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. P.S. We ve completed over a year of writing these blogs. If you have any suggestions on how to make them better or what you d like us to cover, or any other opinions/reviews you might have, et al, please let us know by dropping an email to us. We d be happy to hear your thoughts. :)

SSO Authentication for jitsi.debian.social, by Stefano Rivera Debian.social s jitsi instance has been getting some abuse by (non-Debian) people sharing sexually explicit content on the service. After playing whack-a-mole with this for a month, and shutting the instance off for another month, we opened it up again and the abuse immediately re-started. Stefano sat down and wrote an SSO Implementation that hooks into Jitsi s existing JWT SSO support. This requires everyone using jitsi.debian.social to have a Salsa account. With only a little bit of effort, we could change this in future, to only require an account to open a room, and allow guests to join the call.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne The biggest task this month was sending mitigation patches for all of the /usr-move issues arising from package renames due to the 2038 transition. As a result, we can now say that every affected package in unstable can either be converted with dh-sequence-movetousr or has an open bug report. The package set relevant to debootstrap except for the set that has to be uploaded concurrently has been moved to /usr and is awaiting migration. The move of coreutils happened to affect piuparts which hard codes the location of /bin/sync and received multiple updates as a result.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera uploaded a stable release update to python3.11 for bookworm, fixing a use-after-free crash.
• Stefano uploaded a new version of python-html2text, and updated python3-defaults to build with it.
• In support of Python 3.12, Stefano dropped distutils as a Build-Dependency from a few packages, and uploaded a complex set of patches to python-mitogen.
• Stefano landed some merge requests to clean up dead code in dh-python, removed the flit plugin, and uploaded it.
• Stefano uploaded new upstream versions of twisted, hatchling, python-flexmock, python-authlib, python mitogen, python-pipx, and xonsh.
• Stefano requested removal of a few packages supporting the Opsis HDMI2USB hardware that DebConf Video team used to use for HDMI capture, as they are not being maintained upstream. They started to FTBFS, with recent sdcc changes.
• DebConf 24 is getting ready to open registration, Stefano spent some time fixing bugs in the website, caused by infrastructure updates.
• Stefano reviewed all the DebConf 23 travel reimbursements, filing requests for more information from SPI where our records mismatched.
• Stefano spun up a Wafer website for the Berlin 2024 mini DebConf.
• Roberto C. S nchez worked on facilitating the transfer of upstream maintenance responsibility for the dormant Shorewall project to a new team led by the current maintainer of the Shorewall packages in Debian.
• Colin Watson fixed build failures in celery-haystack-ng, db1-compat, jsonpickle, libsdl-perl, kali, knews, openssh-ssh1, python-json-log-formatter, python-typing-extensions, trn4, vigor, and wcwidth. Some of these were related to the 64-bit time_t transition, since that involved enabling -Werror=implicit-function-declaration.
• Colin fixed an off-by-one error in neovim, which was already causing a build failure in Ubuntu and would eventually have caused a build failure in Debian with stricter toolchain settings.
• Colin added an sshd@.service template to openssh to help newer systemd versions make containers and VMs SSH-accessible over AF_VSOCK sockets.
• Following the xz-utils backdoor, Colin spent some time testing and discussing OpenSSH upstream s proposed inline systemd notification patch, since the current implementation via libsystemd was part of the attack vector used by that backdoor.
• Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some Go packages for Lena Voytek and Rajudev.
• Utkarsh also helped Mitchell Dzurick with the adoption of pyparted package.
• Helmut sent 10 patches for cross build failures.
• Helmut partially fixed architecture cross bootstrap tooling to deal with changes in linux-libc-dev and the recent gcc-for-host changes and also fixed a 64bit-time_t FTBFS in libtextwrap.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded several packages from debian-printing: cjet, lprng, rlpr and epson-inkjet-printer-escpr were affected by the newly enabled compiler switch -Werror=implicit-function-declaration. Besides fixing these serious bugs, Thorsten also worked on other bugs and could fix one or the other.
• Carles updated simplemonitor and python-ring-doorbell packages with new upstream versions.
• Santiago is still working on the Salsa CI MRs to adapt the build jobs so they can rely on sbuild. Current work includes adapting the images used by the build job, implementing the basic sbuild support the related jobs, and adjusting the support for experimental and *-backports releases..
  Additionally, Santiago reviewed some MR such as Make timeout action explicit in the logs and the subsequent Implement conditional timeout verbosity, and the batch of MRs included in https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/482.
• Santiago also reviewed applications for the improving Salsa CI in Debian GSoC 2024 project. We received applications from four very talented candidates. The selection process is currently ongoing. A huge thanks to all of them!
• As part of the DebConf 24 organization, Santiago has taken part in the Content team discussions.

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

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

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

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

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

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne Much of the work was spent on handling interaction with time time64 transition and sending patches for mitigating fallout. The set of packages relevant to debootstrap is mostly converted and the patches for glibc and base-files have been refined due to feedback from the upload to Ubuntu noble. Beyond this, he sent patches for all remaining packages that cannot move their files with dh-sequence-movetousr and packages using dpkg-divert in ways that dumat would not recognize.

Upcoming improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Last month, Santiago Ruano Rinc n started the work on integrating sbuild into the Salsa CI pipeline. Initially, Santiago used sbuild with the unshare chroot mode. However, after discussion with josch, jochensp and helmut (thanks to them!), it turns out that the unshare mode is not the most suitable for the pipeline, since the level of isolation it provides is not needed, and some test suites would fail (eg: krb5). Additionally, one of the requirements of the build job is the use of ccache, since it is needed by some C/C++ large projects to reduce the compilation time. In the preliminary work with unshare last month, it was not possible to make ccache to work. Finally, Santiago changed the chroot mode, and now has a couple of POC (cf: 1 and 2) that rely on the schroot and sudo, respectively. And the good news is that ccache is successfully used by sbuild with schroot! The image here comes from an example of building grep. At the end of the build, ccache -s shows the statistics of the cache that it used, and so a little more than half of the calls of that job were cacheable. The most important pieces are in place to finish the integration of sbuild into the pipeline. Other than that, Santiago also reviewed the very useful merge request !346, made by IOhannes zm lnig to autodetect the release from debian/changelog. As agreed with IOhannes, Santiago is preparing a merge request to include the release autodetection use case in the very own Salsa CI s CI.

Packaging simplemonitor, by Carles Pina i Estany Carles started using simplemonitor in 2017, opened a WNPP bug in 2022 and started packaging simplemonitor dependencies in October 2023. After packaging five direct and indirect dependencies, Carles finally uploaded simplemonitor to unstable in February. During the packaging of simplemonitor, Carles reported a few issues to upstream. Some of these were to make the simplemonitor package build and run tests reproducibly. A reproducibility issue was reprotest overriding the timezone, which broke simplemonitor s tests. There have been discussions on resolving this upstream in simplemonitor and in reprotest, too. Carles also started upgrading or improving some of simplemonitor s dependencies.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera spent some time doing admin on debian.social infrastructure. Including dealing with a spike of abuse on the Jitsi server.
• Stefano started to prepare a new release of dh-python, including cleaning out a lot of old Python 2.x related code. Thanks to Niels Thykier (outside Freexian) for spear-heading this work.
• DebConf 24 planning is beginning. Stefano discussed venues and finances with the local team and remotely supported a site-visit by Nattie (outside Freexian).
• Also in the DebConf 24 context, Santiago took part in discussions and preparations related to the Content Team.
• A JIT bug was reported against pypy3 in Debian Bookworm. Stefano bisected the upstream history to find the patch (it was already resolved upstream) and released an update to pypy3 in bookworm.
• Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
• Colin Watson backported a python-channels-redis fix to bookworm, rediscovered while working on debusine.
• Colin dug into a cluster of celery build failures and tracked the hardest bit down to a Python 3.12 regression, now fixed in unstable. celery should be back in testing once the 64-bit time_t migration is out of the way.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cpdb-libs. Unfortunately upstream changed the naming of their release tags, so updating the watch file was a bit demanding. Anyway this version 2.0 is a huge step towards introduction of the new Common Print Dialog Backends.
• Helmut send patches for 48 cross build failures.
• Helmut changed debvm to use mkfs.ext4 instead of genext2fs.
• Helmut sent a debci MR for improving collector robustness.
• In preparation for DebConf 25, Santiago worked on the Brest Bid.

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

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Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Three new reproducibility-related academic papers A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month: Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:

Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)

Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time by Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Th o Zimmermann (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France) addresses:

[The] principle of reusability [ ] makes it harder to reproduce projects build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.

The abstract continues with the claim that Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision. (arXiv, full PDF)
Options Matter: Documenting and Fixing Non-Reproducible Builds in Highly-Configurable Systems by Georges Aaron Randrianaina, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Olivier Zendra and Mathieu Acher (Inria centre at Rennes University, France):

This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

• User cen posted a query asking How to verify a package by rebuilding it locally on Debian which received a followup from Vagrant Cascadian.
• James Addison asked Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian regarding the differences in the testing performed by Debian s GitLab continuous integration (CI) pipeline and the Debian-specific testing performed by the Reproducible Builds project itself, and followed this with a separate but related question regarding misconfigured reprotest configurations.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]
• Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). [ ]
• Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]
• Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. [ ]
• Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]
• Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]
• Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]
• Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]
• Make test_zip black clean. [ ]

In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest 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, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:

• Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]
• Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [ ][ ]
• Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

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

• Chris Lamb:
  • Improve the relative sizing of headers. [ ]
  • Re-order and punch up the introduction and documentation on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. [ ]
  • Update SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation re. datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp. Thanks, James Addison. [ ]
  • Add a post about Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Update the GNU Guix page to include their reproducibility QA page. [ ]
  • Add Sune Vuorela and Jan-Benedict Glaw to our contributors list. [ ][ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add Sovereign Tech Fund s logo to our sponsors. [ ]
  • Update our sponsors list. [ ]

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

• Debian-related changes:
  • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]
  • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]
  • Add an Erlang package set. [ ]
• Other changes:
  • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]
  • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
  • Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]
  • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. [ ]
  • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]
  • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]

Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:

• Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]
• Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]

In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

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:

• Philip Rinn:
  • gimagereader (date)
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • grass (date-related issue)
  • grub2 (filesystem ordering issue)
  • latex2html (drop a non-deterministic log)
  • mhvtl (tar)
  • obs (build-tool issue)
  • ollama (GZip embedding the modification time)
  • presenterm (filesystem-ordering issue)
  • qt6-quick3d (parallelism)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1064506 filed against geophar.
  • #1064891 filed against pytest-repeat.
  • #1064892 filed against klepto.
• James Addison:
  • #1064519 filed against flask-limiter.
  • python-parsl-doc (disable dynamic argument evaluation by Sphinx autodoc extension)
  • python3-pytest-repeat (remove entry_points.txt creation that varied by shell)
  • python3-selinux (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • python3-sepolicy (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • #1064575 filed against pyswarms.
  • #1064638 filed against python-x2go.
  • snapd (fix timestamp header in packaged manual-page)
  • zzzeeksphinx (existing RB patch forwarded and merged (with modifications))
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • #1063939 filed against fop.

---

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

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

Two months into my new gig and it s going great! Tracking my time has taken a bit of getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database of everything I ve done has also allowed some helpful introspection. Freexian sponsors up to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice. In fact I ve been spending the bulk of my time on debusine which is itself intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later. While I contribute to Freexian s summaries now, I ve also decided to start writing monthly posts about my free software activity as many others do, to get into some more detail. January 2024

• I added Incus support to autopkgtest. Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager, forked from Canonical s LXD. I switched my laptop over to it and then quickly found that it was inconvenient not to be able to run Debian package test suites using autopkgtest, so I tweaked autopkgtest s existing LXD integration to support using either LXD or Incus.
• I discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of my packages, including debconf. Perl used to be my language of choice but I ve been mostly using Python for over a decade now, so I m not as fluent as I used to be and some mechanical assistance with spotting common errors is helpful; besides, I m generally a big fan of applying static analysis to everything possible in the hope of reducing bug density. Of course, this did result in a couple of regressions (1, 2), but at least we caught them fairly quickly.
• I did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
• I did some routine maintenance to move several of my upstream projects to a new Gnulib stable branch.
• debmirror includes a useful summary of how big a Debian mirror is, but it hadn t been updated since 2010 and the script to do so had bitrotted quite badly. I fixed that and added a recurring task for myself to refresh this every six months.

February 2024

• Some time back I added AppArmor and seccomp confinement to man-db. This was mainly motivated by a desire to support manual pages in snaps (which is still open several years later ), but since reading manual pages involves a non-trivial text processing toolchain mostly written in C++, I thought it was reasonable to assume that some day it might have a vulnerability even though its track record has been good; so man now restricts the system calls that groff can execute and the parts of the file system that it can access. I stand by this, but it did cause some problems that have needed a succession of small fixes over the years. This month I issued DLA-3731-1, backporting some of those fixes to buster.
• I spent some time chasing a console-setup build failure following the removal of kFreeBSD support, which was uploaded by mistake. I suggested a set of fixes for this, but the author of the change to remove kFreeBSD support decided to take a different approach (fair enough), so I ve abandoned this.
• I updated the Debian zope.testrunner package to 6.3.1.
• openssh:
  • A Freexian collaborator had a problem with automating installations involving changes to /etc/ssh/sshd_config. This turned out to be resolvable without any changes, but in the process of investigating I noticed that my dodgy arrangements to avoid ucf prompts in certain cases had bitrotted slightly, which meant that some people might be prompted unnecessarily. I fixed this and arranged for it not to happen again.
  • Following a recent debian-devel discussion, I realized that some particularly awkward code in the OpenSSH packaging was now obsolete, and removed it.
• I backported a python-channels-redis fix to bookworm. I wasn t the first person to run into this, but I rediscovered it while working on debusine and it was confusing enough that it seemed worth fixing in stable.
• I fixed a simple build failure in storm.
• I dug into a very confusing cluster of celery build failures (1, 2, 3), and tracked the hardest bit down to a Python 3.12 regression, now fixed in unstable thanks to Stefano Rivera. Getting celery back into testing is blocked on the 64-bit time_t transition for now, but once that s out of the way it should flow smoothly again.

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

Miscellaneous contributions

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

IEEE Software recently announced that a paper that I co-authored with Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli has recently been awarded their Best Paper award:

Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains, the abstract reads as follows:

Although it is possible to increase confidence in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by reviewing its source code, trusting code is not the same as trusting its executable counterparts. These are typically built and distributed by third-party vendors with severe security consequences if their supply chains are compromised. In this paper, we present reproducible builds, an approach that can determine whether generated binaries correspond with their original source code. We first define the problem and then provide insight into the challenges of making real-world software build in a "reproducible" manner that is, when every build generates bit-for-bit identical results. Through the experience of the Reproducible Builds project making the Debian Linux distribution reproducible, we also describe the affinity between reproducibility and quality assurance (QA).

According to Google Scholar, the paper has accumulated almost 40 citations since publication. The full text of the paper can be found in PDF format.

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.

LXD/Incus backend bug in autopkgtest by Stefano Rivera While working on the Python 3.12 transition, Stefano repeatedly ran into a bug in autopkgtest when using LXD (or in the future Incus), that caused it to hang when running cython s multi-hour autopkgtests. After some head-banging, the bug turned out to be fairly straightforward: LXD didn t shut down on receiving a SIGTERM, so when a testsuite timed out, it would hang forever. A simple fix has been applied.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Thanks to Christian Hofstaedtler and others, the effort is moving into a community effort and the work funded by Freexian becomes more difficult to separate from non-funded work. In particular, since the community fully handled all issues around lost udev rules, dh_installudev now installs rules to /usr. The story around diversions took another detour. We learned that conflicts do not reliably prevent concurrent unpack and the reiterated mitigation for molly-guard triggered this. After a bit of back and forth and consultation with the developer mailing list, we concluded that avoiding the problematic behavior when using apt or an apt-based upgrader combined with a loss mitigation would be good enough. The involved packages bfh-container, molly-guard, progress-linux-container and systemd have since been uploaded to unstable and the matter seems finally solved except that it doesn t quite work with sysvinit yet. The same approach is now being proposed for the diversions of zutils for gzip. We thank involved maintainers for their timely cooperation.

gcc-for-host, by Helmut Grohne Since forever, it has been difficult to correctly express a toolchain build dependency. This can be seen in the Build-Depends of the linux source package for instance. While this has been solved for binutils a while back, the patches for gcc have been unfinished. With lots of constructive feedback from gcc package maintainer Matthias Klose, Helmut worked on finalizing and testing these patches. Patch stacks are now available for gcc-13 and gcc-14 and Matthias already included parts of them in test builds for Ubuntu noble. Finishing this work would enable us to resolve around 1000 cross build dependency satisfiability issues in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano continued work on the Python 3.12 transition, including uploads of cython, pycxx, numpy, python-greenlet, twisted, foolscap and dh-python.
• Stefano reviewed and selected from a new round of DebConf 24 bids, as part of the DebConf Committee. Busan, South Korea was selected.
• For debian-printing Thorsten uploaded hplip to unstable to fix a /usr-merge bug and cups to Bookworm to fix bugs related to printing in color.
• Utkarsh helped newcomers in mentoring and reviewing their packaging; eg: golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter.
• Helmut sent patches for 42 cross build failures unrelated to the gcc-for-host work.
• Helmut continues to maintain rebootstrap. In December, blt started depending on libjpeg and this poses a dependency loop. Ideally, Python would stop depending on blt. Also linux-libc-dev having become Multi-Arch: foreign poses non-trivial issues that are not fully resolved yet.
• Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.

Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

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Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:

The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:

What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]

The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:

I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.

Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes:

Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:

deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.

The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including:

• crack [ ] (#1021521 & #1021522)
• dustmite [ ] (#1020878 & #1020879)
• edid-decode [ ] (#1020877)
• gentoo [ ] (#1024284)
• haskell98-report [ ] (#1024007)
• infinipath-psm [ ] (#990862)
• lcm [ ] (#1024286)
• libapache-mod-evasive [ ] (#1020800)
• libccrtp [ ] (#860470)
• libinput [ ] (#995809)
• lirc [ ] (#979019, #979023 & #979024)
• mm-common [ ] (#977177)
• mpl-sphinx-theme [ ] (#1005826)
• psi [ ] (#1017473)
• python-parse-type [ ] (#1002671)
• ruby-tioga [ ] (#1005727)
• ucspi-proxy [ ] (#1024125)
• ypserv [ ] (#983138)

In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

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

• Debian-related changes:
  • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
• Arch Linux-related changes
  • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
  • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
  • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
  • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
  • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
  • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
  • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
  • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
  • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]

In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • apr (hostname issue)
  • dune (parallelism)
  • epy (time-based .pyc issue)
  • fpc (Year 2038)
  • gap (date)
  • gh (FTBFS in 2024)
  • kubernetes (fixed random build path)
  • libgda (date)
  • libguestfs (tar)
  • metamail (date)
  • mpi-selector (date)
  • neovim (randomness in Lua)
  • nml (time-based .pyc)
  • pommed (parallelism)
  • procmail (benchmarking)
  • pysnmp (FTBFS in 2038)
  • python-efl (drop Sphinx doctrees)
  • python-pyface (time)
  • python-pytest-salt-factories (time-based .pyc issue)
  • python-quimb (fails to build on single-CPU systems)
  • python-rdflib (random)
  • python-yarl (random path)
  • qt6-webengine (parallelism issue in documentation)
  • texlive (Gzip modification time issue)
  • waf (time-based .pyc)
  • warewulf (CPIO modification time and inode issue)
  • xemacs (toolchain hostname)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1057710 filed against python-aiostream.
  • #1057721 filed against openpyxl.
  • #1058681 filed against python-multipletau.
  • #1059013 filed against wxmplot.
  • #1059014 filed against stunnel4.
• James Addison:
  • #1059592 & #1059631 filed against qttools-opensource-src.

---

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

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

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.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
• For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
• Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
• Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
• Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
• Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
• Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
• Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
• Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
• Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
• Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
• Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

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.

urllib3 s old security patch by Stefano Rivera Stefano ran into a test-suite failure in a new Debian package (python-truststore), caused by Debian s patch to urllib3 from a decade ago, making it enable TLS verification by default (remember those days!). Some analysis confirmed that this patch isn t useful any more, and could be removed. While working on the package, Stefano investigated the scope of the urllib3 2.x transition. It looks ready to start, not many packages are affected.

Preparing for Python 3.12 in dh-python by Stefano Rivera We are preparing to start the Python 3.12 transition in Debian. Two of the upstream changes that are going to cause a lot of packages to break could be worked-around in dh-python, so we did:

• Distutils is no longer shipped in the Python stdlib. Packages need to Build-Depend on python3-setuptools to get a (compatibility shim) distutils. Until that happens, dh-python will Depend on setuptools.
• A failure to find any tests to execute will now make the unittest runner exit 5, like pytest does. This was our change, to test-suites that have failed to be automatically discovered. It will cause many packages to fail to build, so until they explicitly skip running test suites, dh-python will ignore these failures.

/usr-merge by Helmut Grohne It has become clear that the planned changes to debhelper and systemd.pc cause more rc-bugs. Helmut researched these systematically and filed another stack of patches. At the time of this writing, the uploads would still cause about 40 rc-bugs. A new opt-in helper dh_movetousr has been developed and added to debhelper in trixie and unstable.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten adopted two packages, namely rlpr and lprng, and moved them to the debian-printing team. As part of this Thorsten could close eight bugs in the BTS. Thorsten also uploaded a new upstream version of cups, which also meant that eleven bugs could be closed. As package hannah-foo2zjs still depended on the deprecated policykit-1 package, Thorsten changed the dependency list accordingly and could close one RC bug by the following upload.

Invalid PEP-440 Versions in Python Packages by Stefano Rivera Stefano investigated how many packages in Debian (typically Debian-native packages) recorded versions in their packaging metadata (egg-info directories) that weren t valid PEP-440 Python versions. pip is starting to enforce that all versions on the system are valid.

Miscellaneous contributions

• distro-info-data updates in Debian, due to the new Ubuntu release, by Stefano.
• DebConf 23 bookkeeping continues, but is winding down. Stefano still spends a little time on it.
• Utkarsh continues to monitor and help with reimbursements.
• Helmut continues to maintain architecture bootstrap and accidentally broke pam briefly
• Anton uploaded boost1.83 and started to prepare a transition to make boost1.83 as a default boost version.
• Rejuntada Debian UY 2023, a MiniDebConf that will be held in Montevideo, from 9 to 11 November, mainly organized by Santiago.

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous contributions

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

A while ago, I saw Stefano's portable monitor, and thought it was very useful. Personally, I rent a desk at an office space where I have a 27" Dell monitor; but I do sometimes use my laptop away from that desk, and then I do sometimes miss the external monitor. So a few weeks before DebConf, I bought me one myself. The one I got is about a mid-range model; there are models that are less than half the price of the one that I bought, and there are models that are more than double its price, too. ASUS has a very wide range of these monitors; the cheapest model that I could find locally is a 720p monitor that only does USB-C and requires power from the connected device, which presumably if I were to connect it to my laptop with no power connected would half its battery life. More expensive models have features such as wifi connectivity and miracast support, builtin batteries, more connection options, and touchscreen fancyness. While I think some of these features are not worth the money, I do think that a builtin battery has its uses, and that I would want a decent resolution, so I got a FullHD model with builtin battery. The device comes with a number of useful accessories: a USB-C to USB-C cable for the USB-C connectivity as well as to charge the battery; an HDMI-to-microHDMI cable for HDMI connectivity; a magnetic sleeve that doubles as a back stand; a beefy USB-A charger and USB-A-to-USB-C convertor (yes, I know); and a... pen. No, really, a pen. You can write with it. Yes, on paper. No, not a stylus. It's really a pen. Sigh, OK. This one: OK, believe me now? Good. Don't worry, I was as confused about this as you just were when I first found that pen. Why would anyone do that, I thought. So I read the manual. Not something I usually do with new hardware, but here you go. It turns out that the pen doubles as a kickstand. If you look closely at the picture of the laptop and the monitor above, you may see a little hole at the bottom right of the monitor, just to the right of the power button/LED. The pen fits right there. Now I don't know what the exact thought process was here, but I imagine it went something like this:

• ASUS wants to make money through selling monitors, but they don't want to spend too much money making them.
• A kickstand is expensive.
• So they choose not to make one, and add a little hole instead where you can put any little stick and make that function as a kickstand.
• They explain in the manual that you can use a pen with the hole as a kickstand. Problem solved, and money saved.
• Some paper pusher up the chain decides that if you mention a pen in the manual, you can't not ship a pen
  • Or perhaps some lawyer tells them that this is illegal to do in some jurisdictions
  • Or perhaps some large customer with a lot of clout is very annoying
• So in a meeting, it is decided that the monitor will have a pen going along with it
• So someone in ASUS then goes through the trouble of either designing and manufacturing a whole set of pens that use the same color scheme as the monitor itself, or just sourcing them from somewhere; and those pens are then branded (cheaply) and shipped with the monitors.

It's an interesting concept, especially given the fact that the magnetic sleeve works very well as a stand. But hey. Anyway, the monitor is very nice; the battery lives longer than the battery of my laptop usually does, so that's good, and it allows me to have a dual-monitor setup when I'm on the road. And when I'm at the office? Well, now I have a triple-monitor setup. That works well, too.

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.

/usr-merge work, by Helmut Grohne, et al. Given that we now have consensus on moving forward by moving aliased files from / to /usr, we will also run into the problems that the file move moratorium was meant to prevent. The way forward is detecting them early and applying workarounds on a per-package basis. Said detection is now automated using the Debian Usr Merge Analysis Tool. As problems are reported to the bug tracking system, they are connected to the reports if properly usertagged. Bugs and patches for problem categories DEP17-P2 and DEP17-P6 have been filed. After consensus has been reached on the bootstrapping matters, debootstrap has been changed to swap the initial unpack and merging to avoid unpack errors due to pre-existing links. This is a precondition for having base-files install the aliasing symbolic links eventually. It was identified that the root filesystem used by the Debian installer is still unmerged and a change has been proposed. debhelper was changed to recognize systemd units installed to /usr. A discussion with the CTTE and release team on repealing the moratorium has been initiated.

Salsa CI work, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n August was a busy month in the Salsa CI world. Santiago reviewed and merged a bunch of MRs that have improved the project in different aspects: The aptly job got two MRs from Philip Hands. With the first one, the aptly now can export a couple of variables in a dotenv file, and with the second, it can include packages from multiple artifact directories. These MRs bring the base to improve how to test reverse dependencies with Salsa CI. Santiago is working on documenting this. As a result of the mass bug filing done in August, Salsa CI now includes a job to test how a package builds twice in a row. Thanks to the MRs of Sebastiaan Couwenberg and Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Last but not least, Santiago helped Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues to complete the support for arm64-only pipelines.

DebConf23 lead-up, by Stefano Rivera Stefano wears a few hats in the DebConf organization and in the lead up to the conference in mid-September, they ve all been quite busy. As one of the treasurers of DebConf 23, there has been a final budget update, and quite a few payments to coordinate from Debian s Trusted Organizations. We try to close the books from the previous conference at the next one, so a push was made to get DebConf 22 account statements out of TOs and record them in the conference ledger. As a website developer, we had a number of registration-related tasks, emailing attendees and trying to estimate numbers for food and accommodation. As a conference committee member, the job was mostly taking calls and helping the local team to make decisions on urgent issues. For example, getting conference visas issued to attendees required getting political approval from the Indian government. We only discovered the full process for this too late to clear some complex cases, so this required some hard calls on skipping some countries from the application list, allowing everyone else to get visas in time. Unfortunate, but necessary.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Rapha l Hertzog updated gnome-shell-extension-hamster to a new upstream git snapshot that is compatible with GNOME Shell 44 that was recently uploaded to Debian unstable/testing. This extension makes it easy to start/stop tracking time with Hamster Time Tracker. Very handy for consultants like us who are billing their work per hour.
• Rapha l also updated zim to the latest upstream release (0.74.2). This is a desktop wiki that can be very useful as a note-taking tool to build your own personal knowledge base or even to manage your personal todo lists.
• Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some uploads from mentors.debian.net.
• Utkarsh helped the local team and the bursary team with some more DebConf activities and helped finalize the data.
• Thorsten tried to update package hplip. Unfortunately upstream added some new compressed files that need to appear uncompressed in the package. Even though this sounded like an easy task, which seemed to be already implemented in the current debian/rules, the new type of files broke this implementation and made the package no longer buildable. The problem has been solved and the upload will happen soon.
• Helmut sent 7 patches for cross build failures. Since dpkg-buildflags now defaults to issue arm64-specific compiler flags, more care is needed to distinguish between build architecture flags and host architecture flags than previously.
• Stefano pushed the final bit of the tox 4 transition over the line in Debian, allowing dh-python and tox 4 to migrate to testing. We got caught up in a few unusual bugs in tox and the way we run it in Debian package building (which had to change with tox 4). This resulted in a couple of patches upstream.
• Stefano visited Haifa, Israel, to see the proposed DebConf 24 venue and meet with the local team. While the venue isn t committed yet, we have high hopes for it.

Debian Celebrates 30 years! We celebrated our birthday this year and we had a great time with new friends, new members welcomed to the community, and the world. We have collected a few comments, videos, and discussions from around the Internet, and some images from some of the DebianDay2023 events. We hope that you enjoyed the day(s) as much as we did!

"Debian 30 years of collective intelligence" -Maqsuel Maqson Brazil

Pouso Alegre, Brazil

Macei , Brazil

Curitiba, Brazil

The cake is there. :) Honorary Debian Developers: Buzz, Jessie, and Woody welcome guests to this amazing party. Sao Carlos, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil Stickers, and Fliers, and Laptops, oh my! Belo Horizonte, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Mexico 30 a os! A quick Selfie We do not encourage beverages on computing hardware, but this one is okay by us. Germany

30 years of love

The German Delegation is also looking for this dog who footed the bill for the party, then left mysteriously.

We took the party outside

We brought the party back inside at CCCamp Belgium

Cake and Diversity in Belgium El Salvador

Food and Fellowship in El Salvador South Africa

Debian is also very delicious!

All smiles waiting to eat the cake Reports Debian Day 30 years in Macei - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in S o Carlos - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Pouso Alegre - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Belo Horizonte - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Curitiba - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Bras lia - Brazil Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil Articles & Blogs Happy Debian Day - going 30 years strong - Liam Dawe Debian Turns 30 Years Old, Happy Birthday! - Marius Nestor 30 Years of Stability, Security, and Freedom: Celebrating Debian s Birthday - Bobby Borisov Happy 30th Birthday, Debian! - Claudio Kuenzier Debian is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething - Christine Hall Debian turns 30! -Corbet Thirty years of Debian! - Lennart Hengstmengel Debian marks three decades as 'Universal Operating System' - Sam Varghese Debian Linux Celebrates 30 Years Milestone - Joshua James 30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros - Liam Proven Looking Back on 30 Years of Debian - Maya Posch Cheers to 30 Years of Debian: A Journey of Open Source Excellence - arindam Discussions and Social Media Debian Celebrates 30 Years - Source: News YCombinator Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian ... Source: News YCombinator Comment: Congrats @debian !!! Happy Birthday! Thank you for becoming a cornerstone of the #opensource world. Here's to decades of collaboration, stability & #software #freedom -openSUSELinux via X (formerly Twitter) Comment: Today we #celebrate the 30th birthday of #Debian, one of the largest and most important cornerstones of the #opensourcecommunity. For this we would like to thank you very much and wish you the best for the next 30 years! Source: X (Formerly Twitter -TUXEDOComputers via X (formerly Twitter) Happy Debian Day! - Source: Reddit.com Video The History of Debian The Beginning - Source: Linux User Space Debian Celebrates 30 years -Source: Lobste.rs Video Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! - LWDW388 - Source: LinuxGameCast Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Debian User Forums Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Linux.org

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 work by Rapha l Hertzog Rapha l spent some time during his vacation to update distro-tracker to be fully compatible with Django 3.2 so that the codebase and the whole testsuite can run on Debian 12. There s one exception though with the functional test suite that still needs further work to cope with the latest version of Selenium. By dropping support of Django 2.2, Rapha l could also start to work toward support of Django 4.2 since Django helpfully emits deprecation warnings of things that will break in future versions. All the warnings have been fixed but the codebase still fails its testsuite in Django 4.2 because we have to get rid of the python3-django-jsonfield dependency (that is rightfully dead upstream since Django has native support nowadays). All the JSONField have been converted to use Django s native field, but the migration system still requires that dependency at this point. This will require either some fresh reboot of the migration history, or some other trickery to erase the jsonfield dependency from the history of migrations. If you have experience with that, don t hesitate to share it (mail at hertzog@debian.org, or reach out to buxy on IRC). At this point, tracker.debian.org runs with Django 3.2 on Debian 11 since Debian System Administrators are not yet ready to upgrade debian.org hosts to Debian 12.

DebConf 23 bursary work by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh led the bursary team this year. The bursary team got a ton of requests this time. Rolling out the results in 4 batches, the bursary team catered over 165 bursary requests - which is superb! The team managed to address all the requests and answered a bit over 120 emails in the process. With that, the bursaries are officially closed for DebConf 2023. The team also intends to roll out some of the statistics closer to DebConf.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano implemented meson support in pybuild, the tool for building Python packages in Debian against multiple Python versions.
• Santiago did some work on Salsa CI to enhance the ARM support on the autopkgtest job and make Josch s branch work. MR to come soon.
• Helmut sent patches for 6 cross build failures.
• Stefano has been preparing for DebConf 23: Working on the website, and assisting the local teams.
• Stefano attended the DebConf Video team sprint in Paris, mostly looking at new hardware and software options for video capture and live-mixing. Full sprint report.

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• libpst: cleanups
• pytest-rerunfailures: cleanups
• git-mediate: cleanups (1 2 3 4 5)
• Debian buildd website: suggest reportbug, getbuildlog
• Debian wiki: drop page view events on log rotation
• Debian BTS usertags: fix cmake/pytest/release/archive/reproducible/ports usertags
• Debian package uploads: pytest-rerunfailures, sptag
• Debian wiki pages: BisectDebian, DebianEdu/Status/Bullseye, DebianJessie, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, DebianUnstable, DebianWheezy, DebianWiki/EditorGuide (1 2), FunambolInstallation, InstructionSelection, ManualPage, PortsDocs/New, PortTemplate, ReleaseGoals/SystemdAnalyzeSecurity, ReleasePartyBookworm/Belgium/Leuven, StefanKropp/SHIFT6mq, tasksel, Wajig
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

• Features in lintian, scancode-licencedb
• AppArmor denial in geoclue
• Errors from Debian DOSE cron job
• Mishandling of filenames in git-mediate
• Packaging needed for git-mediate

Debugging

• nmap/udptunnel test failure

Review

• Spam: reported 26 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved cherrytree convert-pgn dzen2 fcitx5-unikey kdevelop-pg-qt konq-plugins sass-stylesheets-gutenberg sass-stylesheets-purecss sddm-theme-breeze sddm-theme-elarun sddm-theme-maldives sddm-theme-maui sddm-theme-maya
  • rejected orthanc (private data), chromium-browser (Windows), dconf-gsettings-backend (cartoon), browser-plugin-vlc/weboob-qt (photo), stockfish (tablet app), dbmix (website), convert-pgn/sudoku-solver (mobile app)

Administration

• Debian IRC: rescue empty Debian IRC channel
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The libpst, nmap, sptag, pytest-rerunfailures work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

The DebConf video team has been sprinting in preparation for DebConf 23 which will happen in Kochi, India, in September of this year. Present were Nicolas "olasd" Dandrimont, Stefano "tumbleweed" Rivera, and yours truly. Additionally, Louis-Philippe "pollo" V ronneau and Carl "CarlFK" Karsten joined the sprint remotely from across the pond. Thank you to the DPL for agreeing to fund flights, food, and accomodation for the team members. We would also like to extend a special thanks to the Association April for hosting our sprint at their offices. We made a lot of progress:

• Now that Debian Bookworm has been released, we updated our ansible repository to work with Debian Bookworm. This encountered some issues, but nothing earth-shattering, and almost all of them are handled. The one thing that is still outstanding is that jibri requires OpenJDK 11, which is no longer in bookworm; a solution for that will need to be found in the longer term, but as jibri is only needed for online conferences, it is not quite as urgent (Stefano, Louis-Philippe).
• In past years, we used open "opsis" hardware to do screen grabbing. While these work, upstream development has stalled, and their intended functionality is also somewhat more limited than we would like. As such, we experimented with a USB-based HDMI capture device, and after playing with it for some time, decided that it is a good option and that we would like to switch to it. Support for the specific capture device that we played with has now also been added to all the relevant places. (Stefano, Carl)
• Another open tool that we have been using is voctomix, a software video mixer. Its upstream development has also stalled somewhat . While we managed to make it work correctly on Bookworm, we decided that to ensure long-term viability for the team, it would be preferable if we had an alternative. As such, we quickly investigated Nageru, Sesse's software video mixer, and decided that it can everything we need (and, probably, more). As such, we worked on implementing a user interface theme that would work with our specific requirements. Work on this is still ongoing, and we may decide that we are not ready yet for the switch by the time DebConf23 comes along, but we do believe that the switch is at least feasible. While working on the theme, we found a bug which Sesse quickly fixed for us after a short amount of remote debugging, so, thanks for that! (Stefano, Nicolas, Sesse)
• Our current streaming architecture uses HLS, which requires MPEG-4-based codecs. While fully functional, MPEG-4 is not the most modern of codecs anymore, not to mention the fact that it is somewhat patent-encumbered (even though some of these patents are expired by now). As such, we investigated switching to the AV1 codec for live streaming. Our ansible repository has been updated to support live streaming using that codec; the post-event transcoding part will follow soon enough. Special thanks, again, to Sesse, for pointing out a few months ago on Planet Debian that this is, in fact, possible to do. (Wouter)
• Apart from these big-ticket items, we also worked on various small maintenance things: upgrading, fixing, and reinstalling hosts and services, filing budget requests, and requesting role emails. (all of the team, really).

It is now Sunday the 23rd at 14:15, and while the sprint is coming to an end, we haven't quite finished yet, so some more progress can still be made. Let's see what happens by tonight. All in all, though, we believe that the progress we made will make the DebConf Videoteam's work a bit easier in some areas, and will make things work better in the future. See you in Kochi!

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.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al The work on /usr-merge continues from May. The lengthy discussion was condensed into a still lengthy rewrite of DEP17 listing all known problems and proposed mitigations. An initial consensus call did not resolve all questions, but we now have rough consensus on finalizing the transition without relying on major changes to dpkg. Other questions still have diverging opinions and some matters such as how to not break backports are still missing satisfying answers.

DebConf Bursary prep, by Utkarsh Gupta DebCamp and DebConf is happening from 03rd September to 17th September in Kochi, India, and the DebConf Bursary team is gearing up for that. After extending the bursary deadline (catering to the requests coming in from various people), we ve finally managed to clock over 260 bursary requests. The team is set up and we re starting to review the applications. The team intends to roll out the result as soon as possible.

debci, by Helmut Grohne As Freexian is working on deploying autopkgtests for the LTS and ELTS services, debci and autopkgtests were improved in Debian to better deal with derivatives (e.g. by better supporting external package signing keyrings). Other aspects that are not deployed on ci.debian.net such as the qemu backend were also improved. We express thanks to the relevant maintainers Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Simon McVittie for their timely reviews and merges of our changes.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Following the release of Debian 12, Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to be aware of trixie. He also pushed some fixes to distro-tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org) and released version 1.2.0 (since the former release was lacking fixes to run on Debian 12 bookworm).
• Following the release of Debian 12, Helmut Grohne updated crossqa.debian.net systems. He also sent 7 patches for cross build failures and continued adapting rebootstrap to changes in unstable.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n started to work on how to improve the robustness of Salsa CI s pipeline for some jobs failing frequently.
• Thorsten Alteholz did security updates of cpdb-libs in Unstable and Bookworm.
• Stefano Rivera upgraded pixelfed.debian.social to bookworm.
• Stefano started an re2 library transition, and started preparation for the next transition.
• Helmut Grohne updated debvm in unstable releasing changes that accumulated during the freeze.
• Stefano did some work on the website and infrastructure for DebConf 23.
• Utkarsh Gupta helped review and fix open redmine bugs and fix them all in unstable.

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.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al Towards the end of April, the discussion on DEP 17 on debian-devel@l.d.o initiated by Helmut Grohne took off, trying to deal with the fact that while Debian bookworm has a merged /usr, files are still being distributed to / and /usr in Debian binary packages, and moving them currently has some risk of breakage. Most participants of the discussion agreed that files should be moved, and there are several competing design ideas for doing it safely. Most of the time was spent understanding the practical implications of lifting the moratorium and moving all the files from / to /usr in a coordinated effort. With help from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Enrico Zini, and Raphael Hertzog, Helmut Grohne performed extensive analysis of the various aspects, including quantitative analysis of the original file move problem, analysis of effects on dpkg-divert, dpkg-statoverride, and update-alternatives, analysis of effects on filesystem bootstrapping tools. Most of the problematic cases spawned plausible workarounds, such as turning Breaks into Conflicts in selected cases or adding protective diversions for the symbolic links that enable aliasing. Towards the end of May, Andreas Beckmann reported a new failure scenario which may cause shared resources to inadvertently disappear, such as directories and even regular files in case of Multi-Arch packages, and our work on analyzing these problems and proposing mitigations is on-going. While the quantitative analysis is funded by Freexian, we wouldn t be here without the extensive feedback and ideas of many voluntary contributors from multiple areas of Debian, which are too many to name here. Thank you.

Preparing for the tox 4 transition, by Stefano Rivera While Debian was in freeze for the bookworm release, tox 4 has landed in Debian experimental, and some packages are starting to require it, upstream. It has some backwards-incompatible behavior that breaks many packages using tox through pybuild. So Stefano had to make some changes to pybuild and to many packages that run build-time tests with tox. The easy bits of this transition are now completed in git / experimental, but a few packages that integrate deeply into tox need upstream work.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Just before the release of Bookworm, lots of QA tools were used to inspect packages. One of these tools found a systemd service file in a wrong directory. So, Thorsten did another upload of package lprint to correct this. Thanks a lot to all the hardworking people who run such tools and file bugs. Thorsten also participated in discussions about the new Common Printing Dialog Backends (CPDB) that will be introduced in Trixie and hopefully can replace the current printing architecture in Forky.

Miscellaneous contributions

• DebConf 23 preparations by Stefano Rivera. Some work on the website, video team planning, accounting, and team documentation.
• Utkarsh Gupta started to prep the work on the bursary team s side for DC23.
• Stefano spun up a website for the Hamburg mini-DebConf so that the video team could have a machine-readable schedule and a place to stream video from the event.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n reviewed and sponsored four python packages of a prospective Debian member.
• Helmut Grohne supported Timo Roehling and Jochen Sprickerhof to improve cross building in 15 ROS packages.
• Helmut Grohne supported Jochen Sprickerhof with diagnosing an e2fsprogs RC bug.
• Helmut Grohne continued to maintain rebootstrap and located an issue with lto in gcc-13.
• Anton Gladky fixed some RC-Bugs and uploaded a new stravalib python library.