that is much harder to achieve at work due to organizational complexities. It balances out some frustration I'd otherwise have. The work is different enough to be enjoyable and the people I work with are great.

The future
I still think the work we do in Debian is important, as much as I see a lack of appreciation in a world full of containers. We are reaping most of the benefits of standing on the shoulders of giants and of great decisions made in the past (e.g. the excellent Debian policy, but also the organizational model) that made Debian what it is today.Given the increase in size and complexity of what Debian ships - and the somewhat dwindling resource of developer time, it would benefit us to have better processes for large-scale changes across all packages. I greatly respect the horizontal effects that are currently being driven and that suck up a lot of energy.A lot of our infrastructure is also aging and not super well maintained. Many take it for granted that the services we have keep existing, but most are only maintained by a person or two, if even. Software stacks are aging and it is even a struggle to have all necessary packages in the next release.Hopefully I can contribute a bit or two to these efforts in the future.

Another year of data from Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency! A few highlights this year:

1. The closure of the Saint-Michel station had a drastic impact on D'Iberville, the station closest to it.
2. The opening of the Royalmount shopping center nearly doubled the traffic of the De La Savane station.
3. The Montreal subway continues to grow, but has not yet recovered from the pandemic. Berri-UQAM station (the largest one) is still below 1 million entries per quarter compared to its pre-pandemic record.

By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

Licences

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. STM apparently changed (again!) the way they are exporting data, and since it's now somewhat sane, I didn't have to rely on a converter script.

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.

Our Debian User Group met on December 22^nd for our last meeting of 2024. I wasn't sure at first it was a good idea, but many people showed up and it was great! Here's what we did: pollo:

• migrated to a new Yubikey
• merged a lintian MR

anarcat:

• fought with the Supersonic flatpak to fix build with latest placebo (failed), but managed to update to the latest upstream
• realized that keyring-pass does the inverse of what he needs, whereas pass_secret_service, which does, is poorly maintained and depends on the dead pypass library
• uploaded new upstream versions of etckeeper, mdformat and python-internetarchive
• improved a lintian warning
• opened yet another sbuild bug
• started playing with sfwbar

lelutin:

• worked on the 2024 Advent of Code in Rust

lavamind:

• installed Debian on an oooollld (as in, with a modem) laptop
• debugged a FTBFS on jruby

tvaz:

• did some simple packaging QA
• added basic salsa CI and some RFA for a bunch of packages (python-midiutil, antimony, python-pyo, rakarrack, python-pyknon, soundcraft-utils, cecilia, nasty, gnome-icon-theme-nuovo, gnome-extra-iconsg, nome-subtitles, timgm6mb-soundfont)

mjeanson and joeDoe:

• hanged out and did some stuff :)

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue. Pictures This time around, we were hosted by l'Espace des possibles, at their new location (they moved since our last visit). It was great! People liked the space so much we actually discussed going back there more often :)

Another musical retrospective. If you enjoy this, I also did a 2022 and a 2023 one. Albums In 2024, I added 88 new albums to my collection that's a lot! This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. To be honest, I'm quite distraught by what's become of that website. Although it stays a wonderful place to buy underground music, Songtradr, the new owner of the platform, has been shown to be viciously anti-union. Money continues to ruin the world, I guess. Concerts I continued to go to a lot of concerts in 2024 (25!). Over the past 3 years, I have been going to more and more concerts, and I think I've reached my "peak". A mean of a concert every two weeks is quite a lot :) If you also like music and concerts, but find yourself not going to as many as you would like, the real secret is not to be afraid to go to concerts alone. Going with friends is always fun, but if I restricted myself to only going to concerts in a group, I'd barely see a few each year. Another good advice is to bring a book or something else¹ to pass the time between sets. It can often take 30-45 minutes between sets for the artists to get their instruments ready, which can get quite boring if you just stand there and wait. Anyway, here are the concerts I went to in 2024:

• February 22^nd-23^rd-24^th (Montreal Madhouse 2024): Scorching Tomb, Bruiserweight, Scaramanga, Cloned Apparition, Chain Block, Freezerburn, B ton Arm , Mil-Spec, NUKE, Friction, Reality Denied, SOV, Deathnap, Glint, Mulch, Stigmatism, Plus Minus, Puffer, Deadbolt, Apes, Pale Ache, Total Nada, Verify, Cross Check
• March 16^th: Kavinsky
• April 11^th: Agriculture
• April 26^th-27^th (Oi! Fest 2024): Bishops Green, The Partisans, Mess, Fuerza Bruta, Empire Down, Unwanted Noise, Lion's Law, The Oppressed, Ultra Sect, Reckless Upstarts, 21 Gun Salute, Jail
• May 4^th: MASTER BOOT RECORD
• May 16^th: Wayfarer, Valdrin, Sonja
• May 25^th: Union Thugs
• June 15^th: Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill, Street Code, Mortier
• September 5^th-6^th (Droogs Fest 2024): Skarface, Inspecter 7, 2 Stone 2 Skank, Francb tards, Les Happycuriens, Perkele, Blanks 77, Violent Way, La Gachette, Jenny Woo
• September 16^th: Too Many Zoos
• September 27^th: The Slads, Young Blades, New Release, Mortier
• October 2^nd: Amorphis, Dark Tranquility, Fires in the Distance
• October 7^th: Jordi Savall & Hesp rion XXI, accompanied by La Capella Reial de Catalunya
• October 11^th-12^th (Revolution Fest 2024): Ren Binam , Dirty Old Mat, Union Thugs, Gunh Twei, Vermine Kaos, Inner Terrestrials, Ultra Razzia, Battery March, Uzu, One Last Thread, Years of Lead
• October 19^th (Varning from Montreal XVI): Coupe Gorge, Flash, Imploders, Young Blades, Tenaz, M torw lf
• November 2^nd: Kon-Fusion, Union Thugs
• November 12^th: Chat Pile, Agriculture, Traindodge
• November 25^th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• November 27^th: Zeal & Ardour, Gaerea, Zetra
• December 7^th: Perestro ka, Priors, White Knuckles, Tenaz

Shout out to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there. See you all in 2025!

Review: Number Go Up, by Zeke Faux

Publisher:	Crown Currency
Copyright:	2023
Printing:	2024
ISBN:	0-593-44382-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	373

Number Go Up is a cross between a history and a first-person account of investigative journalism around the cryptocurrency bubble and subsequent collapse in 2022. The edition I read has an afterward from June 2024 that brings the story up to date with Sam Bankman-Fried's trial and a few other events. Zeke Faux is a reporter for Bloomberg News and a fellow of New America. Last year, I read Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, a somewhat-sympathetic book-length profile of Sam Bankman-Fried that made a lot of people angry. One of the common refrains at the time was that people should read Number Go Up instead, and since I'm happy to read more about the absurdities of the cryptocurrency world, I finally got around to reading the other big crypto book of 2023. This is a good book, with some caveats that I am about to explain at absurd length. If you want a skeptical history of the cryptocurrency bubble, you should read it. People who think that it's somehow in competition with Michael Lewis's book or who think the two books disagree (including Faux himself) have profoundly missed the point of Going Infinite. I agree with Matt Levine: Both of these books are worth your time if this is the sort of thing you like reading about. But (much) more on Faux's disagreements with Lewis later. The frame of Number Go Up is Faux's quixotic quest to prove that Tether is a fraud. To review this book, I therefore need to briefly explain what Tether is. This is only the first of many extended digressions. One natural way to buy cryptocurrency would be to follow the same pattern as a stock brokerage account. You would deposit some amount of money into the account (or connect the brokerage account to your bank account), and then exchange money for cryptocurrency or vice versa, using bank transfers to put money in or take it out. However, there are several problems with this. One is that swapping cryptocurrency for money is awkward and sometimes expensive. Another is that holding people's investment money for them is usually highly regulated, partly for customer safety but also to prevent money laundering. These are often called KYC laws (Know Your Customer), and the regulation-hostile world of cryptocurrency didn't want to comply with them. Tether is a stablecoin, which means that the company behind Tether attempts to guarantee that one Tether is always worth exactly one US dollar. It is not a speculative investment like Bitcoin; it's a cryptocurrency substitute for dollars. People exchange dollars for Tether to get their money into the system and then settle all of their subsequent trades in Tether, only converting the Tether back to dollars when they want to take their money out of cryptocurrency entirely. In essence, Tether functions like the cash reserve in a brokerage account: Your Tether holdings are supposedly guaranteed to be equivalent to US dollars, you can withdraw them at any time, and because you can do so, you don't bother, instead leaving your money in the reserve account while you contemplate what new coin you want to buy. As with a bank, this system rests on the assurance that one can always exchange one Tether for one US dollar. The instant people stop believing this is true, people will scramble to get their money out of Tether, creating the equivalent of a bank run. Since Tether is not a regulated bank or broker and has no deposit insurance or strong legal protections, the primary defense against a run on Tether is Tether's promise that they hold enough liquid assets to be able to hand out dollars to everyone who wants to redeem Tether. (A secondary defense that I wish Faux had mentioned is that Tether limits redemptions to registered accounts redeeming more than $100,000, which is a tiny fraction of the people who hold Tether, but for most purposes this doesn't matter because that promise is sufficient to maintain the peg with the dollar.) Faux's firmly-held belief throughout this book is that Tether is lying. He believes they do not have enough money to redeem all existing Tether coins, and that rather than backing every coin with very safe liquid assets, they are using the dollars deposited in the system to make illiquid and risky investments. Faux never finds the evidence that he's looking for, which makes this narrative choice feel strange. His theory was tested when there was a run on Tether following the collapse of the Terra stablecoin. Tether passed without apparent difficulty, redeeming $16B or about 20% of the outstanding Tether coins. This doesn't mean Faux is wrong; being able to redeem 20% of the outstanding tokens is very different from being able to redeem 100%, and Tether has been fined for lying about its reserves. But Tether is clearly more stable than Faux thought it was, which makes the main narrative of the book weirdly unsatisfying. If he admitted he might be wrong, I would give him credit for showing his work even if it didn't lead where he expected, but instead he pivots to focusing on Tether's role in money laundering without acknowledging that his original theory took a serious blow. In Faux's pursuit of Tether, he wanders through most of the other elements of the cryptocurrency bubble, and that's the strength of this book. Rather than write Number Go Up as a traditional history, Faux chooses to closely follow his own thought processes and curiosity. This has the advantage of giving Faux an easy and natural narrative, something that non-fiction books of this type can struggle with, and it lets Faux show how confusing and off-putting the cryptocurrency world is to an outsider. The best parts of this book were the parts unrelated to Tether. Faux provides an excellent summary of the Axie Infinity speculative bubble and even traveled to the Philippines to interview people who were directly affected. He then wandered through the bizarre world of NFTs, and his first-hand account of purchasing one (specifically a Mutant Ape) to get entrance to a party (which sounded like a miserable experience I would pay money to get out of) really drives home how sketchy and weird cryptocurrency-related software and markets can be. He also went to El Salvador to talk to people directly about the country's supposed embrace of Bitcoin, and there's no substitute for that type of reporting to show how exaggerated and dishonest the claims of cryptocurrency adoption are. The disadvantage of this personal focus on Faux himself is that it sometimes feels tedious or sensationalized. I was much less interested in his unsuccessful attempts to interview the founder of Tether than Faux was, and while the digression into forced labor compounds in Cambodia devoted to pig butchering scams was informative (and horrific), I think Faux leaned too heavily on an indirect link to Tether. His argument is that cryptocurrency enables a type of money laundering that is particularly well-suited to supporting scams, but both scams and this type of economic slavery existed before cryptocurrency and will exist afterwards. He did not make a very strong case that Tether was uniquely valuable as a money laundering service, as opposed to a currently useful tool that would be replaced with some other tool should it go away. This part of the book is essentially an argument that money laundering is bad because it enables crime, and sure, to an extent I agree. But if you're going to put this much emphasis on the evils of money laundering, I think you need to at least acknowledge that many people outside the United States do not want to give US government, which is often openly hostile to them, veto power over their financial transactions. Faux does not. The other big complaint I have with this book, and with a lot of other reporting on cryptocurrency, is that Faux is sloppy with the term "Ponzi scheme." This is going to sound like nit-picking, but I think this sloppiness matters because it may obscure an ongoing a shift in cryptocurrency markets. A Ponzi scheme is not any speculative bubble. It is a very specific type of fraud in which investors are promised improbably high returns at very low risk and with safe principal. These returns are paid out, not via investment in some underlying enterprise, but by taking the money from new investments and paying it to earlier investors. Ponzi schemes are doomed because satisfying their promises requires a constantly increasing flow of new investors. Since the population of the world is finite, all Ponzi schemes are mathematically guaranteed to eventually fail, often in a sudden death spiral of ever-increasing promises to lure new investors when the investment stream starts to dry up. There are some Ponzi schemes in cryptocurrency, but most practices that are called Ponzi schemes are not. For example, Faux calls Axie Infinity a Ponzi scheme, but it was missing the critical elements of promised safe returns and fraudulently paying returns from the investments of later investors. It was simply a speculative bubble that people bought into on the assumption that its price would increase, and like any speculative bubble those who sold before the peak made money at the expense of those who bought at the peak. The reason why this matters is that Ponzi schemes are a self-correcting problem. One can decry the damage caused when they collapse, but one can also feel the reassuring certainty that they will inevitably collapse and prove the skeptics correct. The same is not true of speculative assets in general. You may think that the lack of an underlying economic justification for prices means that a speculative bubble is guaranteed to collapse eventually, but in the famous words of Gary Schilling, "markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." One of the people Faux interviews explains this distinction to him directly:

Rong explained that in a true Ponzi scheme, the organizer would have to handle the "fraud money." Instead, he gave the sneakers away and then only took a small cut of each trade. "The users are trading between each other. They are not going through me, right?" Rong said. Essentially, he was arguing that by downloading the Stepn app and walking to earn tokens, crypto bros were Ponzi'ing themselves.

Faux is openly contemptuous of this response, but it is technically correct. Stepn is not a Ponzi scheme; it's a speculative bubble. There are no guaranteed returns being paid out of later investments and no promise that your principal is safe. People are buying in at price that you may consider irrational, but Stepn never promised you would get your money back, let alone make a profit, and therefore it doesn't have the exponential progression of a Ponzi scheme. One can argue that this is a distinction without a moral difference, and personally I would agree, but it matters immensely if one is trying to analyze the future of cryptocurrencies. Schemes as transparently unstable as Stepn (which gives you coins for exercise and then tries to claim those coins have value through some vigorous hand-waving) are nearly as certain as Ponzi schemes to eventually collapse. But it's also possible to create a stable business around allowing large numbers of people to regularly lose money to small numbers of sophisticated players who are collecting all of the winnings. It's called a poker room at a casino, and no one thinks poker rooms are Ponzi schemes or are doomed to collapse, even though nearly everyone who plays poker will lose money. This is the part of the story that I think Faux largely missed, and which Michael Lewis highlights in Going Infinite. FTX was a legitimate business that made money (a lot of money) off of trading fees, in much the same way that a casino makes money off of poker rooms. Lots of people want to bet on cryptocurrencies, similar to how lots of people want to play poker. Some of those people will win; most of those people will lose. The casino doesn't care. Its profit comes from taking a little bit of each pot, regardless of who wins. Bankman-Fried also speculated with customer funds, and therefore FTX collapsed, but there is no inherent reason why the core exchange business cannot be stable if people continue to want to speculate in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps people will get tired of this method of gambling, but poker has been going strong for 200 years. It's also important to note that although trading fees are the most obvious way to be a profitable cryptocurrency casino, they're not the only way. Wall Street firms specialize in finding creative ways to take a cut of every financial transaction, and many of those methods are more sophisticated than fees. They are so good at this that buying and selling stock through trading apps like Robinhood is free. The money to run the brokerage platform comes from companies that are delighted to pay for the opportunity to handle stock trades by day traders with a phone app. This is not, as some conspiracy theories would have you believe, due to some sort of fraudulent price manipulation. It is because the average person with a Robinhood phone app is sufficiently unsophisticated that companies that have invested in complex financial modeling will make a steady profit taking the other side of their trades, mostly because of the spread (the difference between offered buy and sell prices). Faux is so caught up in looking for Ponzi schemes and fraud that I think he misses this aspect of cryptocurrency's transformation. Wall Street trading firms aren't piling into cryptocurrency because they want to do securities fraud. They're entering this market because there seems to be persistent demand for this form of gambling, cryptocurrency markets reward complex financial engineering, and running a legal casino is a profitable business model. Michael Lewis appears as a character in this book, and Faux portrays him quite negatively. The root of this animosity appears to stem from a cryptocurrency conference in the Bahamas that Faux attended. Lewis interviewed Bankman-Fried on stage, and, from Faux's account, his questions were fawning and he praised cryptocurrencies in ways that Faux is certain he knew were untrue. From that point on, Faux treats Lewis as an apologist for the cryptocurrency industry and for Sam Bankman-Fried specifically. I think this is a legitimate criticism of Lewis's methods of getting close to the people he wants to write about, but I think Faux also makes the common mistake of assuming Lewis is a muckraking reporter like himself. This has never been what Lewis is interested in. He writes about people he finds interesting and that he thinks a reader will also find interesting. One can legitimately accuse him of being credulous, but that's partly because he's not even trying to do the same thing Faux is doing. He's not trying to judge; he's trying to understand. This shows when it comes to the parts of this book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Faux's default assumption is that everyone involved in cryptocurrency is knowingly doing fraud, and a lot of his research is looking for evidence to support the conclusion he had already reached. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that approach: Faux is largely, although not entirely, correct, and this type of hostile journalism is incredibly valuable for society at large. Upton Sinclair didn't start writing The Jungle with an open mind about the meat-packing industry. But where Faux and Lewis disagree on Bankman-Fried's motivations and intentions, I think Lewis has the much stronger argument. Faux's position is that Bankman-Fried always intended to steal people's money through fraud, perhaps to fund his effective altruism donations, and his protestations that he made mistakes and misplaced funds are obvious lies. This is an appealing narrative if one is looking for a simple villain, but Faux's evidence in support of this is weak. He mostly argues through stereotype: Bankman-Fried was a physics major and a Jane Street trader and therefore could not possibly be the type of person to misplace large amounts of money or miscalculate risk. If he wants to understand how that could be possible, he could read Going Infinite? I find it completely credible that someone with what appears to be uncontrolled, severe ADHD could be adept at trading and calculating probabilities and yet also misplace millions of dollars of assets because he wasn't thinking about them and therefore they stopped existing. Lewis made a lot of people angry by being somewhat sympathetic to someone few people wanted to be sympathetic towards, but Faux (and many others) are also misrepresenting his position. Lewis agrees that Bankman-Fried intentionally intermingled customer funds with his hedge fund and agrees that he lied about doing this. His only contention is that Bankman-Fried didn't do this to steal the money; instead, he invested customer money in risky bets that he thought would pay off. In support of this, Lewis made a prediction that was widely scoffed at, namely that much less of FTX's money was missing than was claimed, and that likely most or all of it would be found. And, well, Lewis was basically correct? The FTX bankruptcy is now expected to recover considerably more than the amount of money owed to creditors. Faux argues that this is only because the bankruptcy clawed back assets and cryptocurrencies have gone up considerably since the FTX bankruptcy, and therefore that the lost money was just replaced by unexpected windfall profits on other investments, but I don't think this point is as strong as he thinks it is. Bankman-Fried lost money on some of what he did with customer funds, made money on other things, and if he'd been able to freeze withdrawals for the year that the bankruptcy froze them, it does appear most of the money would have been recoverable. This does not make what he did legal or morally right, but no one is arguing that, only that he didn't intentionally steal money for his own personal gain or for effective altruism donations. And on that point, I don't think Faux is giving Lewis's argument enough credit. I have a lot of complaints about this book because I know way too much about this topic than anyone should probably know. I think Faux missed the plot in a couple of places, and I wish someone would write a book about where cryptocurrency markets are currently going. (Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter is quite good, but it's about all sorts of things other than cryptocurrency and isn't designed to tell a coherent story.) But if you know less about cryptocurrency and just want to hear the details of the run-up to the 2022 bubble, this is a great book for that. Faux is writing for people who are already skeptical and is not going to convince people who are cryptocurrency true believers, but that's fine. The details are largely correct (and extensively footnoted) and will satisfy most people's curiosity. Lewis's Going Infinite is a better book, though. It's not the same type of book at all, and it will not give you the broader overview of the cryptocurrency world. But if you're curious about what was going through the head of someone at the center of all of this chaos, I think Lewis's analysis is much stronger than Faux's. I'm happy I read both books. Rating: 8 out of 10

After finding AlmaLinux mirror sync capacity at Tier 0 (or Tier 1, however you look at it) is around 140 Gbps, I wanted to find source and hierarchy in Debian mirroring systems. There are two main types of mirrors in Debian - Debian package mirrors (for package installs and updates) and Debian CD mirrors (for ISO and others medias). Let s talk about package mirrors (and it s hierarchy) first.

Package mirror hierarchy Trace file was a good starting point for checking upstream for a package mirror in Debian. It resides at <URL>/debian/project/trace/_traces and shows flow of data. Sample trace file from jing.rocks s mirror. It showed, canonical source for packages is ftp-master.debian.org. Checking via https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi, showed it s fasolo.d.o hosted at Brown University, US. This serves as Master Archive Server , making it a Tier 0 mirror. It s entry mentions that it has 1 Gbps shared LAN connectivity (dated information?) but it only has to push to 3 other machines/sites. Side note - .d.o is .debian.org As shown on https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, the three sites are:

• syncproxy2.eu.debian.org ie smit.d.o hosted by University of Twente, Netherlands with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
• syncproxy4.eu.debian.org ie schmelzer.d.o hosted by Conova in Austria with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
• syncproxy2.wna.debian.org - https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi entry mentions it being hosted at UBC here, but IP seems to be pointing to OSUOSL IP range as of now. IIRC few months ago, syncproxy2.wna.d.o was made to point to other host due to some issue (?). mirror-osuosl.d.o seems to be serving as syncproxy2.wna.d.o now. Bandwidth isn t explicitly mentioned but from my experience seeing bandwidths which other free software projects hosted at OSUOSL have, it would be atleast 10 Gbps and maybe more for Debian.

                     syncproxy2.eu.d.o (NL) ---> to the world
                    /
ftp-master.d.o (US) -- syncproxy4.eu.d.o (AT)  --> to the world 
                    \
                     syncproxy2.wna.d.o (US) --> to the world

A visualation of flow of package from ftp-master.d.o

These form the Debian Tier 1 mirror network, as all the mirrors sync from them. So Debian has atleast 50 Gbps+ capacity at Tier 1. A normal Debian user might never directly interact with any of these 3 machines, but every Debian package they run/download/install flows through these machines. Though, I m unsure what wna stands for in syncproxy2.wna.d.o. NA probably is North America and W is west (coast)? If you know, do let me know. After Tier 1, there are a few more syncproxies (detailed below). There are atleast 45 mirrors at Tier 2, updates for which are directly pushed from the three Tier 1 sync proxies. Most country mirrors i.e. ftp..debian.org are at Tier 2 too (barring a few like ftp.au.d.o, ftp.nz.do etc). Coming back to Sync proxies at Tier 2:

• syncproxy3.wna.debian.org - gretchaninov.d.o which is marked as syncproxy2 on db.d.o (information dated). It s hosted in University of British Columbia, Canada, where a lot of Debian infrastructure including Salsa is hosted.
• syncproxy.eu.debian.org - Croatian Academic and Research Network managed machine. CNAME directs to debian.carnet.hr.
• syncproxy.au.debian.org - mirror-anu.d.o hosted by Australian National University with 100Mbps connectivity. Closest sync proxy for all Australian mirrors.
• syncproxy4.wna.debian.org - syncproxy-aws-wna-01.d.o hosted in AWS, in US (according to GeoIP). IPv6 only (CNAME to syncproxy-aws-wna-01.debian.org. which only has an AAAA record, no A record). A m6g.2xlarge instance which has speeds upto 10 Gbps.

Coming back to https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, one can see chain extend till Tier 6 like in case of this mirror in AU which should add some latency for the updates from being pushed at ftp-master.d.o to them. Ideally, which shouldn t be a problem as https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#when mentions The main archive gets updated four times a day . In my case, I get my updates from NITC mirror, so my updates flows from US > US > TW > IN > me in IN. CDNs have to internally manage cache purging too unlike normal mirrors which directly serve static file. Both deb.debian.org (sponsored by Fastly) and cdn-aws.deb.debian.org (sponsored by Amazon Cloudfront) sync from following CDN backends:

• mirror.accumu.d.o hosted by Academic Computer Club in Ume , Sweden.
• mirror-skroutz.d.o hosted by Skroutz Internet Services in Greece.
• schmelzer.d.o hosted by Conovo in Austria.

See deb.d.o trace file and cdn-aws.deb.d.o trace file. (Thanks to Philipp Kern for the heads up here.)

CD image mirrors Hierarchy Till now, I have only talked about Debian package mirrors. When you see /debian directory on various mirrors, they re usually for package install and updates. If you want to grab the latest (and greatest) Debian ISO, you go to Debian CD (as they re still called) mirror site. casulana.d.o is mentioned as CD builder site hosted by Bytemark while pettersson-ng.d.o is mentioned as CD publishing server hosted at Academic Computer Club in Ume , Sweden. Primary download site for Debian CD when you click download on debian.org homepage is https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/ is hosted here as well. This essentially becomes Tier 0 mirror for Debian CD. All Debian CD mirrors are downstream to it.

pettersson-ng.d.o / cdimage.d.o (SE) ---> to the world

A visualation of flow of Debian CD from cdimage.d.o

Academic Computer Club s mirror setup uses a combination of multiple machines (called frontends and offloading servers) to load balance requests. Their document setup is a highly recommended read. Also, in that document, they mention , All machines are reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6 and connected with 10 or 25 gigabit Ethernet, external bandwidth available is 200 gigabit/s. For completeness sake, following mirror (or mirror systems) exists too for Debian:

• Debian Ports mirrors.
• Debian Archive mirrors to get old Debian versions.
• Debian Security has bunch official mirrors (as mentioned here) behind security.d.o. It resolves to Fastly IP ranges so could be Fastly or Debian operated mirrors. Taking a look at https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi tells seger.d.o in DE is security-master which I m assuming is source for all following mentioned security mirrors:
  • lobos.d.o in DE
  • mirror-csail.d.o in US
  • mirror-anu.d.o in AU
  • santoro.d.o in BR
  • schumann.d.o in DE
  • setoguchi.d.o in JP
  • villa.d.o in DE
  • wieck.d.o in DE

Debian heavily rely on various organizations to donate resources (hosting and hardware) to distribute and update Debian. Compiling above information made me thankful to all these organizations. Many thanks to DSA and mirror team as well for managing these stuffs. I relied heavily on https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi which seems to be manually updated, so things might have changed along the way. If anything looks amiss, feel free to ping.

After weeks dare I say months of work, it is finally done. lintian.debian.org is back online! Many, many thanks to everyone who worked hard to make this possible:

• Thanks to Nicolas Peugnet, the author of lintian-ssg, who handed us this custom static site generator on a silver platter. I'm happy I didn't have to code this myself :)
• Thanks to Otto Kek l inen, maintainer of the lintian-ssg package in Debian, who worked in tandem with Nicolas to iron out problems.
• Thanks to Philipp Kern, who did the work on the DSA side to put the website back online.

All in all, I did very little (mostly coordinating these fine folks) and they should get the credit for this very useful service being back.

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

• Joachim Bauch (fancycode)
• Alexander Kj ll (capitol)
• Jan Moj (janmojzis)
• Xiao Sheng Wen (atzlinux)

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

• Alberto Bertogli
• Alexis Murzeau
• David Heilderberg
• Xiyue Deng
• Kathara Sasikumar
• Philippe Swartvagher

Congratulations!

debian.org's infrastructure now supports using Security Key-backed SSH keys. DDs (and guests) can use the mail gateway to add SSH keys of the types sk-ecdsa-sha2-nistp256@openssh.com and sk-ssh-ed25519@openssh.com to their LDAP accounts.This was done in support of hardening our infrastructure: Hopefully we can require these hardware-backed keys for sensitive machines in the future, to have some assertion that it is a human that is connecting to them.
As some of us shell to machines a little too often, I also wrote a small SSH CA that issues short-lived certificates (documentation). It requires the user to login via SSH using an SK-backed key and then issues a certificate that is valid for less than a day. For cases where you need to frequently shell to a machine or to a lot of machines at once that should be a nice compromise of usability vs. security.The capabilities of various keys differ a lot and it is not always easy to determine what feature set they support. Generally SK-backed keys work with FIDO U2F keys, if you use the ecdsa key type. Resident keys (i.e. keys stored on the token, to be used from multiple devices) require FIDO2-compatible keys. no-touch-required is its own maze, e.g. the flag is not properly restored today when pulling the public key from a resident key. The latter is also one reason for writing my own CA.Someone^TM should write up a matrix on what is supported where and how. In the meantime it is probably easiest to generate an ed25519 key - or if that does not work an ecdsa key - and make a backup copy of the resulting on-disk key file. And copy that around to other devices (or OSes) that require access to the key.

Our Debian User Group met on November 2nd after a somewhat longer summer hiatus than normal. It was lovely to see a bunch of people again and to be able to dedicate a whole day to hacking :) Here is what we did: lavamind:

• reproduced puppetdb FTBFS #1084038 and reported the issue upstream
• uploaded a new upstream version for pgpainless (1.6.8-1)
• uploaded a new revision for ruby-moneta (1.6.0-3)
• sent an inquiry to the backports team about #1081696

pollo:

• reviewed & merged many lintian merge requests, clearing out most of the queue
• uploaded a new lintian release (1.120.0)
• worked on unblocking the revival of lintian.debian.org (many thanks to anarcat and pkern)
• apparently (kindly) told people to rtfm at least 4 times :)

anarcat:

• figured out he still can't figure out how to do 3D printing and should probably just delegate these prints, currently in his wishlist:
  • k4vp VHF HT radio case (fits on your phone)
  • (tr)uSDX HF radio (fits in your hand!)
  • framework expansion card holder (fits in my bag!)
  • Ortlieb QUICK-LOCK1 compatible inserts (fits on my bike?)
• fixed an RC bug in python-ulid
• sponsored fuzzel 1.11.1+ds-2 upload, resolving a FTBFS on non-x86 arches
• tried to move the sigal packaging forward a little, failing in obscure pybuild land

LeLutin:

• opened an RFS on the ruby team mailing list for the new upstream version of ruby-necromancer
• worked on packaging the new upstream version of ruby-pathspec

tvaz:

• did AM (Application Manager) work

tassia:

• explored the Debian Jr. project (website, wiki, mailing list, salsa repositories)
• played a few games for Nico's entertainment :-)
• built and tested a Debian Jr. live image

Pictures This time around, we went back to Foulab. Thanks for hosting us! As always, the hacklab was full of interesting stuff and I took a few (bad) pictures for this blog post:

When setting up your YubiKey you have the option to require the user to touch the device to authorize an operation (be it signing, decrypting, or authenticating). While web browsers often provide clear prompts for this, other applications like SSH or GPG will not. Instead the operation will just hang without any visual indication that user input is required. The YubiKey itself will blink, but depending on where it is plugged in that is not very visible.
yubikey-touch-detector (fresh in unstable) solves this issue by providing a way for your desktop environment to signal the user that the device is waiting for a touch. It provides an event feed on a socket that other components can consume. It comes with libnotify support and there are some custom integrations for other environments.For GNOME and KDE libnotify support should be sufficient, however you still need to turn it on:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/yubikey-touch-detector
$ sed -e 's/^YUBIKEY_TOUCH_DETECTOR_LIBNOTIFY=.*/YUBIKEY_TOUCH_DETECTOR_LIBNOTIFY=true/' \
  < /usr/share/doc/yubikey-touch-detector/examples/service.conf.example \
  > ~/.config/yubikey-touch-detector/service.conf
$ systemctl --user restart yubikey-touch-detector

I would still have preferred a more visible, more modal prompt. I guess that would be an exercise for another time, listening to the socket and presenting a window. But for now, desktop notifications will do for me.PS: I have not managed to get SSH's no-touch-required to work with YubiKey 4, while it works just fine with a YubiKey 5.

Dear Debian community, this are my bits from DPL for September. New lintian maintainer I'm pleased to welcome Louis-Philippe V ronneau as a new Lintian maintainer. He humorously acknowledged his new role, stating, "Apparently I'm a Lintian maintainer now". I remain confident that we can, and should, continue modernizing our policy checker, and I see this as one important step toward that goal. SPDX name / license tools There was a discussion about deprecating the unique names for DEP-5 and migrating to fully compliant SPDX names. Simon McVittie wrote: "Perhaps our Debian-specific names are better, but the relevant question is whether they are sufficiently better to outweigh the benefit of sharing effort and specifications with the rest of the world (and I don't think they are)." Also Charles Plessy sees the value of deprecating the Debian ones and align on SPDX. The thread on debian-devel list contains several practical hints for writing debian/copyright files. proposal: Hybrid network stack for Trixie There was a very long discussion on debian-devel list about the network stack on Trixie that started in July and was continued in end of August / beginning of September. The discussion was also covered on LWN. It continued in a "proposal: Hybrid network stack for Trixie" by Lukas M rdian. Contacting teams I continued reaching out to teams in September. One common pattern I've noticed is that most teams lack a clear strategy for attracting new contributors. Here's an example snippet from one of my outreach emails, which is representative of the typical approach: Q: Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team? A: No. Q: Can I do anything for you? A: Everything that can help to have more than 3 guys :-D Well, only the first answer, "No," is typical. To help the JavaScript team, I'd like to invite anyone with JavaScript experience to join the team's mailing list and offer to learn and contribute. While I've only built a JavaScript package once, I know this team has developed excellent tools that are widely adopted by others. It's an active and efficient team, making it a great starting point for those looking to get involved in Debian. You might also want to check out the "Little tutorial for JS-Team beginners". Given the lack of a strategy to actively recruit new contributors--a common theme in the responses I've received--I recommend reviewing my talk from DebConf23 about teams. The Debian Med team would have struggled significantly in my absence (I've paused almost all work with the team since becoming DPL) if I hadn't consistently focused on bringing in new members. I'm genuinely proud of how the team has managed to keep up with the workload (thank you, Debian Med team!). Of course, onboarding newcomers takes time, and there's no guarantee of long-term success, but if you don't make the effort, you'll never find out. OS underpaid The Register, in its article titled "Open Source Maintainers Underpaid, Swamped by Security, Going Gray", summarizes the 2024 State of the Open Source Maintainer Report. I find this to be an interesting read, both in general and in connection with the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph about finding new team members. Kind regards Andreas.

DebConf24 is now over! I'm very happy I was able to attend this year. If you haven't had time to look at the schedule yet, here is a selection of talks I liked.

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What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging A great talk by Weezel showcasing how easy it is to migrate to PEP-518 for existing Python projects. This is the kind of thing I've been doing a lot when packaging upstream projects that still use setup.py. I encourage you to send this kind of patch upstream, as it makes everyone's life much easier.

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Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next? A talk by Alper Nebi Yasak, who has done great work on running Debian and the Debian Installer on Chromebooks. With Chromebooks being very popular machines in schools, it's nice to see people working on a path to liberate them.

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Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian I had the chance to see Justus' talk on Sequoia an OpenPGP implementation in Rust at DebConf22 in Kosovo. Back then, the conclusion was that sq wasn't ready for production yet. Well it seems it now is! This in-depth talk goes through the history of the project and its goals. There is also a very good section on the current OpenPGP/LibrePGP schism.

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Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust A very short talk by Holger on Chameleon, a tool to make migration to Sequoia easier. TL;DW: apt install gpg-from-sq

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Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding Although I used to enjoy signing people's OpenPGP keys, I completely gave up on this practice around 2019 when dkg's key was flooded with bogus certifications and have been refusing to do so since. In this talk, Gunnar talks about his PhD work on fixing this issue and making sure we can eventually restore this important function on keyservers.

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Bits from the DPL Bits from the DPL! A DebConf classic.

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Linux live patching in Debian Having to reboot servers after kernel upgrades is a hassle, especially with machines that have encrypted disk drives. Although kernel live patching in Debian is still a work in progress, it is encouraging to see people trying to fix this issue.

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"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends A fun talk by Samuel Henrique on little changes and tricks one can make to their setup to make life easier.

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Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward Another in-depth talk by Alper, this time on the Debian Installer and his ideas to try to make it better. I learned a lot about the d-i internals!

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Lightning Talks Lighting talks are always fun to watch! This year, the following talks happened:

1. Customizing your Linux icons
2. A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
3. Desktop computing is irrelevant
4. An introduction to wcurl
5. Aliasing in dpkg
6. A DebConf art space
7. Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
8. Data processing and visualisation in the shell

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Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era? As an economist, I've been interested in Copyright and business models in the Free Software ecosystem for a while. In this talk, Hatta-san and Bruce Perens discuss the idea of alternative licences that are not DFSG-free, like Post-Open.