The Debian Project Developers will shortly vote for a new Debian Project Leader known as the DPL. The DPL is the official representative of representative of The Debian Project tasked with managing the overall project, its vision, direction, and finances. The DPL is also responsible for the selection of Delegates, defining areas of responsibility within the project, the coordination of Developers, and making decisions required for the project. Our outgoing and present DPL Jonathan Carter served 4 terms, from 2020 through 2024. Jonathan shared his last Bits from the DPL post to Debian recently and his hopes for the future of Debian. Recently, we sat with the two present candidates for the DPL position asking questions to find out who they really are in a series of interviews about their platforms, visions for Debian, lives, and even their favorite text editors. The interviews were conducted by disaster2life (Yashraj Moghe) and made available from video and audio transcriptions:

• Andreas Tille [Interview]
• Sruthi Chandran [this document]

Voting for the position starts on April 6, 2024. Editors' note: This is our official return to Debian interviews, readers should stay tuned for more upcoming interviews with Developers and other important figures in Debian as part of our "Meet your Debian Developer" series. We used the following tools and services: Turboscribe.ai for the transcription from the audio and video files, IRC: Oftc.net for communication, Jitsi meet for interviews, and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for editing and video. While we encountered many technical difficulties in the return to this process, we are still able and proud to present the transcripts of the interviews edited only in a few areas for readability. 2024 Debian Project Leader Candidate: Sruthi Chandran Sruthi's interview Hi Sruthi, so for the first question, who are you and could you tell us a little bit about yourself? [Sruthi]:

I usually talk about me whenever I am talking about answering the question who am I, I usually say like I am a librarian turned free software enthusiast and a Debian Developer. So I had no technical background and I learned, I was introduced to free software through my husband and then I learned Debian packaging, and eventually I became a Debian Developer. So I always give my example to people who say I am not technically inclined, I don't have technical background so I can't contribute to free software. So yeah, that's what I refer to myself.

For the next question, could you tell me what do you do in Debian, and could you mention your story up until here today? [Sruthi]:

Okay, so let me start from my initial days in Debian. I started contributing to Debian, my first contribution was a Tibetan font. We went to a Tibetan place and they were saying they didn't have a font in Linux. So that's how I started contributing. Then I moved on to Ruby packages, then I have some JavaScript and Go packages, all dependencies of GitLab. So I was involved with maintaining GitLab for some time, now I'm not very active there. But yeah, so GitLab was the main package I was contributing to since I contributed since 2016 to maybe like 2020 or something. Later I have come [over to] packaging. Now I am part of some of the teams, delegated teams, like community team and outreach team, as well as the Debconf committee. And the biggest, I think, my activity in Debian, I would say is organizing Debconf 2023. So it was a great experience and yeah, so that's my story in Debian.

So what are three key terms about you and your candidacy? [Sruthi]:

Okay, let me first think about it. For candidacy, I can start with diversity is one point I started expressing from the first time I contested for DPL. But to be honest, that's the main point I want to bring.

[Yashraj]:

So for diversity, if you could break down your thoughts on diversity and make them, [about] your three points including diversity.

[Sruthi]:

So in addition to, eventually when starting it was just diversity. Now I have like a bit more ideas, like community, like I want to be a leader for the Debian community. More than, I don't know, maybe people may not agree, but I would say I want to be a leader of Debian community rather than a Debian operating system. I connect to community more and third point I would say.

The term of a DPL lasts for an year. So what do you think during, what would you try to do during that, that you can't do from your position now? [Sruthi]:

Okay. So I, like, I am very happy with the structure of Debian and how things work in Debian. Like you can do almost a lot of things, like almost all things without being a DPL. Whatever change you want to bring about or whatever you want to do, you can do without being a DPL. Anyone, like every DD has the same rights. Only things I feel [the] DPL has hold on are mainly the budget or the funding part, which like, that's where they do the decision making part. And then comes like, and one advantage of DPL driving some idea is that somehow people tend to listen to that with more, like, tend to give more attention to what DPL is saying rather than a normal DD. So I wanted to, like, I have answered some of the questions on how to, how I plan to do the financial budgeting part, how I want to handle, like, and the other thing is using the extra attention that I get as a DPL, I would like to obviously start with the diversity aspect in Debian. And yeah, like, I, what I want to do is not, like, be a leader and say, like, take Debian to one direction where I want to go, but I would rather take suggestions and inputs from the whole community and go about with that. So yes, that's what I would say.

And taking a less serious question now, what is your preferred text editor? [Sruthi]:

Vim.

[Yashraj]:

Vim, wholeheartedly team Vim?

[Sruthi]:

Yes.

[Yashraj]:

Great. Well, this was made in Vim, all the text for this.

[Sruthi]:

So, like, since you mentioned extra data, I'll give my example, like, it's just a fun note, when I started contributing to Debian, as I mentioned, I didn't have any knowledge about free software, like Debian, and I was not used to even using Linux. So, and I didn't have experience with these text editors. So, when I started contributing, I used to do the editing part using gedit. So, that's how I started. Eventually, I moved to Nano, and once I reached Vim, I didn't move on.

Team Vim. Next question. What, what do you think is the importance of the Debian project in the world today? And where would you like to see it in 10 years, like 10 years into the future? [Sruthi]:

Okay. So, Debian, as we all know, is referred to as the universal operating system without, like, it is said for a reason. We have hundreds and hundreds of operating systems, like Linux, distributions based on Debian. So, I believe Debian, like even now, Debian has good influence on the, at least on the Linux or Linux ecosystem. So, what we implement in Debian has, like, is going to affect quite a lot of, like, a very good percentage of people using Linux. So, yes. So, I think Debian is one of the leading Linux distributions. And I think in 10 years, we should be able to reach a position, like, where we are not, like, even now, like, even these many years after having Linux, we face a lot of problems in newer and newer hardware coming up and installing on them is a big problem. Like, firmwares and all those things are getting more and more complicated. Like, it should be getting simpler, but it's getting more and more complicated. So, I, one thing I would imagine, like, I don't know if we will ever reach there, but I would imagine that eventually with the Debian, we should be able to have some, at least a few of the hardware developers or hardware producers have Debian pre-installed and those kind of things. Like, not, like, become, I'm not saying it's all, it's also available right now. What I'm saying is that it becomes prominent enough to be opted as, like, default distro.

What part of Debian has made you And what part of the project has kept you going all through these years? [Sruthi]:

Okay. So, I started to contribute in 2016, and I was part of the team doing GitLab packaging, and we did have a lot of training workshops and those kind of things within India. And I was, like, I had interacted with some of the Indian DDs, but I never got, like, even through chat or mail. I didn't have a lot of interaction with the rest of the world, DDs. And the 2019 Debconf changed my whole perspective about Debian. Before that, I wasn't, like, even, I was interested in free software. I was doing the technical stuff and all. But after DebConf, my whole idea has been, like, my focus changed to the community. Debian community is a very welcoming, very interesting community to be with. And so, I believe that, like, 2019 DebConf was a for me. And that kept, from 2019, my focus has been to how to support, like, how, I moved to the community part of Debian from there. Then in 2020 I became part of the community team, and, like, I started being part of other teams. So, these, I would say, the Debian community is the one, like, aspect of Debian that keeps me whole, keeps me held on to the Debian ecosystem as a whole.

Continuing to speak about Debian, what do you think, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Debian, like, the word, the community, what's the first thing? [Sruthi]:

I think I may sound like a broken record or something.

[Yashraj]:

No, no.

[Sruthi]:

Again, I would say the Debian community, like, it's the people who makes Debian, that makes Debian special. Like, apart from that, if I say, I would say I'm very, like, one part of Debian that makes me very happy is the, how the governing system of Debian works, the Debian constitution and all those things, like, it's a very unique thing for Debian. And, and it's like, when people say you can't work without a proper, like, establishment or even somebody deciding everything for you, it's difficult. When people say, like, we have been, Debian has been proving it for quite a long time now, that it's possible. So, so that's one thing I believe, like, that's one unique point. And I am very proud about that.

What areas do you think Debian is failing in, how can it (that standing) be improved? [Sruthi]:

So, I think where Debian is failing now is getting new people into Debian. Like, I don't remember, like, exactly the answer. But I remember hearing someone mention, like, the average age of a Debian Developer is, like, above 40 or 45 or something, like, exact age, I don't remember. But it's like, Debian is getting old. Like, the people in Debian are getting old and we are not getting enough of new people into Debian. And that's very important to have people, like, new people coming up. Otherwise, eventually, like, after a few years, nobody, like, we won't have enough people to take the project forward. So, yeah, I believe that is where we need to work on. We are doing some efforts, like, being part of GSOC or outreachy and having maybe other events, like, local events. Like, we used to have a lot of Debian packaging workshops in India. And those kind of, I think, in Brazil and all, they all have, like, local communities are doing. But we are not very successful in retaining the people who maybe come and try out things. But we are not very good at retaining the people, like, retaining people who come. So, we need to work on those things. Right now, I don't have a solid answer for that. But one thing, like, I was thinking about is, like, having a Debian specific outreach project, wherein the focus will be about the Debian, like, starting will be more on, like, usually what happens in GSOC and outreach is that people come, have the, do the contributions, and they go back. Like, they don't have that connection with the Debian, like, Debian community or Debian project. So, what I envision with these, the Debian outreach, the Debian specific outreach is that we have some part of the internship, like, even before starting the internship, we have some sessions and, like, with the people in Debian having, like, getting them introduced to the Debian philosophy and Debian community and Debian, how Debian works. And those things, we focus on that. And then we move on to the technical internship parts. So, I believe this could do some good in having, like, when you have people you can connect to, you tend to stay back in a project mode. When you feel something more than, like, right now, we have so many technical stuff to do, like, the choice for a college student is endless. So, if they want, if they stay back for something, like, maybe for Debian, I would say, we need to have them connected to the Debian project before we go into technical parts. Like, technical parts, like, there are other things as well, where they can go and do the technical part, but, like, they can come here, like, yeah. So, that's what I was saying. Focused outreach projects is one thing. That's just one. That's not enough. We need more of, like, more ideas to have more new people come up. And I'm very happy with, like, the DebConf thing. We tend to get more and more people from the places where we have a DebConf. Brazil is an example. After the Debconf, they have quite a good improvement on Debian contributors. And I think in India also, it did give a good result. Like, we have more people contributing and staying back and those things. So, yeah. So, these were the things I would say, like, we can do to improve.

For the final question, what field in free software do you, what field in free software generally do you think requires the most work to be put into it? What do you think is Debian's part in that field? [Sruthi]:

Okay. Like, right now, what comes to my mind is the free software licenses parts. Like, we have a lot of free software licenses, and there are non-free software licenses. But currently, I feel free software is having a big problem in enforcing these licenses. Like, there are, there may be big corporations or like some people who take up the whole, the code and may not follow the whole, for example, the GPL licenses. Like, we don't know how much of those, how much of the free softwares are used in the bigger things. Yeah, I agree. There are a lot of corporations who are afraid to touch free software. But there would be good amount of free software, free work that converts into property, things violating the free software licenses and those things. And we do not have the kind of like, we have SFLC, SFC, etc. But still, we do not have the ability to go behind and trace and implement the licenses. So, enforce those licenses and bring people who are violating the licenses forward and those kind of things is challenging because one thing is it takes time, like, and most importantly, money is required for the legal stuff. And not always people who like people who make small software, or maybe big, but they may not have the kind of time and money to have these things enforced. So, that's a big challenge free software is facing, especially in our current scenario. I feel we are having those, like, we need to find ways how we can get it sorted. I don't have an answer right now what to do. But this is a challenge I felt like and Debian's part in that. Yeah, as I said, I don't have a solution for that. But the Debian, so DFSG and Debian sticking on to the free software licenses is a good support, I think.

So, that was the final question, Do you have anything else you want to mention for anyone watching this? [Sruthi]:

Not really, like, I am happy, like, I think I was able to answer the questions. And yeah, I would say who is watching. I won't say like, I'm the best DPL candidate, you can't have a better one or something. I stand for a reason. And if you believe in that, or the Debian community and Debian diversity, and those kinds of things, if you believe it, I hope you would be interested, like, you would want to vote for me. That's it. Like, I'm not, I'll make it very clear. I'm not doing a technical leadership part here. So, those, I can't convince people who want technical leadership to vote for me. But I would say people who connect with me, I hope they vote for me.

The Debian Project Developers will shortly vote for a new Debian Project Leader known as the DPL. The Project Leader is the official representative of The Debian Project tasked with managing the overall project, its vision, direction, and finances. The DPL is also responsible for the selection of Delegates, defining areas of responsibility within the project, the coordination of Developers, and making decisions required for the project. Our outgoing and present DPL Jonathan Carter served 4 terms, from 2020 through 2024. Jonathan shared his last Bits from the DPL post to Debian recently and his hopes for the future of Debian. Recently, we sat with the two present candidates for the DPL position asking questions to find out who they really are in a series of interviews about their platforms, visions for Debian, lives, and even their favorite text editors. The interviews were conducted by disaster2life (Yashraj Moghe) and made available from video and audio transcriptions:

• Andreas Tille [this document]
• Sruthi Chandran [Interview]

Voting for the position starts on April 6, 2024. Editors' note: This is our official return to Debian interviews, readers should stay tuned for more upcoming interviews with Developers and other important figures in Debian as part of our "Meet your Debian Developer" series. We used the following tools and services: Turboscribe.ai for the transcription from the audio and video files, IRC: Oftc.net for communication, Jitsi meet for interviews, and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for editing and video. While we encountered many technical difficulties in the return to this process, we are still able and proud to present the transcripts of the interviews edited only in a few areas for readability. 2024 Debian Project Leader Candidate: Andrea Tille Andreas' Interview Who are you? Tell us a little about yourself. [Andreas]:

How am I? Well, I'm, as I wrote in my platform, I'm a proud grandfather doing a lot of free software stuff, doing a lot of sports, have some goals in mind which I like to do and hopefully for the best of Debian.

And How are you today? [Andreas]:

How I'm doing today? Well, actually I have some headaches but it's fine for the interview. So, usually I feel very good. Spring was coming here and today it's raining and I plan to do a bicycle tour tomorrow and hope that I do not get really sick but yeah, for the interview it's fine.

What do you do in Debian? Could you mention your story here? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well, I started with Debian kind of an accident because I wanted to have some package salvaged which is called WordNet. It's a monolingual dictionary and I did not really plan to do more than maybe 10 packages or so. I had some kind of training with xTeddy which is totally unimportant, a cute teddy you can put on your desktop. So, and then well, more or less I thought how can I make Debian attractive for my employer which is a medical institute and so on. It could make sense to package bioinformatics and medicine software and it somehow evolved in a direction I did neither expect it nor wanted to do, that I'm currently the most busy uploader in Debian, created several teams around it. DebianMate is very well known from me. I created the Blends team to create teams and techniques around what we are doing which was Debian TIS, Debian Edu, Debian Science and so on and I also created the packaging team for R, for the statistics package R which is technically based and not topic based. All these blends are covering a certain topic and R is just needed by lots of these blends. So, yeah, and to cope with all this I have written a script which is routing an update to manage all these uploads more or less automatically. So, I think I had one day where I uploaded 21 new packages but it's just automatically generated, right? So, it's on one day more than I ever planned to do.

What is the first thing you think of when you think of Debian? Editors' note: The question was misunderstood as the worst thing you think of when you think of Debian [Andreas]:

The worst thing I think about Debian, it's complicated. I think today on Debian board I was asked about the technical progress I want to make and in my opinion we need to standardize things inside Debian. For instance, bringing all the packages to salsa, follow some common standards, some common workflow which is extremely helpful. As I said, if I'm that productive with my own packages we can adopt this in general, at least in most cases I think. I made a lot of good experience by the support of well-formed teams. Well-formed teams are those teams where people support each other, help each other. For instance, how to say, I'm a physicist by profession so I'm not an IT expert. I can tell apart what works and what not but I'm not an expert in those packages. I do and the amount of packages is so high that I do not even understand all the techniques they are covering like Go, Rust and something like this. And I also don't speak Java and I had a problem once in the middle of the night and I've sent the email to the list and was a Java problem and I woke up in the morning and it was solved. This is what I call a team. I don't call a team some common repository that is used by random people for different packages also but it's working together, don't hesitate to solve other people's problems and permit people to get active. This is what I call a team and this is also something I observed in, it's hard to give a percentage, in a lot of other teams but we have other people who do not even understand the concept of the team. Why is working together make some advantage and this is also a tough thing. I [would] like to tackle in my term if I get elected to form solid teams using the common workflow. This is one thing. The other thing is that we have a lot of good people in our infrastructure like FTP masters, DSA and so on. I have the feeling they have a lot of work and are working more or less on their limits, and I like to talk to them [to ask] what kind of change we could do to move that limits or move their personal health to the better side.

The DPL term lasts for a year, What would you do during that you couldn't do now? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well this is basically what I said are my main issues. I need to admit I have no really clear imagination what kind of tasks will come to me as a DPL because all these financial issues and law issues possible and issues [that] people who are not really friendly to Debian might create. I'm afraid these things might occupy a lot of time and I can't say much about this because I simply don't know.

What are three key terms about you and your candidacy? [Andreas]:

As I said, I like to work on standards, I d like to make Debian try [to get it right so] that people don't get overworked, this third key point is be inviting to newcomers, to everybody who wants to come. Yeah, I also mentioned in my term this diversity issue, geographical and from gender point of view. This may be the three points I consider most important.

Preferred text editor? [Andreas]:

Yeah, my preferred one? Ah, well, I have no preferred text editor. I'm using the Midnight Commander very frequently which has an internal editor which is convenient for small text. For other things, I usually use VI but I also use Emacs from time to time. So, no, I have not preferred text editor. Whatever works nicely for me.

What is the importance of the community in the Debian Project? How would like to see it evolving over the next few years? [Andreas]:

Yeah, I think the community is extremely important. So, I was on a lot of DebConfs. I think it's not really 20 but 17 or 18 DebCons and I really enjoyed these events every year because I met so many friends and met so many interesting people that it's really enriching my life and those who I never met in person but have read interesting things and yeah, Debian community makes really a part of my life.

And how do you think it should evolve specifically? [Andreas]:

Yeah, for instance, last year in Kochi, it became even clearer to me that the geographical diversity is a really strong point. Just discussing with some women from India who is afraid about not coming next year to Busan because there's a problem with Shanghai and so on. I'm not really sure how we can solve this but I think this is a problem at least I wish to tackle and yeah, this is an interesting point, the geographical diversity and I'm running the so-called mentoring of the month. This is a small project to attract newcomers for the Debian Med team which has the focus on medical packages and I learned that we had always men applying for this and so I said, okay, I dropped the constraint of medical packages. Any topic is fine, I teach you packaging but it must be someone who does not consider himself a man. I got only two applicants, no, actually, I got one applicant and one response which was kind of strange if I'm hunting for women or so. I did not understand but I got one response and interestingly, it was for me one of the least expected counters. It was from Iran and I met a very nice woman, very open, very skilled and gifted and did a good job or have even lose contact today and maybe we need more actively approach groups that are underrepresented. I don't know if what's a good means which I did but at least I tried and so I try to think about these kind of things.

What part of Debian has made you smile? What part of the project has kept you going all through the years? [Andreas]:

Well, the card game which is called Mao on the DebConf made me smile all the time. I admit I joined only two or three times even if I really love this kind of games but I was occupied by other stuff so this made me really smile. I also think the first online DebConf in 2020 made me smile because we had this kind of short video sequences and I tried to make a funny video sequence about every DebConf I attended before. This is really funny moments but yeah, it's not only smile but yeah. One thing maybe it's totally unconnected to Debian but I learned personally something in Debian that we have a do-ocracy and you can do things which you think that are right if not going in between someone else, right? So respect everybody else but otherwise you can do so. And in 2020 I also started to take trees which are growing widely in my garden and plant them into the woods because in our woods a lot of trees are dying and so I just do something because I can. I have the resource to do something, take the small tree and bring it into the woods because it does not harm anybody. I asked the forester if it is okay, yes, yes, okay. So everybody can do so but I think the idea to do something like this came also because of the free software idea. You have the resources, you have the computer, you can do something and you do something productive, right? And when thinking about this I think it was also my Debian work. Meanwhile I have planted more than 3,000 trees so it's not a small number but yeah, I enjoy this.

What part of Debian would you have some criticisms for? [Andreas]:

Yeah, it's basically the same as I said before. We need more standards to work together. I do not want to repeat this but this is what I think, yeah.

What field in Free Software generally do you think requires the most work to be put into it? What do you think is Debian's part in the field? [Andreas]:

It's also in general, the thing is the fact that I'm maintaining packages which are usually as modern software is maintained in Git, which is fine but we have some software which is at Sourceport, we have software laying around somewhere, we have software where Debian somehow became Upstream because nobody is caring anymore and free software is very different in several things, ways and well, I in principle like freedom of choice which is the basic of all our work. Sometimes this freedom goes in the way of productivity because everybody is free to re-implement. You asked me for the most favorite editor. In principle one really good working editor would be great to have and would work and we have maybe 500 in Debian or so, I don't know. I could imagine if people would concentrate and say five instead of 500 editors, we could get more productive, right? But I know this will not happen, right? But I think this is one thing which goes in the way of making things smooth and productive and we could have more manpower to replace one person who's [having] children, doing some other stuff and can't continue working on something and maybe this is a problem I will not solve, definitely not, but which I see.

What do you think is Debian's part in the field? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well, okay, we can bring together different Upstreams, so we are building some packages and have some general overview about similar things and can say, oh, you are doing this and some other person is doing more or less the same, do you want to join each other or so, but this is kind of a channel we have to our Upstreams which is probably not very successful. It starts with code copies of some libraries which are changed a little bit, which is fine license-wise, but not so helpful for different things and so I've tried to convince those Upstreams to forward their patches to the original one, but for this and I think we could do some kind of, yeah, [find] someone who brings Upstream together or to make them stop their forking stuff, but it costs a lot of energy and we probably don't have this and it's also not realistic that we can really help with this problem.

Do you have any questions for me? [Andreas]:

I enjoyed the interview, I enjoyed seeing you again after half a year or so. Yeah, actually I've seen you in the eating room or cheese and wine party or so, I do not remember we had to really talk together, but yeah, people around, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

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

The Daily Kos has an interesting article about a new more effective method of desalination [1]. Here is a video of a crazy guy zapping things with 100 car batteries [2]. This is sonmething you should avoid if you want to die of natural causes. Does dying while making a science video count for a Darwin Award? A Hacker News comment has an interesting explanation of Unix signals [3]. Interesting documentary on the rise of mega corporations [4]. We need to split up Google, Facebook, and Amazon ASAP. Also every phone platform should have competing app stores. Dave Taht gave an interesting LCA lecture about Internet congestion control [5]. He also referenced a web site about projects to alleviate the buffer bloat problem [6]. This tiny event based sensor is an interesting product [7]. It could lead to some interesting (but possibly invasive) technological developments in phones. Tara Barnett s Everything Open lecture Swiss Army GLAM had some interesting ideas for community software development [8]. Having lots of small programs communicating with APIs is an interesting way to get people into development. Actually Hardcore Overclocking has an interesting youtube video about the differences between x8 and x14 DDR4 DIMMs [9]. Interesting YouTube video from someone who helped the Kurds defend against Turkey about how war tunnels work [10]. He makes a strong case that the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip won t be easy or pleasant.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/ywoxq29u
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y
• [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37902515
• [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8ogOaKk4Y
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeCIbCzGY6k
• [6] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
• [7] https://www.prophesee.ai/event-based-sensor-genx320/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yoo435ra
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=w2bFzQTQ9aI
• [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaQn6eBroY

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.

Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.

Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA

I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.

From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

There are a lot of people talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a lot of moving goalposts in such discussions. I think that everyone who wants to advocate for it should publish what they expect to happen and what specific things they consider as victory conditions. When Russia first invaded I thought they would win in a matter of weeks. I underestimated the determination of the Ukrainian people and the corruption and the incompetence and corruption of the Russian military. The first time I thought that Ukraine could win was when I read an analysis of the tires on Russian military vehicles breaking because of the cheapest available tires being bought and then not stored correctly to avoid damage, which led to the long stalled convoy. A successful military campaign requires many more difficult tasks than buying good tires and maintaining them correctly. An army that is too corrupt to buy the bare minimum of usable equipment and too incompetent to adapt to failures is not going to do well. The Ukrainians have done very well with the equipment available, one example is their use of off the shelf drones for dropping grenades into armoured vehicles and for targeting artillery. While the Russians have responded by buying Iranian military drones because they lack the industrial capacity to make their own ones. From the time when the Russians first got bogged down the Ukrainians have been mostly retaking their territory slowly and steadily. The Russians started the invasion with a significant advantage in aircraft, armoured vehicles, artillery, and ammunition. This advantage has been significantly decreased due to losses of vehicles and artillery, high rates of ammunition use, and Ukrainian capture of Russian equipment. The Ukrainians are getting new vehicles, aircraft, artillery, and ammunition from western countries while sanctions are preventing Russians from importing or manufacturing much. Currently one important factor for Russia is the ability of their airforce to attack Ukrainian positions while out of range of Ukrainian air defence systems. The MANPAD systems are good for close support but not good for long range. A problem that the Russians will have in the long term is running out of spare parts and being unable to properly maintain aircraft. This will result in loss of aircraft due to accidents and the inability to repair aircraft that has even minor damage. Here are my specific predictions:

1. I predict that by the end of 2023 Russia will have a much smaller number of military aircraft through maintenance problems even if Ukraine doesn t get long-range SAM systems.
2. I predict that by mid 2024 Ukraine will have air superiority. They will destroy many Russian SAM systems and be able to bomb Russian targets with little risk.
3. I predict that Russia won t impose any significant new conscription programs on their population. Such programs are extremely unpopular and Russia doesn t have the industrial capacity to equip a larger army as they can t properly equip their current army.
4. Currently Ukraine is making slow but steady progress in retaking their territory in the East. I predict that before the end of 2023 they will have cut all supply lines to Crimea from the mainland by having artillery that can accurately cover all the distance to the coast of the Sea of Azov. I also predict that the bridge over the Kerch strait will be mostly unusable from now on (on average less than 1/3 the bridge capacity usable). As fast as the Russians can repair it the Ukrainians will bomb it again. At most they will have half of the road lanes available to cars and will be unable to transport any significant amount of military equipment.
5. Due to Russians lacking supplies I predict that Ukraine will recapture at least half the Crimean land area by the end of 2023.
6. The regions of Luhansk and Donetsk will be the most difficult to capture as they have been held the longest. I predict that the war will not end until Ukraine controls everything within their 2013 borders including Luhansk and Donetsk. The final victory may happen due to the Russian military collapsing or due to a new Russian government ordering a withdrawal.
7. I predict that Russia will make significant efforts to help Trump get elected in 2024. But even if they succeed it will be too late for him to help them much or change the outcome.
8. I predict that Ukraine will win this war before the end of 2025. Even if some of my other predictions turn out to be incorrect I predict that by the end of 2025 the military forces of Russia and Ukraine will not be fighting and that it will be because Ukraine has given the Russian military a proper spanking. If something like the Troubles in Ireland happens (which is a real possibility) that doesn t count as a war.
9. I predict that Ukraine will not deploy any significant attack inside Russian territory. They will launch small scale attacks on specific military targets but do nothing that the Russian population might consider to be full scale war.
10. I predict that Putin will not lead Russia 2 months after Ukraine recaptures all their territory. He may not live for long after Ukraine wins, or the Russian withdrawal might happen because Putin dies of apparently natural causes.
11. After the war I predict that Ukraine will control all their territory from 2013 and there will be a demilitarised zone or no-fly zone in Russian territory.
12. I predict that after the war some parts of the Russian Federation will break free. There are many different groups who would like to be free of Russia and Ukraine destroying most of the Russian military will make things easy for them. A Russian civil war is a possibility.
13. I predict that the US will give minimal support to Russia after the war as a strategic plan to block China. I predict that the quality and efficacy of such support will be comparable to the US actions in the Middle East.

I welcome comments disagreeing with this. But please make specific predictions that can be tested and sign your name to them. If you don t think that a certain event will happen when I predict it then provide a date when you think it will happen or a date by which the opposite will have happened. Also please show enough confidence to make multiple predictions. I ve made 12 specific predictions, if you think I m doing badly then make at least 3 specific competing predictions. If you think that Russia will win then define what a win means in terms of territory occupied when fighting between armies ends and when that will happen. Also if you think that Russia will win then please make a prediction about whether there will be a Ukrainian equivalent of the IRA and if so what they will do.

I grew up with the Internet and its ethics and politics have always been important in my life. But I have also been involved at other levels, against police brutality, for Food, Not Bombs, worker autonomy, software freedom, etc. For a long time, that all seemed coherent. But the more I look at the modern Internet -- and the mega-corporations that control it -- and the less confidence I have in my original political analysis of the liberating potential of technology. I have come to believe that most of our technological development is harmful to the large majority of the population of the planet, and of course the rest of the biosphere. And now I feel this is not a new problem. This is because the Internet is a neo-colonial device, and has been from the start. Let me explain.

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

Review: Paladin's Strength, by T. Kingfisher

Series:	The Saint of Steel #2
Publisher:	Red Wombat Studio
Copyright:	2021
ASIN:	B08WWKXXVY
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	474

Paladin's Strength is a sequel of sorts to Paladin's Grace, but it has different protagonists. It picks up a subplot from that novel with another former follower of the Saint of Steel. You can safely read the books in any order; there are some minor spoilers for the Paladin's Grace subplot in this book, but nothing that would matter for the enjoyment of the story. Istvhan and his fellow brother Galen are acting as the head of a mercenary band, which has hired on to escort Master Distiller Brant and his collection of Emperor Oak barrels. In truth, they have another mission from the Temple of the White Rat: to track down a disturbing monster that leaves a trail of beheaded bodies. Clara is a lay sister of St. Ursa, a convent that was raided by slavers who hauled away the nuns. She was left for dead in Arral territory when she fell sick, and was taken as a house slave after they nursed her back to life. The story opens with her holding a sword in front of Istvhan's tent, part of the fallout of Istvhan killing a young Arral in self-defense. The politics of that fallout are not at all what Istvhan expects. They end with Clara traveling with Istvhan's company, at least for a while. Both Istvhan and Clara are telling the truth: Istvhan is escorting a merchant, and Clara is hoping to rescue her sisters. Both of them are also hiding a great deal. Istvhan's quiet investigation of the trail of a monster is easy enough to reveal once he knows Clara well enough. That he's a berserker who no longer has a god in control of his battle rage is another matter; the reader knows that, and of course so does Galen, but Istvhan has no intention of telling anyone else. Clara has her own secrets about herself and the sisters of St. Ursa, ones that neither the reader nor Istvhan knows. This is a T. Kingfisher novel about paladins, so of course it's also a romance. If you've read Kingfisher's other books, you know she writes slow burn romances, but Paladin's Strength is next level. Istvhan and Clara have good reasons to not want to get involved and to doubt the other person's attraction or willingness, but this goes far beyond the obvious to become faintly absurd. If you like the sort of romance where both leads generate endless reasons to not pursue the relationship (some legitimate, some not) while steadfastly refusing to talk to each other about them and endlessly rehashing hints and interpretations, you're in for a treat. For me, it was too much and crossed over into irritation. By the two-thirds point, Kingfisher was gleefully throwing obstacles in their way to drag out the suspense, and I just wanted everyone to shut up about having sex and get on with the rest of the story. That's unfortunate because I really liked Clara. She isn't the same type as Grace, Halla from Swordheart, or even Slate from Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine, the other novels set in this universe. She's self-contained, physically intimidating, cautious, deliberate, and very good at keeping her own counsel. I won't spoil her secret, since it's fun to work it out at the start of the book, but it's a lovely bit of characterization and world-building that Kingfisher handles with a thoughtful eye for its ramifications and effect on Clara's psychology. I would happily read more books about Clara. I liked Istvhan well enough when he was doing anything other than mooning over Clara. As with all of Kingfisher's paladins, he's not a very subtle person, but he's a good straight man for Clara's quiet bemusement. He fills the paladin slot in this story, which is all he needs to do. There's enough else going on with Clara and with the plot two separate major plotlines, plus a few subplots that Paladin's Strength can use a protagonist who heads straight forward and hits things until they fall down. The mooning, though... this is going to be a matter of personal taste. I think the intent was to contrast Istvhan's rather straightforward lustful appreciation with Clara's nuanced and trauma-laced reservations, and to play Istvhan's reactions in part for humor. I'm sure it works for some people, but I found Istvhan juvenile and puerile (albeit, to be clear, in a respectful and entirely consensual way), which didn't help me invest in a romance plot that I already thought dragged on too long. Thankfully the characters finally get past this in time for a dramatic and satisfying conclusion to the plot. The joy of Paladin's Grace (and Swordheart for that matter) was the character dynamics and quirky female lead, which made the romance work even when Stephen was being dense. The joy of Paladin's Strength for me was primarily Clara's matter-of-fact calm bemusement and secondarily the plot and the world-building. (Kingfisher's gnoles continue to be the best thing about this setting.) None of that helps the romance as much, and the slow burn was far, far too slow for me, which lowers this one a notch. Still, this was fun, and I'll keep reading books about the Temple of the White Rat and their various friends and encounters for as long as Kingfisher keeps writing them. Rating: 7 out of 10

DebConf8 This tshirt is 12 years old and from DebConf8. DebConf8 was my 6th DebConf and took place in Mar de la Plata, Argentina. Also this is my 6th post in this series of posts about DebConfs and for the last two days for the first time I failed my plan to do one post per day. And while two days ago I still planned to catch up on this by doing more than one post in a day, I have now decided to give in to realities, which mostly translates to sudden fantastic weather in Hamburg and other summer related changes in life. So yeah, I still plan to do short posts about all the DebConfs I was lucky to attend, but there might be days without a blog post. Anyhow, Mar de la Plata. When we held DebConf in Argentina it was winter there, meaning locals and other folks would wear jackets, scarfs, probably gloves, while many Debian folks not so much. Andreas Tille freaked out and/or amazed local people by going swimming in the sea every morning. And when I told Stephen Gran that even I would find it a bit cold with just a tshirt he replied "na, the weather is fine, just like british summer", while it was 14 celcius and mildly raining. DebConf8 was the first time I've met Valessio Brito, who I had worked together since at least DebConf6. That meeting was really super nice, Valessio is such a lovely person. Back in 2008 however, there was just one problem: his spoken English was worse than his written one, and that was already hard to parse sometimes. Fast forward eleven years to Curitiba last year and boom, Valessio speaks really nice English now. And, you might wonder why I'm telling this, especially if you were exposed to my Spanish back then and also now. So my point in telling this story about Valessio is to illustrate two things: a.) one can contribute to Debian without speaking/writing much English, Valessio did lots of great artwork since DebConf6 and b.) one can learn English by doing Debian stuff. It worked for me too! During set up of the conference there was one very memorable moment, some time after the openssl maintainer, Kurt Roeckx arrived at the venue: Shortly before DebConf8 Luciano Bello, from Argentina no less, had found CVE-2008-0166 which basically compromised the security of sshd of all Debian and Ubuntu installations done in the last 4 years (IIRC two Debian releases were affected) and which was commented heavily and noticed everywhere. So poor Kurt arrived and wondered whether we would all hate him, how many toilets he would have to clean and what not... And then, someone rather quickly noticed this, approached some people and suddenly a bunch of people at DebConf were group-hugging Kurt and then we were all smiling and continuing doing set up of the conference. That moment is one of my most joyful memories of all DebConfs and partly explains why I remember little about the conference itself, everything else pales in comparison and most things pale over the years anyway. As I remember it, the conference ran very smoothly in the end, despite quite some organisational problems right before the start. But as usual, once the geeks arrive and are happily geeking, things start to run smooth, also because Debian people are kind and smart and give hands and brain were needed. And like other DebConfs, Mar de la Plata also had moments which I want to share but I will only hint about, so it's up to you to imagine the special leaves which were brought to that cheese and wine party! Update: added another xkcd link, spelled out Kurt's name after talking to him and added a link to a video of the group hug.

I know most Debian people know about this already But in case you don t follow the usual Debian communications channels, this might interest you! Given most of the world is still under COVID-19 restrictions, and that we want to work on Debian, given there is no certainty as to what the future holds in store for us Our DPL fearless as they always are had the bold initiative to make this weekend into the first-ever miniDebConf Online (MDCO)! So, we are already halfway through DebCamp (which means, you can come and hang out with us in the debian.social DebCamp Jitsi lounge, where some impromptu presentations might happen (or not). Starting tomorrow morning (11AM UTC), we will have a quite interesting set of talks. I am reproducing the schedule here:

Saturday 2020.05.30

Time (UTC)	Speaker	Talk
11:00 - 11:10	MDCO team members	Hello + Welcome
11:30 - 11:50	Wouter Verhelst	Extrepo
12:00 - 12:45	JP Mengual	Debian France, trust european organization
13:00 - 13:20	Arnaud Ferraris	Bringing Debian to mobile phones, one package at a time
13:30 - 15:00	Lunch Break	A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45	JP Mengual	The community team, United Nations Organizations of Debian?
16:00 - 16:45	Christoph Biedl	Clevis and tang - overcoming the disk unlocking problem
17:00 - 17:45	Antonio Terceiro	I m a programmer, how can I help Debian

Sunday 2020.05.31

Time (UTC)	Speaker	Talk
11:00 - 11:45	Andreas Tille	The effect of Covid-19 on the Debian Med project
12:00 - 12:45	Paul Gevers	BoF: running autopkgtest for your package
13:00 - 13:20	Ben Hutchings	debplate: Build many binary packages with templates
13:30 - 15:00	Lunch break	A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45	Holger Levsen	Reproducing bullseye in practice
16:00 - 16:45	Jonathan Carter	Striving towards excellence
17:00 - 17:45	Delib*	Organizing Peer-to-Peer Debian Facilitation Training
18:00 - 18:15	MDCO team members	Closing

• subject to confirmation

Timezone Remember this is an online event, meant for all of the world! Yes, the chosen times seem quite Europe-centric (but they are mostly a function of the times the talk submitters requested). Talks are 11:00 18:00UTC, which means, 06:00 13:00 Mexico (GMT-5), 20:00 03:00 Japan (GMT+9), 04:00 11:00 Western Canada/USA/Mexico (GMT-7) and the rest of the world, somewhere in between. (No, this was clearly not optimized for our dear usual beer team. Sorry! I guess we need you to be fully awake at beertime!)

[update] Connecting! Of course, I didn t make it clear at first how to connect to the Online miniDebConf, silly me!

• The video streams are available at: https://video.debconf.org/
• Suggested: tune in to the #minidebconf-online IRC channel in OFTC.

That should be it. Hope to see you there! (Stay home, stay safe )

I know most Debian people know about this already But in case you don t follow the usual Debian communications channels, this might interest you! Given most of the world is still under COVID-19 restrictions, and that we want to work on Debian, given there is no certainty as to what the future holds in store for us Our DPL fearless as they always are had the bold initiative to make this weekend into the first-ever miniDebConf Online (MDCO)! So, we are already halfway through DebCamp (which means, you can come and hang out with us in the debian.social DebCamp Jitsi lounge, where some impromptu presentations might happen (or not). Starting tomorrow morning (11AM UTC), we will have a quite interesting set of talks. I am reproducing the schedule here:

Saturday 2020.05.30

Time (UTC)	Speaker	Talk
11:00 - 11:10	MDCO team members	Hello + Welcome
11:30 - 11:50	Wouter Verhelst	Extrepo
12:00 - 12:45	JP Mengual	Debian France, trust european organization
13:00 - 13:20	Arnaud Ferraris	Bringing Debian to mobile phones, one package at a time
13:30 - 15:00	Lunch Break	A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45	JP Mengual	The community team, United Nations Organizations of Debian?
16:00 - 16:45	Christoph Biedl	Clevis and tang - overcoming the disk unlocking problem
17:00 - 17:45	Antonio Terceiro	I m a programmer, how can I help Debian

Sunday 2020.05.31

Time (UTC)	Speaker	Talk
11:00 - 11:45	Andreas Tille	The effect of Covid-19 on the Debian Med project
12:00 - 12:45	Paul Gevers	BoF: running autopkgtest for your package
13:00 - 13:20	Ben Hutchings	debplate: Build many binary packages with templates
13:30 - 15:00	Lunch break	A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45	Holger Levsen	Reproducing bullseye in practice
16:00 - 16:45	Jonathan Carter	Striving towards excellence
17:00 - 17:45	Delib*	Organizing Peer-to-Peer Debian Facilitation Training
18:00 - 18:15	MDCO team members	Closing

• subject to confirmation

Timezone Remember this is an online event, meant for all of the world! Yes, the chosen times seem quite Europe-centric (but they are mostly a function of the times the talk submitters requested). Talks are 11:00 18:00UTC, which means, 06:00 13:00 Mexico (GMT-5), 20:00 03:00 Japan (GMT+9), 04:00 11:00 Western Canada/USA/Mexico (GMT-7) and the rest of the world, somewhere in between. (No, this was clearly not optimized for our dear usual beer team. Sorry! I guess we need you to be fully awake at beertime!)

[update] Connecting! Of course, I didn t make it clear at first how to connect to the Online miniDebConf, silly me!

• The video streams are available at: https://video.debconf.org/
• Suggested: tune in to the #minidebconf-online IRC channel in OFTC.

That should be it. Hope to see you there! (Stay home, stay safe )

Previously: v5.4. I got a bit behind on this blog post series! Let s get caught up. Here are a bunch of security things I found interesting in the Linux kernel v5.5 release: restrict perf_event_open() from LSM
Given the recurring flaws in the perf subsystem, there has been a strong desire to be able to entirely disable the interface. While the kernel.perf_event_paranoid sysctl knob has existed for a while, attempts to extend its control to block all perf_event_open() calls have failed in the past. Distribution kernels have carried the rejected sysctl patch for many years, but now Joel Fernandes has implemented a solution that was deemed acceptable: instead of extending the sysctl, add LSM hooks so that LSMs (e.g. SELinux, Apparmor, etc) can make these choices as part of their overall system policy. generic fast full refcount_t
Will Deacon took the recent refcount_t hardening work for both x86 and arm64 and distilled the implementations into a single architecture-agnostic C version. The result was almost as fast as the x86 assembly version, but it covered more cases (e.g. increment-from-zero), and is now available by default for all architectures. (There is no longer any Kconfig associated with refcount_t; the use of the primitive provides full coverage.) linker script cleanup for exception tables
When Rick Edgecombe presented his work on building Execute-Only memory under a hypervisor, he noted a region of memory that the kernel was attempting to read directly (instead of execute). He rearranged things for his x86-only patch series to work around the issue. Since I d just been working in this area, I realized the root cause of this problem was the location of the exception table (which is strictly a lookup table and is never executed) and built a fix for the issue and applied it to all architectures, since it turns out the exception tables for almost all architectures are just a data table. Hopefully this will help clear the path for more Execute-Only memory work on all architectures. In the process of this, I also updated the section fill bytes on x86 to be a trap (0xCC, int3), instead of a NOP instruction so functions would need to be targeted more precisely by attacks. KASLR for 32-bit PowerPC
Joining many other architectures, Jason Yan added kernel text base-address offset randomization (KASLR) to 32-bit PowerPC. seccomp for RISC-V
After a bit of long road, David Abdurachmanov has added seccomp support to the RISC-V architecture. The series uncovered some more corner cases in the seccomp self tests code, which is always nice since then we get to make it more robust for the future! seccomp USER_NOTIF continuation
When the seccomp SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF interface was added, it seemed like it would only be used in very limited conditions, so the idea of needing to handle normal requests didn t seem very onerous. However, since then, it has become clear that the overhead of a monitor process needing to perform lots of normal open() calls on behalf of the monitored process started to look more and more slow and fragile. To deal with this, it became clear that there needed to be a way for the USER_NOTIF interface to indicate that seccomp should just continue as normal and allow the syscall without any special handling. Christian Brauner implemented SECCOMP_USER_NOTIF_FLAG_CONTINUE to get this done. It comes with a bit of a disclaimer due to the chance that monitors may use it in places where ToCToU is a risk, and for possible conflicts with SECCOMP_RET_TRACE. But overall, this is a net win for container monitoring tools. EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL for x86
Some EFI systems provide a Random Number Generator interface, which is useful for gaining some entropy in the kernel during very early boot. The arm64 boot stub has been using this for a while now, but Dominik Brodowski has now added support for x86 to do the same. This entropy is useful for kernel subsystems performing very earlier initialization whre random numbers are needed (like randomizing aspects of the SLUB memory allocator). FORTIFY_SOURCE for MIPS
As has been enabled on many other architectures, Dmitry Korotin got MIPS building with CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE, so compile-time (and some run-time) buffer overflows during calls to the memcpy() and strcpy() families of functions will be detected. limit copy_ to,from _user() size to INT_MAX
As done for VFS, vsnprintf(), and strscpy(), I went ahead and limited the size of copy_to_user() and copy_from_user() calls to INT_MAX in order to catch any weird overflows in size calculations. Other things
Alexander Popov pointed out some more v5.5 features that I missed in this blog post. I m repeating them here, with some minor edits/clarifications. Thank you Alexander!

• KASan support for vmap memory expands KASan s features to include analysis of memory allocated with vmalloc(). More specifically, this means KASan can examine the stack again, since it can be in that region since CONFIG_VMAP_STACK was introduced.
• MIPS can build with GCC plugins and KCOV now, providing those systems with the associated features like stack wiping, coverage analysis, etc.
• userfaultfd requires CAP_SYS_PTRACE for UFFD_FEATURE_EVENT_FORK. This was done to block unprivileged users from abusing the userfaultfd feature, as it is implemented in a way that provides the ability to inject file descriptors into unsuspecting processes.

Edit: added Alexander Popov s notes That s it for v5.5! Let me know if there s anything else that I should call out here. Next up: Linux v5.6.

2020, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

(image shamelessly copied from Noodles' Emptiness) This year I will only make it to DebConf, not to DebCamp. But, still, I am very very happy and excited as the travel date looms nearer! I have ordered some of the delicacies for the Cheese and Wine party, signed up for the public bicycle system of Montreal, and done a fair share of work with the Content Team; finally today we sent out the announcement for the schedule of talks. Of course, there are several issues yet to fix, and a lot of things to do before traveling... But, no doubt about this: It will be an intense week! Oh, one more thing while we are at it: The schedule as it was published today does not really look like we have organized stuff into tracks But we have! This will be soon fixed, adding some color-coding to make tracks clearer on the schedule. This year, I pushed for the Content Team to recover the notion of tracks as an organizative measure, and as something that delivers value to DebConf as a whole. Several months ago, I created a Wiki page for the DebConf tracks, asking interested people to sign up for them. We currently have the following tracks registered:

Blends

Andreas Tille

Debian Science

Michael Banck

Cloud and containers

Luca Filipozzi

Embedded

Pending

Systems administration, automation and orchestation

Pending

Security

Gunnar Wolf

We have two tracks still needing a track coordinator. Do note that most of the tasks mentioned by the Wiki have already been carried out; what a track coordinator will now do is to serve as some sort of moderator, maybe a recurring talkmeister, ensuring continuity and probably providing for some commentary, giving some unity to its sessions. So, the responsibilities for a track coordinator right now are quite similar to what is expected for video team volunteers but to a set of contiguous sessions. If you are interested in being the track coordinator/moderator for Embedded or for Systems administration, automation and orchestation or even to share the job with any of the other, registered, coordinators, please speak up! Mail content@debconf.org and update the table in the Wiki page. See you very soon in Montreal!

I mean, it is easy to make fun of Trump, he is just too stupid and incapable and uneducated. But what the French president Emmanuel Macron did on Bastille Day, in presence of the usual Trumpies, was just above the usual level of making fun of Trump. The French made Trump watch a French band playing a medley of Daft Punk. And as we know Trump seemed to be very unimpressed, most probably because he doesn t have a clue. I mean, normally you play these pathetic rubbish, look at the average US (or Chinese or North Korean) parades, and here we have the celebration of an event much older then anything the US can put on the table, and they are playing Daft Punk! France, thanks. You made my day actually not only one!

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage

• despinosa wrote a blog post on Vala and reproducibility
• h01ger and lynxis gave a talk called "From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE" (video, slides) at the OpenWrt Summit 2016 held in Berlin, together with ELCE, held by the Linux Foundation.
• A discussion on debian-devel@ resulted in a nice quotable comment from Paul Wise: "(Reproducible) builds from source (with continuous rechecking) is the only way to have enough confidence that a Debian user has the freedoms promised to them by the Debian social contract."
• Chris Lamb will present a talk at Software Freedom Kosovo on reproducible builds on Saturday 22nd October.

Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed:

• cobbler/2.6.6+dfsg1-13 by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• collectd/5.6.1-1 by Marc Fournier.
• fonts-tiresias/0.1-3 by G rkan Myczko, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fntsample/4.0-2 by , original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fpga-icestorm/0~20160913git266e758-2 by Ruben Undheim, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• frog/0.13.5-1 by Maarten van Gompel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• lambda-align/1.0.0-2 by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pleiades/1.7.0-2 by Hideki Yamane, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sweethome3d/5.2+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany, original fix by Gabriele Giacone.
• trac-subtickets/0.2.0-2 by W. Martin Borgert.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• aodh/3.0.0-2 by Thomas Goirand.
• eog-plugins/3.16.5-1 by Michael Biebl.
• flam3/3.0.1-5 by Daniele Adriana Goulart Lopes.
• hyphy/2.2.7+dfsg-1 by Andreas Tille.
• libbson/1.4.1-1 by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
• libmongoc/1.4.1-1 by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
• lxc/1:2.0.5-1 by Evgeni Golov.
• spice-gtk/0.33-1 by Liang Guo.
• spice-vdagent/0.17.0-1 by Liang Guo.
• tnef/1.4.12-1 by Kevin Coyner.

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• chktex/1.7.6-1 by Thorsten Alteholz, original patch by Sascha Steinbiss.
• dbus/1.10.12-1 by Simon McVittie.
• doomsday/1.15.8-3 by Markus Koschany, #839338 by Lucas Nussbaum.
• emacs25/25.1+1-1 by Rob Browning.
• gpgme1.0/1.7.0-3 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• monkeysign/2.2.0 by Antoine Beaupr .
• python-attrs/16.2.0-1 by Tristan Seligmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shotwell/0.24.0-1 by J rg Frings-F rst, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• supple/1.0.6-2 by Daniel Silverstone.
• why/2.36-1 by Ralf Treinen, original patch by Valentin Lorentz.

Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues:

• palo/1.96 by Helge Deller, #778437 by Chris Lamb.
• rbdoom3bfg/1.1.0~preview3+dfsg+git20160807-1 by Tobias Frost.
• singular/4.0.3-p3+ds-1 by Jerome Benoit.
• varnish/5.0.0-3 by Stig Sandbeck Mathisen, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• yaml-cpp/0.5.2-4 by Paul Novotny, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #840741 filed against http-icons by Chris Lamb.
• #840177 filed against qconf by Chris Lamb.
• #840845 filed against python-pygraphviz by Chris Lamb.
• #840346 filed against qjoypad by Chris Lamb.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated:

• Added max_output_size_reached, ftbfs_due_to_jenkins_semaphore_setup, and build_id_differences_only.

Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Anders Kaseorg (1)
• Chris Lamb (18)

tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian:

• h01ger has turned off the "Scheduled in testing+unstable+experimental" regular IRC notifications and turned them into emails to those running jenkins.d.n.
• Re-add opi2a armhf node and 3 new builder jobs for a total of 60 build jobs for armhf. (h01ger and vagrant)
• vagrant suggested to add a variation of init systems effecting the build, and h01ger added it to the TODO list.
• Steven Chamberlain submitted a patch so that now all buildinfo files are collected (unsigned yet) at submit@buildinfo.kfreebsd.eu.
• Holger enabled CPU type variation (Intel Haswell or AMD Opteron 62xx) for i386. Thanks to Profitbricks.com for their great and continued support!

Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux:

• Increase memory on the 2 build nodes from 12 to 16gb, thanks to profitbricks.com

Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes

• dpkg/1.18.10 by Guillem Jover.
  • Generate reproducible source tarballs by using the new GNU tar --clamp-mtime option
  • Enable fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, original patch by Mattia Rizzolo.
• cython/0.24.1-1 by Yaroslav Halchenko.
  • Fix a file ordering issue, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Chris Lamb and Thomas Schmidt worked on some patches to make reproducible ISO images.
• Johannes Schauer continued the discussion on #763822 regarding dak and buildinfo files.
• Johannes Schauer continued the discussion on #774415 regarding srebuild and debrebuild.

Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• cvs2svn/2.4.0-3 by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• dapl/2.1.8-2 by 2.1.8-1 by Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fonts-noto/20160116-3 by Vasudev Kamath, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fortunes-bg/1.3 by Anton Zinoviev, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fsvs/1.2.7-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• infernal/1.1.2-1 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• libitpp/4.3.1-7 by Kumar Appaiah, original patch by Eduard Sanou.
• libtar/1.2.20-6 by Magnus Holmgren.
• libterralib/4.3.0+dfsg.2-9 by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Eduard Sanou.
• mknbi/1.4.4-12 Ralf Treinen, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• node-iscroll/5.2.0+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• octave-communications/1.2.1-2 by Rafael Laboissiere.
• python-mkdocs/0.15.3-5 by Brian May, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• remake/4.1+dbg1.1+dfsg-1 by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• sa-exim/4.2.1-16 by Magnus Holmgren.
• seqan/1.4.2+dfsg-1 by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sbuild/0.70.0-1 by Johannes Schauer, #825991 from Aurelien Jarno.
• trscripts/1.18 by Anton Zinoviev, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• ui-auto/1.2.9-1 by Stephan S rken.
• ui-utilcpp/1.8.5-1 by Stephan S rken.
• xfonts-cronyx/2.3.8-8 by Anton Zinoviev, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• libitext-java/2.1.7-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• lice/1:4.2.5i-2 by Kurt Roeckx.
• pgbackrest/1.04-1 by Adrian Vondendriesch.
• pxlib/0.6.7-1 by Uwe Steinmann.
• runit/2.1.2-5 by Dmitry Bogatov.
• ssvnc/1.0.29-3 by Magnus Holmgren.
• syncthing/0.14.3+dfsg1-3 by Alexandre Viau.
• tachyon/0.99~b6+dsx-5 by Jerome Benoit.
• tor/0.2.8.6-2 by Peter Palfrader.

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• apg/2.2.3.dfsg.1-4 by Marc Haber, original patch by Daniel Shahaf.
• atheme-services/7.2.6-1 by Antoine Beaupr .
• gradle-debian-helper/1.3 by Emmanuel Bourg
• hyperscan/4.2.0-2 by Robert Haist, original patch by Eduard Sanou
• kodi by Balint Reczey, original patch by Lukas Rechberger
• python-dtcwt/0.11.0-2 by Ghislain Antony Vaillant.
• sollya/5.0+ds-3 by Jerome Benoit.
• supercat/0.5.5-4.1 by Craig Sanders, original patch by Maria Valentina Marin, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #833070 against wget by Reiner Herrmann.
• #833088 against xine-lib-1.2 by Daniel Shahaf.
• #833162 against qemu by Daniel Shahaf.
• #833176 against trafficserver by Reiner Herrmann.
• #833179 against openldap by Daniel Shahaf.
• #833340 against mini-buildd by Chris Lamb.
• #833379 against hardinfo by Chris Lamb.
• #833380 against roaraudio by Chris Lamb.
• #833395 against emacspeak by Chris Lamb.
• #833399 against wims by Chris Lamb.
• #833408 against amora-server by Chris Lamb.
• #833437 against mp4h by Chris Lamb.
• #833438 against rest2web by Chris Lamb.
• #833439 against forkstat by Chris Lamb.
• #833440 against wmweather+ by Chris Lamb.
• #833441 against rc by Chris Lamb.
• #833443 against vit by Chris Lamb.
• #833444 against openhackware by Chris Lamb.
• #833445 against pd-pdstring by Chris Lamb.
• #833472 against aghermann by Daniel Shahaf.
• #833581 against xshisen by Chris Lamb.
• #833594 against fizmo by Chris Lamb.
• #833610 against ara by Chris Lamb.
• #833611 against fntsample by Chris Lamb.
• #833612 against nsnake by Chris Lamb.

Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week.

• New issues:
  • unknown_ada_issue
  • timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_phpdox
• Updated issues:
  • randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_sphinx

7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools

• diffoscope/56~bpo8+1 uploaded to jessie-backports by Mattia Rizzolo
• strip-nondeterminism/0.022-1~bpo8+1 uploaded to jessie-backports by Mattia Rizzolo

Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 29th and June 4th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste will present Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD at BDSCan 2016 in Ottawa, Canada on June 11th. GSoC and Outreachy updates

• Satyam blogged about his first experiences hacking on diffoscope.
• Ceridwen wrote about her first steps on reprotest, which now has a git repo.

Toolchain fixes

• Paul Gevers uploaded fpc/3.0.0+dfsg-5 with a new helper script fp-fix-timestamps, which helps with reproducibility issues of PPU files in freepascal packages.
• Sascha Steinbiss uploaded a patched version of epydoc to our experimental repository to test a patch for the use_epydoc issue.

Other upstream fixes

• Initial patch for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support in Clang (emaste)

Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: angband blktrace code-saturne coinor-symphony device-tree-compiler mpich rtslib ruby-bcrypt ruby-bson-ext ruby-byebug ruby-cairo ruby-charlock-holmes ruby-curb ruby-dataobjects-sqlite3 ruby-escape-utils ruby-ferret ruby-ffi ruby-fusefs ruby-github-markdown ruby-god ruby-gsl ruby-hdfeos5 ruby-hiredis ruby-hitimes ruby-hpricot ruby-kgio ruby-lapack ruby-ldap ruby-libvirt ruby-libxml ruby-msgpack ruby-ncurses ruby-nfc ruby-nio4r ruby-nokogiri ruby-odbc ruby-oj ruby-ox ruby-raindrops ruby-rdiscount ruby-redcarpet ruby-redcloth ruby-rinku ruby-rjb ruby-rmagick ruby-rugged ruby-sdl ruby-serialport ruby-sqlite3 ruby-unicode ruby-yajl ruby-zoom thin The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• aft/2:5.098-3 by Robert Lemmen, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• bbswitch/0.8-4 by Vincent Cheng, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• cgal/4.8-4 by Joachim Reichel.
• gnuplot/4.6.6-4 by Anton Gladky.
• jmodeltest/2.1.10+dfsg-2 by Andreas Tille.
• kball/0.0.20041216-9 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• netmaze/0.81+jpg0.82-15 by John Goerzen, original patches by Chris Lamb (#778200) and Maria Valentina Marin (#793731).
• pacemaker/1.1.15~rc3-1 by Ferenc W gner.
• pam/1.1.8-3.3 by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Juan Picca.
• plast/2.3.1+dfsg-4 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• prospector/0.11.7-7 by Daniel Stender.
• pymia/0.1.8-1 by Gert Wollny.
• python-cobra/0.4.1-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• python-latexcodec/1.0.3-3 by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pyx/0.12.1-5 by Stuart Prescott, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• rdp-readseq/2.0.2-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• stevedore/1.14.0-1 by Ond ej Nov .
• wise/2.4.1-18 by Sascha Steinbiss.

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• binutils/2.26-10 by Matthias Klose, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pyx3/0.14.1-2 by Stuart Prescott, based on original patch by Alexis Bienven e.

Uploads with an unknown result because they fail to build:

• h2database/1.4.192-1 by Emmanuel Bourg, which forces a specific locale to generate documentation.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #825764 against docbook-ebnf by Chris Lamb: sort list of globbed files.
• #825857 against python-setuptools by Anton Gladky: sort list of files in native_libs.txt.
• #825968 against epydoc by Sascha Steinbiss: traverse lists in sorted order.
• #826051 against dh-lua by Reiner Herrmann: sort list of Lua versions embedded into control file.
• #826093 against osc by Alexis Bienven e: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for manpage date.
• #826158 against texinfo by Alexis Bienven : use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for dates in makeinfo output.
• #826162 against slime by Alexis Bienven e: sort list of contributors locale-independently.
• #826209 against fastqtl by Chris Lamb: normalize permissions and order in tarball.
• #826309 against gnupg2 by intrigeri: don't embed hostname and timestamp into gpgv.exe.

Package reviews 45 reviews have been added, 25 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week.

• New issues:
  • date_added_by_ui_auto
  • timestamp_in_info_file_created_by_makeinfo
  • unsorted_lua_versions_in_control
  • random_order_in_native_libs_by_setuptools
  • ftbfs_build-indep_not_build_on_armhf

12 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development

• diffoscope 53 was been released by Mattia Rizzolo, with:
  • various improvements on temporary file handling;
  • fix a crash when comparing directories with broken symlinks (#818856);
  • great improvement on the deb(5) support (#818414), by Reiner Herrmann;
  • add FreeBSD packages in --list-tools, by Ed Maste.
• diffoscope 54 (released shortly after) to address a regression involving --list-tools, where a syntax error prevented proper listing of all tools.

strip-nondeterminism development Mattia uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.018-1 which improved support for *.epub files. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Added pages with oldest logs per arch (h01ger)
• 3 new armhf hosts were added (vagrant)
  • setup and maintenance jobs added (h01ger)
  • 7 new builder jobs for armhf added (h01ger)
• HOME environment variation on tests.r-b.org and prebuilder (mattia), after Johannes Schauer discovered that this variation was not detected.
• 7 new package sets (for a total of 42) were added by h01ger:
  • mate
  • mate_build-depends
  • maint_debian-python
  • maint_debian-qa
  • maint_debian-science
  • maint_pkg-fonts-devel
  • maint_pkg-games-devel
• Improved rescheduling of packages in "depwait" state (h01ger)
• Use eatmydata on i386+armhf (h01ger) (doesn't work yet; needs unreleased pbuilder features)

Misc. Last week we also learned about progress of reproducible builds in FreeBSD. Ed Maste announced a change to record the build timestamp during ports building, which is required for later reproduction. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrman, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 15th and May 21st 2016: Media coverage Blog posts from our GSoC and Outreachy contributors:

• Val's first post describing her plans for improving tests.reproducible-builds.org.
• ceridwen's first post describing her plans for reprotest, the universal reproducibility testing tool.
• Scarlett's and Satyam's first posts were linked in previous week's report already.

Documentation update Ximin Luo clarified instructions on how to set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Toolchain fixes

• Joao Eriberto Mota Filho uploaded txt2man/1.5.6-4, which honours SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to generate reproducible manpages (original patch by Reiner Herrmann).
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.4.1-1 to experimental with improved support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (original patch by Alexis Bienven e).
• Emmanuel Bourg submitted a patch against debhelper to use a fixed username while building ant packages.

Other upstream fixes

• Doxygen merged a patch by Ximin Luo, which uses UTC as timezone for embedded timestamps.
• CMake applied a patch by Reiner Herrmann in their next branch, which sorts file lists obtained with file(GLOB).
• GNU tar 1.29 with support for --clamp-mtime has been released upstream, closing #816072, which was the blocker for #759886 "dpkg-dev: please make mtimes of packaged files deterministic" which we now hope will be closed soon.

Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: abiword angband apt-listbugs asn1c bacula-doc bittornado cdbackup fenix gap-autpgrp gerbv jboss-logging-tools invokebinder modplugtools objenesis pmw r-cran-rniftilib x-loader zsnes The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• ball/1.4.3~beta1-1 by Andreas Tille.
• chrony/2.3-1 by Vincent Blut, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• corosync/2.3.5-7 by Ferenc W gner.
• gap-ctbllib/1r2p2.dfsg.0-3 by Bill Allombert, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• kdiff3/0.9.98-3 by Eike Sauer.
• netcdf-cxx/4.3.0+ds-3 by Bas Couwenberg.
• netcdf-fortran/4.4.4+ds-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• primesieve/5.6.0+ds-2 by Jerome Benoit.
• ray/2.3.1-4 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• rocksdb/4.5.1-1 by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shapelib/1.3.0-8 by Bas Couwenberg.
• swift/2.7.0-3 by Ond ej Nov .
• t-coffee/11.00.8cbe486-3 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• webkit2pdf/0.3-2 by Ricardo Mones, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• wise/2.4.1-18 by Sascha Steinbiss.

Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• bzr/2.7.0-6 by Jelmer Vernoo .
• libsdl2/2.0.4+dfsg2-1 by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo.
• pvm/3.4.5-13 by James Clarke.
• refpolicy/2:2.20140421-11 by Laurent Bigonville.
• subvertpy/0.9.3-4 by Jelmer Vernoo .

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #824413 against binutils by Chris Lamb: filter build user and date from test log case-insensitively
• #824452 against python-certbot by Chris Lamb: prevent PID from being embedded into documentation (forwarded upstream)
• #824453 against gtk-gnutella by Chris Lamb: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for deterministic timestamp (merged upstream)
• #824454 against python-latexcodec by Chris Lamb: fix for parsing the changelog date
• #824472 against torch3 by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files while linking
• #824501 against cclive by Alexis Bienven e: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH as embedded build date
• #824567 against tkdesk by Alexis Bienven e: sort order of files which are parsed by mkindex script
• #824592 against twitter-bootstrap by Alexis Bienven e: use shell-independent printing
• #824639 against openblas by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files while linking
• #824653 against elkcode by Alexis Bienven e: sort list of files locale-independently
• #824668 against gmt by Alexis Bienven e: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for embedded timestamp (similar patch by Bas Couwenberg already applied and forwarded upstream)
• #824808 against gdal by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files while linking
• #824951 against libtomcrypt by Reiner Herrmann: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for timestamp embedded into metadata

Reproducibility-related bugs filed:

• #824420 against python-phply by ceridwen: parsetab.py file is not included when building with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nocheck"
• #824572 against dpkg-dev by XImin Luo: request to export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in /usr/share/dpkg/*.mk.

Package reviews 51 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 15 have been removed in this week.

• Two new issues have been found:
  • random_order_in_static_library_by_icmake
  • timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_latex2man

22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila, Niko Tyni and Daniel Schepler. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Icons have been added to the package test history pages (h01ger).
• Test performance and variation pages have been splitted out of the dashboard view (h01ger).
• A new pkg set has been added: packages maintained by debian-med-packaging@l.a.d.o (h01ger).
• The preliminary results for testing have improved further:
  • testing/amd64 has 20944 / 90.2% reproducible packages now,
  • testing/i386 has reached 20013 / 86.3% reproducible packages,
  • testing/armhf has come close with 19951 / 86.0%.

Misc.

• During the discussion on debian-devel about PIE, an archive rebuild was suggested by B lint R czey, and Holger Levsen suggested to coordinate this with a required archive rebuild for reproducible builds.
• Ximin Luo improved misc.git/reports (=the tools to help writing the weekly statistics for this blog) quite a bit, h01ger contributed a little too.

This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes

• Roland Rosenfeld uploaded transfig/1:3.2.5.e-6 which honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• Bill Allombert uploaded gap/4r8p3-2 which makes convert.pl honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Jerome Benoit, duplicate patch by Dhole.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded ant/1.9.7-1 which makes the Javadoc task use UTF-8 as the default encoding if none was specified and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set.

Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• autopkgtest/3.20.3 uploaded by Martin Pitt, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• fop/1:2.1-3 uploaded by Mathieu Malaterre, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• fwupdate/0.5-4 by Mario Limonciello.
• gem/1:0.93.3-10 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• imview/1.1.9c-16 by Anton Gladky.
• libappindicator/0.4.92-4 by Adam Borowski.
• libjlha-java/0.0.20050504-9 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• lwjgl/2.9.3+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany.
• lxc/1:2.0.0~rc15-1 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• manpages-de/1.12-1 uploaded by Tobias Quathamer, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• pd-mrpeach/0.1~svn17615-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• pyhoca-gui/0.5.0.6-1 uploaded by Mike Gabriel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• r-cran-spatstat/1.45-0-1 by Andreas Tille.
• s5/1.1.dfsg.2-6 uploaded by Peter Pentchev, original patch by Juan Picca.
• samba/2:4.3.8+dfsg-1 by Jelmer Vernoo .
• sim4/0.0.20121010-3 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• svxlink/15.11-1 uploaded by Felix Lechner, fixed upstream.
• tinc/1.0.28-1 by Guus Sliepen, fixed upstream.
• ucblogo/6.0+dfsg-1 by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• mm-common/0.9.10-1 by Michael Biebl.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #820603 on viking by Alexis Bienven e: fix icon headers inclusion order.
• #820661 on nullmailer by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are included in the static archive.
• #820668 on sawfish by Alexis Bienven e: fix file ordering in theme archives, strip hostname and username from the config.h file, and honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when creating the config.h file.
• #820740 on bless by Alexis Bienven e: always use /bin/sh as shell.
• #820742 on gmic by Alexis Bienven e: strip the build date from help messages.
• #820809 on wsdl4j by Alexis Bienven e: use a plain text representation of the copyright character.
• #820815 on freefem++ by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are included in the .edp files, and honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when using the build date.
• #820869 on pyexiv2 by Alexis Bienven e: honour the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable through the ustrftime function, to get a reproducible copyright year.
• #820932 on fim by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are joined in header files, strip the build date from fim binary, make the embeded vim2html script honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable when building the documentation, and force language to be English when using bison to make a grammar that is going to be parsed using English keywords.
• #820990 on grib-api by Santiago Vila: always call dh-buildinfo.

diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 3rd and April 9th 2016: Media coverage Emily Ratliff wrote an article for SecurityWeek called Establishing Correspondence Between an Application and its Source Code - How Combining Two Completely Separate Open Source Projects Can Make Us All More Secure. Tails have started work on a design for freezable APT repositories to make it easier and practical to perform reproductions of an entire distribution at a given point in time, which will be needed to create reproducible installation- or live-media. Toolchain fixes Alexis Bienven e submitted patches adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in several tools: transfig, imagemagick, rdtool, and asciidoctor. boyska submitted one for python-reportlab. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330 brailleutils cglib3 gnugo libcobra-java libgnumail-java libjchart2d-java libjcommon-java libjfreechart-java libjide-oss-java liblaf-widget-java liblastfm-java liboptions-java octave-control octave-mpi octave-nan octave-parallel octave-stk octave-struct octave-tsa oar The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apt-listchanges/2.88 by Robert Luberda.
• cgal/4.8-1 by Joachim Reichel.
• erlang-bitcask/2.0.2+dfsg-1 by Nobuhiro Iwamatsu.
• geneweb/6.08+git20160228+dfsg-2 by Guillaume Brochu.
• glance/2:12.0.0~rc2-1 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gle-graphics/4.2.5-4 by Christian T. Steigies.
• maude uploaded by Andreas Tille, patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• psqlodbc/1:09.05.0100-3 by Christoph Berg.
• resource-agents/1:3.9.7-3 by Christoph Berg.
• vgabios/0.7a-6 by Reiner Herrmann.
• vim/2:7.4.1689-2 by James McCoy.
• xmhtml/1.1.10-2 by Graham Inggs with Reiner Herrmann's help.
• xscreensaver/5.34-2 uploaded by Tormod Volden, original patch by Sascha Steinbiss.

Several uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• rkward/0.6.5-1 uploaded by Thomas Friedrichsmeier, original patch by Philip Rinn.
• mailfilter/0.8.4-1 uploaded by Elimar Riesebieter, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• bind9/1:9.10.3.dfsg.P4-6 uploaded by Michael Gilbert, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• bzr/2.7.0- 3,4 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• samba/2:4.3.6+dfsg-2 uploaded by Mathieu Parent, fix by Jelmer Vernooij.
• fwupdate/0.5-3 by Mario Limonciello.
• paraview/5.0.1+dfsg1-1 by Anton Gladky.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #819883 on debootstrap by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to sort the archive members.
• #819885 on chktex by Sascha Steinbiss: use the time of latest debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp.
• #819915 on kannel by Alexis Bienven e: use the time of latest debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp.
• #819921 on basket by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from debug info.
• #819965 on openarena-data by Alexandre Detiste: normalize file permissions before creating .pk3 archive.
• #820016 on gabedit by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files used to build the executable.
• #820032 on bibledit-gtk by Alexis Bienven e: remove useless included Makefile.
• #820072 on synfig by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from info output.
• #820148 on autopkgtest by Alexis Bienven e: fix install order to cope with locales with case insensitive globbing.
• #820152 on anope by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from the version string.
• #820179 on aodh by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from the documentation.
• #820183 on cython by Alexis Bienven e: add support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #820194 on nasm by rain1: sorts keys when traversing hash tables used to build the documentation.
• #820226 on chrony by Alexis Bienven e: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to preset the ntp_era_split parameter.
• #820457 on recode by Alexis Bienven e: use system help2man.
• #820522 on gtkspell by Alexis Bienven e: force shell to /bin/sh in example Makefile.

Other upstream fixes Alexander Batischev made a commit to make newsbeuter reproducible. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• An architecture agnostic summary has been added to the reproducible-tracker.json by Valerie Young to make it easy to parse whether a package is unreproducible anywhere.
• To find more reproducibility issues a new variation was added to the i386 builders, so that one build is done using a 32 bit kernel (686-PAE) and the other build is using a 64 bit kernel (amd64). (h01ger)
  • Niko Tyni was the first to notice a bug due to this: #821182 perl: embeds kernel architecture information
• The 2nd builds are now done in fr_CH on amd64, de_CH on i386 and it_CH on armhf. (h01ger)
• The variation table has been updated to reflect the recent changes and various small bugs have been fixed. (h01ger)

Package reviews 93 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 21 updated in the previous week. 12 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and Ximin Luo. With the departure of Lunar as a full-time contributor, Reproducible Builds Weekly News (this thing you're reading) has moved from his personal Debian blog on Debian People to the Reproducible Builds team web site on Debian Alioth. You may want to update your RSS or Atom feeds. Very many thanks to Lunar for writing and publishing this weekly news for so long, well & continously!