Search Results: "sph"

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to be upgraded to Debian 12 bookworm by getting rid of the remnants of python3-django-jsonfield in the code (it was superseded by a Django-native field).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.

7 January 2025

Jonathan Wiltshire: Using TPM for Automatic Disk Decryption in Debian 12

These days it s straightforward to have reasonably secure, automatic decryption of your root filesystem at boot time on Debian 12. Here s how I did it on an existing system which already had a stock kernel, secure boot enabled, grub2 and an encrypted root filesystem with the passphrase in key slot 0. There s no need to switch to systemd-boot for this setup but you will use systemd-cryptenroll to manage the TPM-sealed key. If that offends you, there are other ways of doing this.

Caveat The parameters I ll seal a key against in the TPM include a hash of the initial ramdisk. This is essential to prevent an attacker from swapping the image for one which discloses the key. However, it also means the key has to be re-sealed every time the image is rebuilt. This can be frequent, for example when installing/upgrading/removing packages which include a kernel module. You won t get locked out (as long as you still have a passphrase in another slot), but will need to re-seal the key to restore the automation. You can also choose not to include this parameter for the seal, but that opens the door to such an attack.

Caution: these are the steps I took on my own system. You may need to adjust them to avoid ending up with a non-booting system.

Check for a usable TPM device We ll bind the secure boot state, kernel parameters, and other boot measurements to a decryption key. Then, we ll seal it using the TPM. This prevents the disk being moved to another system, the boot chain being tampered with and various other attacks. 
# apt install tpm2-tools
# systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device list
PATH        DEVICE     DRIVER 
/dev/tpmrm0 STM0125:00 tpm_tis

Clean up older kernels including leftover configurations I found that previously-removed (but not purged) kernel packages sometimes cause dracut to try installing files to the wrong paths. Identify them with: 
# apt install aptitude
# aptitude search '~c'
Change search to purge or be more selective, this part is an exercise for the reader.

Switch to dracut for initramfs images Unless you have a particular requirement for the default initramfs-tools, replace it with dracut and customise: 
# mkdir /etc/dracut.conf.d
# echo 'add_dracutmodules+=" tpm2-tss crypt "' > /etc/dracut.conf.d/crypt.conf
# apt install dracut

Remove root device from crypttab, configure grub Remove (or comment) the root device from /etc/crypttab and rebuild the initial ramdisk with dracut -f. Edit /etc/default/grub and add rd.auto rd.luks=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. Re-generate the config with update-grub. At this point it s a good idea to sanity-check the initrd contents with lsinitrd. Then, reboot using the new image to ensure there are no issues. This will also have up-to-date TPM measurements ready for the next step.

Identify device and seal a decryption key 
# lsblk -ip -o NAME,TYPE,MOUNTPOINTS
NAME                                                    TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
/dev/nvme0n1p4                                          part  /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p5                                          part  
 -/dev/mapper/luks-deff56a9-8f00-4337-b34a-0dcda772e326 crypt 
   -/dev/mapper/lv-var                                  lvm   /var
   -/dev/mapper/lv-root                                 lvm   /
   -/dev/mapper/lv-home                                 lvm   /home
In this example my root filesystem is in a container on /dev/nvme0n1p5. The existing passphrase key is in slot 0. 
# systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=auto --tpm2-pcrs=7+8+9+14 /dev/nvme0n1p5
Please enter current passphrase for disk /dev/nvme0n1p5: ********
New TPM2 token enrolled as key slot 1.
The PCRs I chose (7, 8, 9 and 14) correspond to the secure boot policy, kernel command line (to prevent init=/bin/bash-style attacks), files read by grub including that crucial initrd measurement, and secure boot MOK certificates and hashes. You could also include PCR 5 for the partition table state, and any others appropriate for your setup.

Reboot You should now be able to reboot and the root device will be unlocked automatically, provided the secure boot measurements remain consistent. The key slot protected by a passphrase (mine is slot 0) is now your recovery key. Do not remove it!
Please consider supporting my work in Debian and elsewhere through Liberapay.

3 January 2025

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

Dear Debian community, this is bits from DPL for December. Happy New Year 2025! Wishing everyone health, productivity, and a successful Debian release later in this year. Strict ownership of packages I'm glad my last bits sparked discussions about barriers between packages and contributors, summarized temporarily in some post on the debian-devel list. As one participant aptly put it, we need a way to visibly say, "I'll do the job until someone else steps up". Based on my experience with the Bug of the Day initiative, simplifying the process for engaging with packages would significantly help. Currently we have
  1. NMU The Developers Reference outlines several preconditions for NMUs, explicitly stating, "Fixing cosmetic issues or changing the packaging style in NMUs is discouraged." This makes NMUs unsuitable for addressing package smells. However, I've seen NMUs used for tasks like switching to source format 3.0 or bumping the debhelper compat level. While it's technically possible to file a bug and then address it in an NMU, the process inherently limits the NMUer's flexibility to reduce package smells.
  2. Package Salvaging This is another approach for working on someone else's packages, aligning with the process we often follow in the Bug of the Day initiative. The criteria for selecting packages typically indicate that the maintainer either lacks time to address open bugs, has lost interest, or is generally MIA.
Both options have drawbacks, so I'd welcome continued discussion on criteria for lowering the barriers to moving packages to Salsa and modernizing their packaging. These steps could enhance Debian overall and are generally welcomed by active maintainers. The discussion also highlighted that packages on Salsa are often maintained collaboratively, fostering the team-oriented atmosphere already established in several Debian teams. Salsa Continuous Integration As part of the ongoing discussion about package maintenance, I'm considering the suggestion to switch from the current opt-in model for Salsa CI to an opt-out approach. While I fully agree that human verification is necessary when the pipeline is activated, I believe the current option to enable CI is less visible than it should be. I'd welcome a more straightforward approach to improve access to better testing for what we push to Salsa. Number of packages not on Salsa In my campaign, I stated that I aimed to reduce the number of packages maintained outside Salsa to below 2,000. As of March 28, 2024, the count was 2,368. As of this writing, the count stands at 1,928 [1], so I consider this promise fulfilled. My thanks go out to everyone who contributed to this effort. Moving forward, I'd like to set a more ambitious goal for the remainder of my term and hope we can reduce the number to below 1,800. [1] UDD query: SELECT DISTINCT count(*) FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid' and vcs_url not like '%salsa%' ; Past and future events Talk at MRI Together In early December, I gave a short online talk, primarily focusing on my work with the Debian Med team. I also used my position as DPL to advocate for attracting more users and developers from the scientific research community. FOSSASIA I originally planned to attend FOSDEM this year. However, given the strong Debian presence there and the need for better representation at the FOSSASIA Summit, I decided to prioritize the latter. This aligns with my goal of improving geographic diversity. I also look forward to opportunities for inter-distribution discussions. Debian team sprints Debian Ruby Sprint I approved the budget for the Debian Ruby Sprint, scheduled for January 2025 in Paris. If you're interested in contributing to the Ruby team, whether in person or online, consider reaching out to them. I'm sure any helping hand would be appreciated. Debian Med sprint There will also be a Debian Med sprint in Berlin in mid-February. As usual, you don't need to be an expert in biology or medicine basic bug squashing skills are enough to contribute and enjoy the friendly atmosphere the Debian Med team fosters at their sprints. For those working in biology and medicine, we typically offer packaging support. Anyone interested in spending a weekend focused on impactful scientific work with Debian is warmly invited. Again all the best for 2025 
Andreas.

2 January 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian, as well as one direct donation via Liberapay (thanks!). OpenSSH I issued a bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which was quite broken in bookworm. base-passwd A few months ago, the adduser maintainer started a discussion with me (as the base-passwd maintainer) and the shadow maintainer about bringing all three source packages under one team, since they often need to cooperate on things like user and group names. I agreed, but hadn t got round to doing anything about it until recently. I ve now officially moved it under team maintenance. debconf Gioele Barabucci has been working on eliminating duplicated code between debconf and cdebconf, ultimately with the goal of migrating to cdebconf (which I m not sure I m convinced of as a goal, but if we can make improvements to both packages as part of working towards it then there s no harm in that). I finally got round to reviewing and merging confmodule changes in each of debconf and cdebconf. This caused an installer regression due to a weirdness in cdebconf-udeb s packaging, which I fixed - sorry about that! I ve also been dealing with a few patch submissions that had been in my queue for a long time, but more on that next month if all goes well. CI issues I noticed and fixed a problem with Restrictions: needs-sudo in autopkgtest. I fixed broken aptly images in the Salsa CI pipeline. Python team Last month, I mentioned some progress on sorting out the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728), and said that I thought we d be able to finish it soon. I was right! We got it all done this month: The Python 3.13 transition continues, and last month we were able to add it to the supported Python versions in testing. (The next step will be to make it the default.) I fixed lots of problems in aid of this, including: Sphinx 8.0 removed some old intersphinx_mapping syntax which turned out to still be in use by many packages in Debian. The fixes for this were individually trivial, but there were a lot of them: I found that twisted 24.11.0 broke tests in buildbot and wokkel, and fixed those. I packaged python-flatdict, needed for a new upstream version of python-semantic-release. I tracked down a test failure in vdirsyncer (which I ve been using for some years, but had never previously needed to modify) and contributed a fix upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools: I fixed django-cte to remove a build-dependency on the obsolete python3-nose package. I added Django 5.1 support to django-polymorphic. (There are a number of other packages that still need work here.) I fixed various other build/test failures: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I updated the team s library style guide to remove material related to Python 2 and early versions of Python 3, which is no longer relevant to any current Python packaging work. Other Python upstream work I happened to notice a Twisted upstream issue requesting the removal of the deprecated twisted.internet.defer.returnValue, realized it was still used in many places in Debian, and went on a PR-filing spree informed by codesearch to try to reduce the future impact of such a change on Debian: Other small fixes Santiago Vila has been building the archive with make --shuffle (also see its author s explanation). I fixed associated bugs in cccc (contributed upstream), groff, and spectemu. I backported an upstream patch to putty to fix undefined behaviour that affected use of the small keypad . I removed groff s Recommends: libpaper1 (#1091375, #1091376), since it isn t currently all that useful and was getting in the way of a transition to libpaper2. I filed an upstream bug suggesting better integration in this area.

23 December 2024

Simon Josefsson: OpenSSH and Git on a Post-Quantum SPHINCS+

Are you aware that Git commits and tags may be signed using OpenSSH? Git signatures may be used to improve integrity and authentication of our software supply-chain. Popular signature algorithms include Ed25519, ECDSA and RSA. Did you consider that these algorithms may not be safe if someone builds a post-quantum computer? As you may recall, I have earlier blogged about the efficient post-quantum key agreement mechanism called Streamlined NTRU Prime and its use in SSH and I have attempted to promote the conservatively designed Classic McEliece in a similar way, although it remains to be adopted. What post-quantum signature algorithms are available? There is an effort by NIST to standardize post-quantum algorithms, and they have a category for signature algorithms. According to wikipedia, after round three the selected algorithms are CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON and SPHINCS+. Of these, SPHINCS+ appears to be a conservative choice suitable for long-term digital signatures. Can we get this to work? Recall that Git uses the ssh-keygen tool from OpenSSH to perform signing and verification. To refresh your memory, let s study the commands that Git uses under the hood for Ed25519. First generate a Ed25519 private key: 
jas@kaka:~$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f my_ed25519_key -P ""
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Your identification has been saved in my_ed25519_key
Your public key has been saved in my_ed25519_key.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:fDa5+jmC2+/aiLhWeWA3IV8Wj6yMNTSuRzqUZlIGlXQ jas@kaka
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
     .+=.E ..      
      oo=.ooo      
     . =o=+o .     
      =oO+o .      
      .=+S.=       
       oo.o o      
      . o  .       
     ...o.+..      
    .o.o.=**.      
+----[SHA256]-----+
jas@kaka:~$ cat my_ed25519_key
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAMwAAAAtzc2gtZW
QyNTUxOQAAACAWP/aZ8hzN0WNRMSpjzbgW1tJXNd2v6/dnbKaQt7iIBQAAAJCeDotOng6L
TgAAAAtzc2gtZWQyNTUxOQAAACAWP/aZ8hzN0WNRMSpjzbgW1tJXNd2v6/dnbKaQt7iIBQ
AAAEBFRvzgcD3YItl9AMmVK4xDKj8NTg4h2Sluj0/x7aSPlhY/9pnyHM3RY1ExKmPNuBbW
0lc13a/r92dsppC3uIgFAAAACGphc0BrYWthAQIDBAU=
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
jas@kaka:~$ cat my_ed25519_key.pub 
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIBY/9pnyHM3RY1ExKmPNuBbW0lc13a/r92dsppC3uIgF jas@kaka
jas@kaka:~$
Then let s sign something with this key: 
jas@kaka:~$ echo "Hello world!" > msg
jas@kaka:~$ ssh-keygen -Y sign -f my_ed25519_key -n my-namespace msg
Signing file msg
Write signature to msg.sig
jas@kaka:~$ cat msg.sig 
-----BEGIN SSH SIGNATURE-----
U1NIU0lHAAAAAQAAADMAAAALc3NoLWVkMjU1MTkAAAAgFj/2mfIczdFjUTEqY824FtbSVz
Xdr+v3Z2ymkLe4iAUAAAAMbXktbmFtZXNwYWNlAAAAAAAAAAZzaGE1MTIAAABTAAAAC3Nz
aC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAQLmWsq05tqOOZIJqjxy5ZP/YRFoaX30lfIllmfyoeM5lpVnxJ3ZxU8
SF0KodDr8Rtukg2N3Xo80NGvZOzbG/9Aw=
-----END SSH SIGNATURE-----
jas@kaka:~$
Now let s create a list of trusted public-keys and associated identities: 
jas@kaka:~$ echo 'my.name@example.org ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIBY/9pnyHM3RY1ExKmPNuBbW0lc13a/r92dsppC3uIgF' > allowed-signers
jas@kaka:~$
Then let s verify the message we just signed: 
jas@kaka:~$ cat msg   ssh-keygen -Y verify -f allowed-signers -I my.name@example.org -n my-namespace -s msg.sig
Good "my-namespace" signature for my.name@example.org with ED25519 key SHA256:fDa5+jmC2+/aiLhWeWA3IV8Wj6yMNTSuRzqUZlIGlXQ
jas@kaka:~$
I have implemented support for SPHINCS+ in OpenSSH. This is early work, but I wanted to announce it to get discussion of some of the details going and to make people aware of it. What would a better way to demonstrate SPHINCS+ support in OpenSSH than by validating the Git commit that implements it using itself? Here is how to proceed, first get a suitable development environment up and running. I m using a Debian container launched in a protected environment using podman. 
jas@kaka:~$ podman run -it --rm debian:stable
Then install the necessary build dependencies for OpenSSH. 
# apt-get update 
# apt-get install git build-essential autoconf libz-dev libssl-dev
Now clone my OpenSSH branch with the SPHINCS+ implentation and build it. You may browse the commit on GitHub first if you are curious. 
# cd
# git clone https://github.com/jas4711/openssh-portable.git -b sphincsp
# cd openssh-portable
# autoreconf -fvi
# ./configure
# make
Configure a Git allowed signers list with my SPHINCS+ public key (make sure to keep the public key on one line with the whitespace being one ASCII SPC character): 
# mkdir -pv ~/.ssh
# echo 'simon@josefsson.org ssh-sphincsplus@openssh.com AAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAAECI6eacTxjB36xcPtP0ZyxJNIGCN350GluLD5h0KjKDsZLNmNaPSFH2ynWyKZKOF5eRPIMMKSCIV75y+KP9d6w3' > ~/.ssh/allowed_signers
# git config gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile ~/.ssh/allowed_signers
Then verify the commit using the newly built ssh-keygen binary: 
# PATH=$PWD:$PATH
# git log -1 --show-signature
commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b (HEAD -> sphincsp, origin/sphincsp)
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
Author: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Date:   Tue Dec 3 18:44:25 2024 +0100
    Add SPHINCS+.
# git verify-commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
#
Yay! So what are some considerations? SPHINCS+ comes in many different variants. First it comes with three security levels approximately matching 128/192/256 bit symmetric key strengths. Second choice is between the SHA2-256, SHAKE256 (SHA-3) and Haraka hash algorithms. Final choice is between a robust and a simple variant with different security and performance characteristics. To get going, I picked the sphincss256sha256robust SPHINCS+ implementation from SUPERCOP 20241022. There is a good size comparison table in the sphincsplus implementation, if you want to consider alternative variants. SPHINCS+ public-keys are really small, as you can see in the allowed signers file. This is really good because they are handled by humans and often by cut n paste. What about private keys? They are slightly longer than Ed25519 private keys but shorter than typical RSA private keys. 
# ssh-keygen -t sphincsplus -f my_sphincsplus_key -P ""
Generating public/private sphincsplus key pair.
Your identification has been saved in my_sphincsplus_key
Your public key has been saved in my_sphincsplus_key.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:4rNfXdmLo/ySQiWYzsBhZIvgLu9sQQz7upG8clKziBg root@ad600ff56253
The key's randomart image is:
+[SPHINCSPLUS 256-+
  .  .o            
 o . oo.           
  = .o.. o         
 o o  o o . .   o  
 .+    = S o   o . 
 Eo=  . + . . .. . 
 =*.+  o . . oo .  
 B+=    o o.o. .   
 o*o   ... .oo.    
+----[SHA256]-----+
# cat my_sphincsplus_key.pub 
ssh-sphincsplus@openssh.com AAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAAEAltAX1VhZ8pdW9FgC+NdM6QfLxVXVaf1v2yW4v+tk2Oj5lxmVgZftfT37GOMOlK9iBm9SQHZZVYZddkEJ9F1D7 root@ad600ff56253
# cat my_sphincsplus_key 
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAYwAAABtzc2gtc3
BoaW5jc3BsdXNAb3BlbnNzaC5jb20AAABAJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1Wn9b9slu
L/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpSvYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAAQidiIwanYiMGgAAAB
tzc2gtc3BoaW5jc3BsdXNAb3BlbnNzaC5jb20AAABAJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1
Wn9b9sluL/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpSvYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAAIAbwBxEhA
NYzITN6VeCMqUyvw/59JM+WOLXBlRbu3R8qS7ljc4qFVWUtmhy8B3t9e4jrhdO6w0n5I4l
mnLnBi2hJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1Wn9b9sluL/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpS
vYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAABFyb290QGFkNjAwZmY1NjI1MwECAwQ=
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
#
Signature size? Now here is the challenge, for this variant the size is around 29kb or close to 600 lines of base64 data: 
# git cat-file -p ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b   head -10
tree ede42093e7d5acd37fde02065a4a19ac1f418703
parent 826483d51a9fee60703298bbf839d9ce37943474
author Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> 1733247865 +0100
committer Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> 1734907869 +0100
gpgsig -----BEGIN SSH SIGNATURE-----
 U1NIU0lHAAAAAQAAAGMAAAAbc3NoLXNwaGluY3NwbHVzQG9wZW5zc2guY29tAAAAQIjp5p
 xPGMHfrFw+0/RnLEk0gYI3fnQaW4sPmHQqMoOxks2Y1o9IUfbKdbIpko4Xl5E8gwwpIIhX
 vnL4o/13rDcAAAADZ2l0AAAAAAAAAAZzaGE1MTIAAHSDAAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0
 BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAdGDHlobgfgkKKQBo3UHmnEnNXczCMNdzJmeYJau67QM6xZcAU+d+
 2mvhbksm5D34m75DWEngzBb3usJTqWJeeDdplHHRe3BKVCQ05LHqRYzcSdN6eoeZqoOBvR
# git cat-file -p ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b   tail -5 
 ChvXUk4jfiNp85RDZ1kljVecfdB2/6CHFRtxrKHJRDiIavYjucgHF1bjz0fqaOSGa90UYL
 RZjZ0OhdHOQjNP5QErlIOcZeqcnwi0+RtCJ1D1wH2psuXIQEyr1mCA==
 -----END SSH SIGNATURE-----
Add SPHINCS+.
# git cat-file -p ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b   wc -l
579
#
What about performance? Verification is really fast: 
# time git verify-commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
real	0m0.010s
user	0m0.005s
sys	0m0.005s
#
On this machine, verifying an Ed25519 signature is a couple of times slower, and needs around 0.07 seconds. Signing is slower, it takes a bit over 2 seconds on my laptop. 
# echo "Hello world!" > msg
# time ssh-keygen -Y sign -f my_sphincsplus_key -n my-namespace msg
Signing file msg
Write signature to msg.sig
real	0m2.226s
user	0m2.226s
sys	0m0.000s
# echo 'my.name@example.org ssh-sphincsplus@openssh.com AAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAAEAltAX1VhZ8pdW9FgC+NdM6QfLxVXVaf1v2yW4v+tk2Oj5lxmVgZftfT37GOMOlK9iBm9SQHZZVYZddkEJ9F1D7' > allowed-signers
# cat msg   ssh-keygen -Y verify -f allowed-signers -I my.name@example.org -n my-namespace -s msg.sig
Good "my-namespace" signature for my.name@example.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:4rNfXdmLo/ySQiWYzsBhZIvgLu9sQQz7upG8clKziBg
#
Welcome to our new world of Post-Quantum safe digital signatures of Git commits, and Happy Hacking!

16 December 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Finders

Review: Finders, by Melissa Scott
Series: Firstborn, Lastborn #1
Publisher: Candlemark & Gleam
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 1-936460-87-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 409
Finders is a far future science fiction novel with cyberpunk vibes. It is the first of a series, but the second (and, so far, only other) book of the series is a prequel. It stands alone reasonably well (more on that later). Cassilde Sam is a salvor. That means she specializes in exploring ancient wrecks and ruins left behind by the Ancients and salvaging materials that can be reused. The most important of those are what are called Ancestral elements: BLUE, which can hold programming; GOLD, which which reacts to BLUE instructions; RED, which produces actions or output; and GREEN, the rarest and most valuable, which powers everything else. Cassilde and her partner Dai Winter file claims on newly-discovered or incompletely salvaged Ancestor sites and then extract elemental material and anything else of value in their small salvage ship. Cassilde is also dying. She has Lightman's, an incurable degenerative disease that can only be treated with ever-increasing quantities of GREEN. It's hard to sleep, hard to get warm, hard to breathe, and eventually she'll run out of money to pay for the GREEN and she'll die. To push that day off into the future, she and Dai need work. The good news is that the wreckage of a new Ancestor sky palace was discovered in a long orbit and will create enough salvage work for every experienced salvor in the system. The bad news is that they're not qualified to bid on it. They need a scholar with a class-one license to bid on the best sections, and they haven't had a reliable scholar since their former partner and lover Summerland Ashe picked the opposite side in the Troubles and left the Fringe for the Entente, the more densely settled and connected portion of human space. But, unexpectedly and suspiciously, Ashe may be back and offering to work with them again. So, first, I love this setting. This is far from the first SF novel that is set in the aftermath of a general collapse of human civilization and revolving around discovering lost mysteries. Most examples of that genre are post-apocalyptic novels limited to Earth or the local solar system, but Kate Elliott's Unconquerable Sun comes immediately to mind. It's also not the first space archaeology series I've read; Kristine Kathyrn Rusch's story series starting with "Diving into the Wreck" also came to mind. But I don't recall the last time I've seen the author sell the setting so effectively. This is a world with starships and spaceports and clearly advanced technology, but it feels like a post-collapse society that's built on ruins. It's not just that technology runs on half-understood Ancestral elements and states fight over control of debris fields. It's also that the society repurposes Ancestral remnants in ways that both they and the reader know weren't originally intended, and that sometimes are more ingenious or efficient than how the Ancestors probably used them. There's a creative grittiness here that reminds me of good cyberpunk. It's not just good atmospheric writing, though. Scott makes a world-building decision that is going to sound trivial when I say it, but that has brilliant implications for the rest of the setting. There was not just one collapse; there were two. The Ancestor civilization, presumed to be the first human civilization, has passed into myth, quite literally when it comes to the stories around its downfall in the aftermath of a war against AIs. After the Ancestors came the Successors, who followed a similar salvage and rebuild approach and got as far as inventing their own warp drive technology that was based on but different than the Ancestor technology. Then they also collapsed, leaving their adapted technology and salvage operations layered over Ancestor sites. Cassilde's civilization is the third human starfaring civilization, and it is very specifically the third, neither the second nor one of dozens. This has so many small but effective implications that improve this story. A fall happened twice, so it feels like a pattern that makes Cassilde's civilization paranoid, but it happened for two very different reasons, so there is room to argue against it being a pattern. Salvage is harder because of the layering of Ancestor and Successor activity. Successors had their own way of controlling technology that is not accessible to Cassilde and her crew but is also not how the technology was intended to be used, which sends small ripples of interesting complexity through the background. And salvors are competing not only against each other but also against Successor salvage operations for which they have fragmentary records. It's a beautifully effective touch. Melissa Scott has been publishing science fiction for forty years, and it shows in this book. The protagonists are older characters: established professionals with resource problems but also social connections and an earned reputation, people who are trying to do a job and live their lives, not change the world. The writing is competent, deft, and atmospheric, with the confidence of long practice, but it also has the feel of an earlier era of science fiction. I mentioned the cyberpunk influence, which shows in the grittiness of the descriptions, the marginality of the characters in society, and the background theme of repurposing and reusing technology in unintended ways. This is the sort of book that feels solidly in the center of science fiction, without the genre mixing into either fantasy or romance that has become somewhat more common, and also without the dramatics of space opera (although the reader discovers that the stakes of this novel may be higher than anyone realized). And yet, so much of this book is about navigating a complicated romantic relationship, and that's where the story structure felt a bit odd. Cassilde, Dai, and Ashe were a polyamorous triad (polyamory also shows up in Scott's excellent Roads of Heaven series), and much of the first third of the book deals with the fracturing of trust with Ashe and their renegotiation of that relationship given his return. This is refreshingly written as the thoughtful interaction of three adults who take issues of trust seriously, but that also means it's much less dramatic than it sounds, and that means this book starts exceptionally slow. Scott is going somewhere, and the slow build became engrossing around the midpoint of the book, but I had to fight to stick with it at the start. About 80% of the way through this book, I had no idea how Scott was going to wrap things up in the pages remaining and was bracing myself for some sort of series cliffhanger. This is not what happens; the plot is not fully resolved in every detail, but it reaches a conclusion of sorts that does not mandate a sequel. I did think the end was a little bit unsatisfying, though, and I want another book that explores the implications of the ending. I think it would have to be a much different book, and the tonal shift might be stark. I've had this book on my to-read list for a while and kept putting it off because I wasn't sure I was in the mood for something precarious and gritty. This turned out to be an accurate worry: this is literally a book about salvaging the pieces of something full of wonders inextricably connected to dangers. You have to be in a cyberpunk sort of mood. But I've never read a bad Melissa Scott book, and this is no exception. The simplicity and ALL-CAPSNESS of the Ancestral elements grated a bit, but apart from that, the world-building is exceptional and well worth the trip. Recommended, although be warned that, if you're like me, it may not grab you from the first page. Followed by Fallen, but that book is a prequel that does not share any protagonists. Content notes: disability and degenerative illness in a universe where magical cures are possible, so be warned if that specific thematic combination is not what you're looking for. Rating: 7 out of 10

5 December 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2024

Welcome to the November 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the world of software supply-chain security where relevant. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar
  2. Introducing reproduce.debian.net
  3. New landing page design
  4. SBOMs for Python packages
  5. Debian updates
  6. Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4
  7. PyPI now supports digital attestations
  8. Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries
  9. Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible
  10. Website updates
  11. Upstream patches
  12. Misc development news
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar The Reproducible Builds community sadly announced it has lost its founding member, Lunar. J r my Bobbio aka Lunar passed away on Friday November 8th in palliative care in Rennes, France. Lunar was instrumental in starting the Reproducible Builds project in 2013 as a loose initiative within the Debian project. He was the author of our earliest status reports and many of our key tools in use today are based on his design. Lunar s creativity, insight and kindness were often noted. You can view our full tribute elsewhere on our website. He will be greatly missed.

Introducing reproduce.debian.net In happier news, this month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. In November, reproduce.debian.net began rebuilding Debian unstable on the amd64 architecture, but throughout the MiniDebConf, it had attempted to rebuild 66% of the official archive. From this, it could be determined that it is currently possible to bit-for-bit reproduce and corroborate approximately 78% of the actual binaries distributed by Debian that is, using the .buildinfo files hosted by Debian itself. reproduce.debian.net also contains instructions how to setup one s own rebuilderd instance, and we very much invite everyone with a machine to spare to setup their own version and to share the results. Whilst rebuilderd is still in development, it has been used to reproduce Arch Linux since 2019. We are especially looking for installations targeting Debian architectures other than i386 and amd64.

New landing page design As part of a very productive partnership with the Sovereign Tech Fund and Neighbourhoodie, we are pleased to unveil our new homepage/landing page. We are very happy with our collaboration with both STF and Neighbourhoodie (including many changes not directly related to the website), and look forward to working with them in the future.

SBOMs for Python packages The Python Software Foundation has announced a new cross-functional project for SBOMs and Python packages . Seth Michael Larson writes that the project is specifically looking to solve these issues :
  • Enable Python users that require SBOM documents (likely due to regulations like CRA or SSDF) to self-serve using existing SBOM generation tools.
  • Solve the phantom dependency problem, where non-Python software is bundled in Python packages but not recorded in any metadata. This makes the job of software composition analysis (SCA) tools difficult or impossible.
  • Make the adoption work by relevant projects such as build backends, auditwheel-esque tools, as minimal as possible. Empower users who are interested in having better SBOM data for the Python projects they are using to be able to contribute engineering time towards that goal.
A GitHub repository for the initiative is available, and there are a number of queries, comments and remarks on Seth s Discourse forum post.

Debian updates There was significant development within Debian this month. Firstly, at the recent MiniDebConf in Toulouse, France, Holger Levsen gave a Debian-specific talk on rebuilding packages distributed from ftp.debian.org that is to say, how to reproduce the results from the official Debian build servers: Holger described the talk as follows:
For more than ten years, the Reproducible Builds project has worked towards reproducible builds of many projects, and for ten years now we have build Debian packages twice with maximal variations applied to see if they can be build reproducible still. Since about a month, we ve also been rebuilding trying to exactly match the builds being distributed via ftp.debian.org. This talk will describe the setup and the lessons learned so far, and why the results currently are what they are (spoiler: they are less than 30% reproducible), and what we can do to fix that.
The Debian Project Leader, Andreas Tille, was present at the talk and remarked later in his Bits from the DPL update that:
It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I d like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar s contributions and legacy. Personally, I ve encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.
Holger s slides and video in .webm format are available.
Next, rebuilderd is the server to monitor package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results. This month, version 0.21.0 released, most notably with improved support for binNMUs by Jochen Sprickerhof and updating the rebuilderd-debian.sh integration to the latest debrebuild version by Holger Levsen. There has also been significant work to get the rebuilderd package into the Debian archive, in particular, both rust-rebuilderd-common version 0.20.0-1 and rust-rust-lzma version 0.6.0-1 were packaged by kpcyrd and uploaded by Holger Levsen. Related to this, Holger Levsen submitted three additional issues against rebuilderd as well:
  • rebuildctl should be more verbose when encountering issues. [ ]
  • Please add an option to used randomised queues. [ ]
  • Scheduling and re-scheduling multiple packages at once. [ ]
and lastly, Jochen Sprickerhof submitted one an issue requested that rebuilderd downloads the source package in addition to the .buildinfo file [ ] and kpcyrd also submitted and fixed an issue surrounding dependencies and clarifying the license [ ]
Separate to this, back in 2018, Chris Lamb filed a bug report against the sphinx-gallery package as it generates unreproducible content in various ways. This month, however, Dmitry Shachnev finally closed the bug, listing the multiple sub-issues that were part of the problem and how they were resolved.
Elsewhere, Roland Clobus posted to our mailing list this month, asking for input on a bug in Debian s ca-certificates-java package. The issue is that the Java key management tools embed timestamps in its output, and this output ends up in the /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts file on the generated ISO images. A discussion resulted from Roland s post suggesting some short- and medium-term solutions to the problem.
Holger Levsen uploaded some packages with reproducibility-related changes:
Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 5 were updated and 21 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues in Debian.

Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4 On our mailing list this month, Herv Boutemy reported the latest release of Maven (4.0.0-beta-5) has reproducible builds enabled by default. In his mailing list post, Herv mentions that this story started during our Reproducible Builds summit in Hamburg , where he created the upstream issue that builds on a multi-year effort to have Maven builds configured for reproducibility.

PyPI now supports digital attestations Elsewhere in the Python ecosystem and as reported on LWN and elsewhere, the Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalised support for PEP 740 ( Index support for digital attestations ). Trail of Bits, who performed much of the development work, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone:
One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [ ] This isn t an acceptable end state (cryptographic attestations have defensive properties only insofar as they re actually verified), so we re looking into ways to bring verification to individual installing clients. In particular, we re currently working on a plugin architecture for pip that will enable users to load verification logic directly into their pip install flows.
There was an in-depth discussion on LWN s announcement page, as well as on Hacker News.

Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries At BENEVOL, the Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution workshop in Namur, Belgium, Tom Mens and Alexandre Decan presented their paper, An Overview and Catalogue of Dependency Challenges in Open Source Software Package Registries . The abstract of their paper is as follows:
While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a catalogue of dependency-related challenges that come with relying on OSS packages or libraries. The catalogue is based on the scientific literature on empirical research that has been conducted to understand, quantify and overcome these challenges. [ ]
A PDF of the paper is available online.

Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible Motiejus Jak ty posted an interesting and practical blog post on his successful attempt to reproduce the Zig programming language without using the pre-compiled binaries checked into the repository, and despite the circular dependency inherent in its bootstrapping process. As a summary, Motiejus concludes that:
I can now confidently say (and you can also check, you don t need to trust me) that there is nothing hiding in zig1.wasm [the checked-in binary] that hasn t been checked-in as a source file.
The full post is full of practical details, and includes a few open questions.

Website updates Notwithstanding the significant change to the landing page (screenshot above), there were an enormous number of changes made to our website this month. This included:
  • Alex Feyerke and Mariano Gim nez:
    • Dramatically overhaul the website s landing page with new benefit cards tailored to the expected visitors to our website and a reworking of the visual hierarchy and design. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
    • Update the System images page to document the e2fsprogs approach. [ ]
  • Chris Lamb:
  • FC (Fay) Stegerman:
    • Replace more inline markdown with HTML on the Success stories page. [ ]
    • Add some links, fix some other links and correct some spelling errors on the Tools page. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add a historical presentation ( Reproducible builds everywhere eg. in Debian, OpenWrt and LEDE ) from October 2016. [ ]
    • Add jochensp and Oejet to the list of known contributors. [ ][ ]
  • Julia Kr ger:
  • Ninette Adhikari & hulkoba:
    • Add/rework the list of success stories into a new page that clearly shows milestones in Reproducible Builds. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Philip Rinn:
    • Import 47 historical weekly reports. [ ]
  • hulkoba:
    • Add alt text to almost all images (!). [ ][ ]
    • Fix a number of links on the Talks . [ ][ ]
    • Avoid so-called ghost buttons by not using <button> elements as links, as the affordance of a <button> implies an action with (potentially) a side effect. [ ][ ]
    • Center the sponsor logos on the homepage. [ ]
    • Move publications and generate them instead from a data.yml file with an improved layout. [ ][ ]
    • Make a large number of small but impactful stylisting changes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Expand the Tools to include a number of missing tools, fix some styling issues and fix a number of stale/broken links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

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

Misc development news

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 November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related changes:
    • Create and introduce a new reproduce.debian.net service and subdomain [ ]
    • Make a large number of documentation changes relevant to rebuilderd. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Explain a temporary workaround for a specific issue in rebuilderd. [ ]
    • Setup another rebuilderd instance on the o4 node and update installation documentation to match. [ ][ ]
    • Make a number of helpful/cosmetic changes to the interface, such as clarifying terms and adding links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Deploy configuration to the /opt and /var directories. [ ][ ]
    • Add an infancy (or alpha ) disclaimer. [ ][ ]
    • Add more notes to the temporary rebuilderd documentation. [ ]
    • Commit an nginx configuration file for reproduce.debian.net s Stats page. [ ]
    • Commit a rebuilder-worker.conf configuration for the o5 node. [ ]
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Grant jspricke and jochensp access to the o5 node. [ ][ ]
    • Build the qemu package with the nocheck build flag. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Adapt the update_jdn.sh script for new Debian trixie systems. [ ]
    • Stop installing the PostgreSQL database engine on the o4 and o5 nodes. [ ]
    • Prevent accidental reboots of the o4 node because of a long-running job owned by josch. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo addressed a number of issues with reproduce.debian.net [ ][ ][ ][ ]. And lastly, both Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ] performed node maintenance.
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:

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.

Russ Allbery: Review: Unexploded Remnants

Review: Unexploded Remnants, by Elaine Gallagher
Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: 2024
ISBN: 1-250-32522-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 111
Unexploded Remnants is a science fiction adventure novella. The protagonist and world background would support an episodic series, but as of this writing it stands alone. It is Elaine Gallagher's first professional publication. Alice is the last survivor of Earth: an explorer, information trader, and occasional associate of the Archive. She scouts interesting places, looks for inconsistencies in the stories the galactic civilizations tell themselves, and pokes around ruins for treasure. As this story opens, she finds a supposedly broken computer core in the Alta Sidoie bazaar that is definitely not what the trader thinks it is. Very shortly thereafter, she's being hunted by a clan of dangerous Delosi while trying to decide what to do with a possibly malevolent AI with frightening intrusion abilities. This is one of those stories where all the individual pieces sounded great, but the way they were assembled didn't click for me. Unusually, I'm not entirely sure why. Often it's the characters, but I liked Alice well enough. The Lewis Carroll allusions were there but not overdone, her computer agent Bugs is a little too much of a Warner Brothers cartoon but still interesting, and the world building has plenty of interesting hooks. I certainly can't complain about the pacing: the plot moves briskly along to a somewhat predictable but still adequate conclusion. The writing is smooth and competent, and the world is memorable enough that I'm still thinking about it. And yet, I never connected with this story. I think it may be because both Alice and the tight third-person narrator tend towards breezy confidence and matter-of-fact descriptions. Alice does, at times, get scared or angry, but I never felt those emotions. They were just events that were described to me. There wasn't an emotional hook, a place where the character grabbed me, and so it felt like everything was happening at an odd remove. The advantage of this approach is that there are no overwrought emotional meltdowns or brooding angstful protagonists, just an adventure story about a competent and thoughtful character, but I think I wanted a bit more emotional involvement than I got. The world background is the best part and feels like it could be part of a larger series. The Milky Way is connected by an old, vast, and only partly understood network of teleportation portals, which had cut off Earth for unknown reasons and then just as mysteriously reactivated when Alice, then Andrew, drunkenly poked at a standing stone while muttering an old prayer in Gaelic. The Archive spent a year sorting out her intellectual diseases (capitalism was particularly alarming) and giving her a fresh start with a new body. Humanity subsequently destroyed itself in a paroxysm of reactionary violence, leaving Alice a free agent, one of a kind in a galaxy of dizzying variety and forgotten history. Gallagher makes great use of the weirdness of the portal network to create a Star Wars style of universe: the focus is more on the diversity of the planets and alien species than on a coherent unifying structure. The settings of this book are not prone to Planet of the Hats problems. They instead have the contrasts that one would get if one dropped portals near current or former Earth population centers and then took a random walk through them (or, in other words, what playing GeoGuessr on a world map feels like). I liked this effect, but I have to admit that it also added to that sense of sliding off the surface of the story. The place descriptions were great bits of atmosphere, but I never cared about them. There isn't enough emotional coherence to make them memorable. One of the more notable quirks of this story is the description of ideologies and prejudices as viral memes that can be cataloged, cured, and deployed like weapons. This is a theme of the world-building as well: this society, or at least the Archive-affiliated parts of it, classifies some patterns of thought as potentially dangerous but treatable contagious diseases. I'm not going to object too much to this as a bit of background and characterization in a fairly short novella stuffed with a lot of other world-building and plot, but there's was something about treating ethical systems like diseases that bugged me in much the same way that medicalization of neurodiversity bugs me. I think some people will find that sense of moral clarity relaxing and others will find it vaguely irritating, and I seem to have ended up in the second group. Overall, I would classify this as an interesting not-quite-success. It felt like a side story in a larger universe, like a story that would work better if I already knew Alice from other novels and had an established emotional connection with her. As is, I would not really recommend it, but there are enough good pieces here that I would be interested to see what Gallagher does next. Rating: 6 out of 10

24 November 2024

Edward Betts: A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse

A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse Last week, I ventured to Toulouse, for a delightful mix of coding, conversation, and crepes at MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the broader Capitole du Libre conference, akin to the more well-known FOSDEM but with a distinctly French flair. This was my fourth and final MiniDebConf of the year. no jet bridge My trek to Toulouse was seamless. I hopped on a bus from my home in Bristol to the airport, then took a short flight. I luxuriated in seat 1A, making me the first to disembark a mere ten minutes later, I was already on the bus heading to my hotel.

Exploring the Pink City pink img 29 duck shop Once settled, I wasted no time exploring the charms of Toulouse. Just a short stroll from my hotel, I found myself beside a tranquil canal, its waters mirroring the golden hues of the trees lining its banks. Autumn in Toulouse painted the city in warm oranges and reds, creating a picturesque backdrop that was a joy to wander through. Every corner of the street revealed more of the city's rich cultural tapestry and striking architecture. Known affectionately as 'La Ville Rose' (The Pink City) for its unique terracotta brickwork, Toulouse captivated me with its blend of historical allure and vibrant modern life.

MiniDebCamp FabLab sign laptop setup Prior to the main event, the MiniDebCamp provided two days of hacking at Artilect FabLab a space as creative as it was welcoming. It was a pleasure to reconnect with familiar faces and forge new friendships.

Culinary delights lunch 1 img 14 img 15 img 16 img 17 cakes The hospitality was exceptional. Our lunches boasted a delicious array of quiches, an enticing charcuterie board, and a superb selection of cheeses, all perfectly complemented by exquisite petite fours. Each item was not only a feast for the eyes but also a delight for the palate.

Wine and cheese wine and cheese 1 wine and cheese 2 Leftovers from these gourmet feasts fuelled our impromptu cheese and wine party on Thursday evening a highlight where informal chats blended seamlessly with serious software discussions.

The river at night night river 1 night river 2 night river 3 night river 4 The enchantment of Toulouse doesn't dim with the setting sun; instead, it transforms. My evening strolls took me along the banks of the Garonne, under a sky just turning from twilight to velvet blue. The river, a dark mirror, perfectly reflected the illuminated grandeur of the city's architecture. Notably, the dome of the H pital de La Grave stood out, bathed in a warm glow against the night sky. This architectural gem, coupled with the soft lights of the bridge and the serene river, created a breathtaking scene that was both tranquil and awe-inspiring.

Capitole du Libre making crepes The MiniDebConf itself, part of the larger Capitole du Libre event, was a fantastic immersion into the world of free software. Unlike the ticket-free FOSDEM, this conference required QR codes for entry and even had bag searches, adding an unusual layer of security for a software conference. Highlights included the crepe-making by the organisers, reminiscent of street food scenes from larger festivals. The availability of crepes for MiniDebConf attendees and the presence of food trucks added a festive air, albeit with the inevitable long queues familiar to any festival-goer.

v l Toulouse bike cyclocity The city's bike rental system was a boon easy to use with handy bike baskets perfect for casual city touring. I chose pedal power over electric, finding it a pleasant way to navigate the streets and absorb the city's vibrant atmosphere.

Markets market flatbreads Toulouse's markets were a delightful discovery. From a spontaneous visit to a market near my hotel upon arrival, to cycling past bustling marketplaces, each day presented new local flavours and crafts to explore. The Za'atar flatbread from a Syrian stall was a particularly memorable lunch pick.

La brasserie Les Arcades img 25 img 26 img 27 Our conference wrapped up with a spontaneous gathering at La Brasserie Les Arcades in Place du Capitole. Finding a caf that could accommodate 30 of us on a Sunday evening without a booking felt like striking gold. What began with coffee and ice cream smoothly transitioned into dinner, where I enjoyed a delicious braised duck leg with green peppercorn sauce. This meal rounded off the trip with lively conversations and shared experiences.

The journey back home img 30 img 31 img 32 img 33 Returning from Toulouse, I found myself once again in seat 1A, offering the advantage of being the first off the plane, both on departure and arrival. My flight touched down in Bristol ahead of schedule, and within ten minutes, I was on the A1 bus, making my way back into the heart of Bristol.

Anticipating DebConf 25 in Brittany My trip to Toulouse for MiniDebConf was yet another fulfilling experience; the city was delightful, and the talks were insightful. While I frequently travel, these journeys are more about continuous learning and networking than escape. The food in Toulouse was particularly impressive, a highlight I've come to expect and relish on my trips to France. Looking ahead, I'm eagerly anticipating DebConf in Brest next year, especially the opportunity to indulge once more in the excellent French cuisine and beverages.

10 November 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2024

Welcome to the October 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project. Our reports attempt to outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting news items from elsewhere in tech where they are related. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Beyond bitwise equality for Reproducible Builds?
  2. Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL 2024
  3. Number of cores affected Android compiler output
  4. On our mailing list
  5. diffoscope
  6. IzzyOnDroid passed 25% reproducible apps
  7. Distribution work
  8. Website updates
  9. Reproducibility testing framework
  10. Supply-chain security at Open Source Summit EU
  11. Upstream patches

Beyond bitwise equality for Reproducible Builds? Jens Dietrich, Tim White, of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand along with Behnaz Hassanshahi and Paddy Krishnan of Oracle Labs Australia published a paper entitled Levels of Binary Equivalence for the Comparison of Binaries from Alternative Builds :
The availability of multiple binaries built from the same sources creates new challenges and opportunities, and raises questions such as: Does build A confirm the integrity of build B? or Can build A reveal a compromised build B? . To answer such questions requires a notion of equivalence between binaries. We demonstrate that the obvious approach based on bitwise equality has significant shortcomings in practice, and that there is value in opting for alternative notions. We conceptualise this by introducing levels of equivalence, inspired by clone detection types.
A PDF of the paper is freely available.

Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL 2024 On Friday 8th November, Vagrant Cascadian will present a talk entitled Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL in Seattle, WA. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. Vagrant s talk:
[ ] delves into how two project[s] approaches fundamental security features through Reproducible Builds, Bootstrappable Builds, code auditability, etc. to improve trustworthiness, allowing independent verification; trustworthy projects require little to no trust. Exploring the challenges that each project faces due to very different technical architectures, but also contextually relevant social structure, adoption patterns, and organizational history should provide a good backdrop to understand how different approaches to security might evolve, with real-world merits and downsides.

Number of cores affected Android compiler output Fay Stegerman wrote that the cause of the Android toolchain bug from September s report that she reported to the Android issue tracker has been found and the bug has been fixed.
the D8 Java to DEX compiler (part of the Android toolchain) eliminated a redundant field load if running the class s static initialiser was known to be free of side effects, which ended up accidentally depending on the sharding of the input, which is dependent on the number of CPU cores used during the build.
To make it easier to understand the bug and the patch, Fay also made a small example to illustrate when and why the optimisation involved is valid.

On our mailing list On our mailing list this month:

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 279, 280, 281 and 282 to Debian:
  • Ignore errors when listing .ar archives (#1085257). [ ]
  • Don t try and test with systemd-ukify in the Debian stable distribution. [ ]
  • Drop Depends on the deprecated python3-pkg-resources (#1083362). [ ]
In addition, Jelle van der Waa added support for Unified Kernel Image (UKI) files. [ ][ ][ ] Furthermore, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 282. [ ][ ]

IzzyOnDroid passed 25% reproducible apps The IzzyOnDroid project has reached a good milestone by reaching over 25% of the ~1,200 Android apps provided by their repository (of official APKs built by the original application developers) having been confirmed to be reproducible by a rebuilder.

Distribution work In Debian this month:
  • Holger Levsen uploaded devscripts version 2.24.2, including many changes to the debootsnap, debrebuild and reproducible-check scripts. This is the first time that debrebuild actually works (using sbuild s unshare backend). As part of this, Holger also fixed an issue in the reproducible-check script where a typo in the code led to incorrect results [ ]
  • Recently, a news entry was added to snapshot.debian.org s homepage, describing the recent changes that made the system stable again:
    The new server has no problems keeping up with importing the full archives on every update, as each run finishes comfortably in time before it s time to run again. [While] the new server is the one doing all the importing of updated archives, the HTTP interface is being served by both the new server and one of the VM s at LeaseWeb.
    The entry list a number of specific updates surrounding the API endpoints and rate limiting.
  • Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 3 were updated and 18 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
Elsewhere in distribution news, Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek performed another rebuild of Fedora 42 packages, with the headline result being that 91% of the packages are reproducible. Zbigniew also reported a reproducibility problem with QImage. Finally, in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.

Website updates There were an enormous number of improvements made to our website this month, including:
  • Alba Herrerias:
    • Improve consistency across distribution-specific guides. [ ]
    • Fix a number of links on the Contribute page. [ ]
  • Chris Lamb:
  • hulkoba
  • James Addison:
    • Huge and significant work on a (as-yet-merged) quickstart guide to be linked from the homepage [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • On the homepage, link directly to the Projects subpage. [ ]
    • Relocate dependency-drift notes to the Volatile inputs page. [ ]
  • Ninette Adhikari:
    • Add a brand new Success stories page that highlights the success stories of Reproducible Builds, showcasing real-world examples of projects shipping with verifiable, reproducible builds . [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Pol Dellaiera:
    • Update the website s README page for building the website under NixOS. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a new academic paper citation. [ ]
Lastly, Holger Levsen filed an extensive issue detailing a request to create an overview of recommendations and standards in relation to reproducible builds.

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 October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Add a basic index.html for rebuilderd. [ ]
  • Update the nginx.conf configuration file for rebuilderd. [ ]
  • Document how to use a rescue system for Infomaniak s OpenStack cloud. [ ]
  • Update usage info for two particular nodes. [ ]
  • Fix up a version skew check to fix the name of the riscv64 architecture. [ ]
  • Update the rebuilderd-related TODO. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added a new IP address for the inos5 node [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian brought 4 virt nodes back online [ ].

Supply-chain security at Open Source Summit EU The Open Source Summit EU took place recently, and covered plenty of topics related to supply-chain security, including:

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
Finally, If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

6 November 2024

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

Dear Debian community, this is Bits from DPL for October. In addition to a summary of my recent activities, I aim to include newsworthy developments within Debian that might be of interest to the broader community. I believe this provides valuable insights and foster a sense of connection across our diverse projects. Also, I welcome your feedback on the format and focus of these Bits, as community input helps shape their value. Ada Lovelace Day 2024 As outlined in my platform, I'm committed to increasing the diversity of Debian developers. I hope the recent article celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2024 featuring interviews with women in Debian will serve as an inspiring motivation for more women to join our community. MiniDebConf Cambridge This was my first time attending the MiniDebConf in Cambridge, hosted at the ARM building. I thoroughly enjoyed the welcoming atmosphere of both MiniDebCamp and MiniDebConf. It was wonderful to reconnect with people who hadn't made it to the last two DebConfs, and, as always, there was plenty of hacking, insightful discussions, and valuable learning. If you missed the recent MiniDebConf, there's a great opportunity to attend the next one in Toulouse. It was recently decided to include a MiniDebCamp beforehand as well. FTPmaster accepts MRs for DAK At the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge, I discussed potential enhancements for DAK to make life easier for both FTP Team members and developers. For those interested, the document "Hacking on DAK" provides guidance on setting up a local DAK instance and developing patches, which can be submitted as MRs. As a perfectly random example of such improvements some older MR, "Add commands to accept/reject updates from a policy queue" might give you some inspiration. At MiniDebConf, we compiled an initial list of features that could benefit both the FTP Team and the developer community. While I had preliminary discussions with the FTP Team about these items, not all ideas had consensus. I aim to open a detailed, public discussion to gather broader feedback and reach a consensus on which features to prioritize. Sometimes, packages are rejected not because of DFSG-incompatible licenses but due to other issues that could be resolved within an existing package (as discussed in my DebConf23 BoF, "Chatting with ftpmasters"[1]). During the "Meet the ftpteam" BoF (Log/transcription of the BoF can be found here), for the moment until the MR gets accepted, a new option was proposed for FTP Team members reviewing packages in NEW:

Accept + Bug Report This option would allow a package to enter Debian (in unstable or experimental) with an automatically filed RC bug report. The RC bug would prevent the package from migrating to testing until the issues are addressed. To ensure compatibility with the BTS, which only accepts bug reports for existing packages, a delayed job (24 hours post-acceptance) would file the bug.

When binary package names change, currently the package must go through the NEW queue, which can delay the availability of updated libraries. Allowing such packages to bypass the queue could expedite this process. A configuration option to enable this bypass specifically for uploads to experimental may be useful, as it avoids requiring additional technical review for experimental uploads. Previously, I believed the requirement for binary name changes to pass through NEW was due to a missing feature in DAK, possibly addressable via an MR. However, in discussions with the FTP Team, I learned this is a matter of team policy rather than technical limitation. I haven't found this policy documented, so it may be worth having a community discussion to clarify and reach consensus on how we want to handle binary name changes to get the MR sensibly designed. When a developer requests the removal of a package whether entirely or for specific architectures RM bugs must be filed for the package itself as well as for each package depending on it. It would be beneficial if the dependency tree could be automatically resolved, allowing either: 
a) the DAK removal tooling to remove the entire dependency tree
   after prompting the bug report author for confirmation, or
b) the system to auto-generate corresponding bug reports for all
   packages in the dependency tree.
The latter option might be better suited for implementation in an MR for reportbug. However, given the possibility of large-scale removals (for example, targeting specific architectures), having appropriate tooling for this would be very beneficial. In my opinion the proposed DAK enhancements aim to support both FTP Team members and uploading developers. I'd be very pleased if these ideas spark constructive discussion and inspire volunteers to start working on them--possibly even preparing to join the FTP Team. On the topic of ftpmasters: an ongoing discussion with SPI lawyers is currently reviewing the non-US agreement established 22 years ago. Ideally, this review will lead to a streamlined workflow for ftpmasters, removing certain hurdles that were originally put in place due to legal requirements, which were updated in 2021. Contacting teams My outreach efforts to Debian teams have slowed somewhat recently. However, I want to emphasize that anyone from a packaging team is more than welcome to reach out to me directly. My outreach emails aren't following any specific orders--just my own somewhat na ve view of Debian, which I'm eager to make more informed. Recently, I received two very informative responses: one from the Qt/KDE Team, which thoughtfully compiled input from several team members into a shared document. The other was from the Rust Team, where I received three quick, helpful replies one of which included an invitation to their upcoming team meeting. Interesting readings on our mailing lists I consider the following threads on our mailing list some interesting reading and would like to add some comments. Sensible languages for younger contributors Though the discussion on debian-devel about programming languages took place in September, I recently caught up with it. I strongly believe Debian must continue evolving to stay relevant for the future. "Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same." -- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard I encourage constructive discussions on integrating programming languages in our toolchain that support this evolution. Concerns regarding the "Open Source AI Definition" A recent thread on the debian-project list discussed the "Open Source AI Definition". This topic will impact Debian in the future, and we need to reach an informed decision. I'd be glad to see more perspectives in the discussions particularly on finding a sensible consensus, understanding how FTP Team members view their delegated role, and considering whether their delegation might need adjustments for clarity on this issue. Kind regards Andreas.

9 October 2024

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2024

7 October 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2024

Welcome to the September 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our reports attempt to outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting news items from elsewhere in tech where they are related. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. New binsider tool to analyse ELF binaries
  2. Unreproducibility of GHC Haskell compiler 95% fixed
  3. Mailing list summary
  4. Towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible OS
  5. Two new reproducibility-related academic papers
  6. Distribution work
  7. diffoscope
  8. Other software development
  9. Android toolchain core count issue reported
  10. New Gradle plugin for reproducibility
  11. Website updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

New binsider tool to analyse ELF binaries Reproducible Builds developer Orhun Parmaks z has announced a fantastic new tool to analyse the contents of ELF binaries. According to the project s README page:
Binsider can perform static and dynamic analysis, inspect strings, examine linked libraries, and perform hexdumps, all within a user-friendly terminal user interface!
More information about Binsider s features and how it works can be found within Binsider s documentation pages.

Unreproducibility of GHC Haskell compiler 95% fixed A seven-year-old bug about the nondeterminism of object code generated by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) received a recent update, consisting of Rodrigo Mesquita noting that the issue is:
95% fixed by [merge request] !12680 when -fobject-determinism is enabled. [ ]
The linked merge request has since been merged, and Rodrigo goes on to say that:
After that patch is merged, there are some rarer bugs in both interface file determinism (eg. #25170) and in object determinism (eg. #25269) that need to be taken care of, but the great majority of the work needed to get there should have been merged already. When merged, I think we should close this one in favour of the more specific determinism issues like the two linked above.

Mailing list summary On our mailing list this month:
  • Fay Stegerman let everyone know that she started a thread on the Fediverse about the problems caused by unreproducible zlib/deflate compression in .zip and .apk files and later followed up with the results of her subsequent investigation.
  • Long-time developer kpcyrd wrote that there has been a recent public discussion on the Arch Linux GitLab [instance] about the challenges and possible opportunities for making the Linux kernel package reproducible , all relating to the CONFIG_MODULE_SIG flag. [ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann followed-up to an in-person conversation at our recent Hamburg 2024 summit on the potential presence for Reproducible Builds in recognised standards. [ ]
  • Fay Stegerman also wrote about her worry about the possible repercussions for RB tooling of Debian migrating from zlib to zlib-ng as reproducibility requires identical compressed data streams. [ ]
  • Martin Monperrus wrote the list announcing the latest release of maven-lockfile that is designed aid building Maven projects with integrity . [ ]
  • Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote about potential role of reproducible builds in combatting silent data corruption, as detailed in a recent Tweet and scholarly paper on faulty CPU cores. [ ]

Towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible OS Bernhard M. Wiedemann began writing on journey towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible operating system on the openSUSE wiki:
This is a report of Part 1 of my journey: building 100% bit-reproducible packages for every package that makes up [openSUSE s] minimalVM image. This target was chosen as the smallest useful result/artifact. The larger package-sets get, the more disk-space and build-power is required to build/verify all of them.
This work was sponsored by NLnet s NGI Zero fund.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 14 reviews of Debian packages were added, 12 were updated and 20 were removed, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ] In addition, Holger opened 4 bugs against the debrebuild component of the devscripts suite of tools. In particular:
  • #1081047: Fails to download .dsc file.
  • #1081048: Does not work with a proxy.
  • #1081050: Fails to create a debrebuild.tar.
  • #1081839: Fails with E: mmdebstrap failed to run error.
Last month, an issue was filed to update the Salsa CI pipeline (used by 1,000s of Debian packages) to no longer test for reproducibility with reprotest s build_path variation. Holger Levsen provided a rationale for this change in the issue, which has already been made to the tests being performed by tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, this issue was closed by Santiago R. R., nicely explaining that build path variation is no longer the default, and, if desired, how developers may enable it again. In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading version 278 to Debian:
  • New features:
    • Add a helpful contextual message to the output if comparing Debian .orig tarballs within .dsc files without the ability to fuzzy-match away the leading directory. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Drop removal of calculated os.path.basename from GNU readelf output. [ ]
    • Correctly invert X% similar value and do not emit 100% similar . [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Temporarily remove procyon-decompiler from Build-Depends as it was removed from testing (via #1057532). (#1082636)
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
For trydiffoscope, the command-line client for the web-based version of diffoscope, Chris Lamb also:
  • Added an explicit python3-setuptools dependency. (#1080825)
  • Bumped the Standards-Version to 4.7.0. [ ]

Other software development disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into system calls to reliably flush out reproducibility issues. This month, version 0.5.11-4 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen making the following changes:
  • Replace build-dependency on the obsolete pkg-config package with one on pkgconf, following a Lintian check. [ ]
  • Bump Standards-Version field to 4.7.0, with no related changes needed. [ ]

In addition, reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, version 0.7.28 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen including a change by Jelle van der Waa to move away from the pipes Python module to shlex, as the former will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].

Android toolchain core count issue reported Fay Stegerman reported an issue with the Android toolchain where a part of the build system generates a different classes.dex file (and thus a different .apk) depending on the number of cores available during the build, thereby breaking Reproducible Builds:
We ve rebuilt [tag v3.6.1] multiple times (each time in a fresh container): with 2, 4, 6, 8, and 16 cores available, respectively:
  • With 2 and 4 cores we always get an unsigned APK with SHA-256 14763d682c9286ef .
  • With 6, 8, and 16 cores we get an unsigned APK with SHA-256 35324ba4c492760 instead.

New Gradle plugin for reproducibility A new plugin for the Gradle build tool for Java has been released. This easily-enabled plugin results in:
reproducibility settings [being] applied to some of Gradle s built-in tasks that should really be the default. Compatible with Java 8 and Gradle 8.3 or later.

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

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

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 September, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Upgrade the osuosl4 node to Debian trixie in anticipation of running debrebuild and rebuilderd there. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily mark the osuosl4 node as offline due to ongoing xfs_repair filesystem maintenance. [ ][ ]
    • Do not warn about (very old) broken nodes. [ ]
    • Add the risc64 architecture to the multiarch version skew tests for Debian trixie and sid. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Mark the virt 32,64 b nodes as down. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Add support for powercycling OpenStack instances. [ ]
    • Update the fail2ban to ban hosts for 4 weeks in total [ ][ ] and take care to never ban our own Jenkins instance. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian recorded a disk failure for the virt32b and virt64b nodes [ ], performed some maintenance of the cbxi4a node [ ][ ] and marked most armhf architecture systems as being back online.
Finally, If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

9 September 2024

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in July 2024

16 August 2024

Bits from Debian: Debian Celebrates 31 years!

Debian 31 years by Daniel Lenharo As the expression goes, "Time flies when you are having fun", meaning you do not normally account for the passage of time when you are distracted and enjoying yourself. The expression is a well established English idiom, though today for a moment the Debian Project pauses to reflect on that expression. It has been 31 years now that we have been around. It has been 31 amazing years of fun and amazement in watching the world around us grow and ourselves grow into the world. Let us tell you, we have had a great time in doing so. We have been invited to nearly every continent and country for over 25 Debian Developer Conferences, we have contributed to the sciences with our Debian Pure Blends; we have not given up on or discounted aged hardware with Long Term Support (LTS); we have encouraged and sponsored diversity with our Outreach Programs. We have contributed to exploration of this lovely planet and the vast vacuum of space (where no one hears Developers scream). There is more to what we have done but from a cursory glance, we seem to have done it all. But we never noticed it. Time does fly or "escape irretrievably" when having a good time and making progress, though our pause at this moment is that we have also had a few moments of honest self-evaluation and reflection. Over the years the project has lost some significant loved ones who were dear to us - you may have called them Developers while we called them Friends, we called them Mentors, we hurt, we grieved, and in their memories we keep moving forward. The course of the project has seen a few tragedies, has seen heated discourse in the public domain, has addressed and weathered concerns, and has still continually grown. And we did that in the public sphere, because at the core this is an open project. Our code is public, our bugs and failings are public, our communications are public, our meetings are public, and our love of FLOSS is most definitely public. And now more than ever the Debian Project realizes that the "we" that is sprinkled throughout this letter is just another way of saying: "you". You, the user, contributor, sponsor, developer, maintainer, bug squasher; all of you make the WE that is Debian. So what are WE waiting for? Lets celebrate! Join the worldwide celebration or find an event local to you by visiting our DebianDay events page - see you there!

8 August 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Reproducible Builds Summit 2024
  2. Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps
  3. Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?
  4. AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts
  5. Community updates
  6. Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog
  7. Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems
  8. Development news
  9. Website updates
  10. Upstream patches
  11. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds Summit 2024 Last month, we were very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps (LWN) In a recent edition of Linux Weekly News, Daroc Alden has written an article on bootstrappable builds. Starting with a brief introduction that
a bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process.
The article goes onto to describe that now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all. and concludes:
The real benefit of bootstrappable builds comes from a few things. Like reproducible builds, they can make users more confident that the binary packages downloaded from a package mirror really do correspond to the open-source project whose source code they can inspect. Bootstrappable builds have also had positive effects on the complexity of building a Linux distribution from scratch [ ]. But most of all, bootstrappable builds are a boon to the longevity of our software ecosystem. It s easy for old software to become unbuildable. By having a well-known, self-contained chain of software that can build itself from a small seed, in a variety of environments, bootstrappable builds can help ensure that today s software is not lost, no matter where the open-source community goes from here

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds? Trisquel developer Simon Josefsson wrote an interesting blog post comparing the output of the .deb files from our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework and the ones in the official Debian archive. Following up from a previous post on the reproducibility of Trisquel, Simon notes that typically [the] rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible , Simon correctly identifies that the purpose of [these] rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match. However, Simon s post swiftly moves on to announce a new tool called debdistrebuild that performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline and displays diffoscope output for further analysis.

AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts Mehdi Keshani, Tudor-Gabriel Velican, Gideon Bot and Sebastian Proksch of the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, have published a new paper in the ACM Software Engineering on a new tool to automatically reproduce Apache Maven artifacts:
Reproducible Central is an initiative that curates a list of reproducible Maven libraries, but the list is limited and challenging to maintain due to manual efforts. [We] investigate the feasibility of automatically finding the source code of a library from its Maven release and recovering information about the original release environment. Our tool, AROMA, can obtain this critical information from the artifact and the source repository through several heuristics and we use the results for reproduction attempts of Maven packages. Overall, our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 99.5% when compared field-by-field to the existing manual approach [and] we reveal that automatic reproducibility is feasible for 23.4% of the Maven packages using AROMA, and 8% of these packages are fully reproducible.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:
  • Nichita Morcotilo reached out to the community, first to share their efforts to build reproducible packages cross-platform with a new build tool called rattler-build, noting that as you can imagine, building packages reproducibly on Windows is the hardest challenge (so far!) . Nichita goes onto mention that the Apple ecosystem appears to be using ZERO_AR_DATE over SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus announced that the Debian bookworm 12.6 live images are nearly reproducible , with more detail in the post itself and input in the thread from other contributors.
  • As reported in last month s report, Pol Dellaiera completed his master thesis on Reproducibility in Software Engineering at the University of Mons, Belgium. This month, Pol announced this on the list with more background info. Since the master thesis sources have been available, it has received some feedback and contributions. As a result, an updated version of the thesis has been published containing those community fixes.
  • Daniel Gr ber asked for help in getting the Yosys documentation to build reproducibly, citing issues in inter alia the PDF generation causing differing CreationDate metadata values.
  • James Addison continued his long journey towards getting the Sphinx documentation generator to build reproducible documentation. In this thread, James concerns himself with the problem that even when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is configured, Sphinx projects that have configured their copyright notices using dynamic elements can produce nonsensical output under some circumstances. James query ended up generating a number of replies.
  • Allen gunner Gunner posted a brief update on the progress the core team is making towards introducing a Code of Conduct (CoC) such that it is in place in time for the RB Summit in Hamburg in September . In particular, gunner asks if you are interested in helping with CoC design and development in the weeks ahead, simply email rb-core@lists.reproducible-builds.org and let us know . [ ]

Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog On our mailing list, Fay Stegerman announced a new Reproducible Builds collaboration in the Android ecosystem:
We are pleased to announce Reproducible Builds, special client support and more in our repo : a collaboration between various independent interoperable projects: the IzzyOnDroid team, 3rd-party clients Droid-ify & Neo Store, and rbtlog (part of my collection of tools for Android Reproducible Builds) to bring Reproducible Builds to IzzyOnDroid and the wider Android ecosystem.

Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems Congratulations to Marina Moore of the New York Tandon School of Engineering who has submitted her PhD thesis on Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems. The introduction outlines its contributions to the field:
[S]oftware repositories are a vital component of software development and release, with packages downloaded both for direct use and to use as dependencies for other software. Further, when software is updated due to patched vulnerabilities or new features, it is vital that users are able to see and install this patched version of the software. However, this process of updating software can also be the source of attack. To address these attacks, secure software update systems have been proposed. However, these secure software update systems have seen barriers to widespread adoption. The Update Framework (TUF) was introduced in 2010 to address several attacks on software update systems including repository compromise, rollback attacks, and arbitrary software installation. Despite this, compromises continue to occur, with millions of users impacted by such compromises. My work has addressed substantial challenges to adoption of secure software update systems grounded in an understanding of practical concerns. Work with industry and academic communities provided opportunities to discover challenges, expand adoption, and raise awareness about secure software updates. [ ]

Development news In Debian this month, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 13 were updated and 6 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new toolchain issue type was identified as well, specifically ordering_differences_in_pkg_info.
Colin Percival filed a bug against the LLVM compiler noting that building i386 binaries on the i386 architecture is different when building i386 binaries under amd64. The fix was narrowed down to x87 excess precision, which can result in slightly different register choices when the compiler is hosted on x86_64 or i386 and a fix committed. [ ]
Fay Stegerman performed some in-depth research surrounding her apksigcopier tool, after some Android .apk files signed with the latest apksigner could no longer be verified as reproducible. Fay identified the issue as follows:
Since build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, backwards-incompatible changes to apksigner break apksigcopier as it now by default forcibly replaces existing alignment padding and changed the default page alignment from 4k to 16k (same as Android Gradle Plugin >= 8.3, so the latter is only an issue when using older AGP). [ ]
She documented multiple available workarounds and filed a bug in Google s issue tracker.
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded version 272 and Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 273 to Debian, and the following changes were made as well:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Ensure that the convert utility is from ImageMagick version 6.x. The command-line interface has seemingly changed with the 7.x series of ImageMagick. [ ]
    • Factor out version detection in test_jpeg_image. [ ]
    • Correct the import of the identify_version method after a refactoring change in a previous commit. [ ]
    • Move away from using DSA OpenSSH keys in tests as support has been deprecated and removed in OpenSSH version 9.8p1. [ ]
    • Move to assert_diff in the test_openssh_pub_key package. [ ]
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Add support for ffmpeg version 7.x which adds some extra context to the diff. [ ]
    • Rework the handling of OpenSSH testing of DSA keys if OpenSSH is strictly 9.7, and add an OpenSSH key test with a ed25519-format key [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily disable a few packages that are not available in Debian testing. [ ][ ]
    • Stop ignoring the results of Debian testing in the continuous integration system. [ ]
    • Adjust options in debian/source to make sure not to pack the Python sdist directory into the binary Debian package. [ ]
    • Adjust Lintian overrides. [ ]

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

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

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 July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Grant bremner access to the ionos7 node. [ ][ ]
  • Perform a dummy change to force update of all jobs. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian performed some necessary node maintenance of the underlying build hosts. [ ]
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:

Jonathan Carter: DebConf24 Busan, South Korea

I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would. In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.

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

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

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

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

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)
    Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

    Social Conference Dinner
    Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
    The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.
    Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
    Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
    License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+
    Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.
    • I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
    • I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
    • Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
    • I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).
    • We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
    • and many other fly-by discussions.

    Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf
    • loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
    • toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
    • extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
    • Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
    • Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.
    So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

      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.

      2 July 2024

      Colin Watson: Free software activity in June 2024

      My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

      Next.