This is bits from DPL for November.

MiniDebConf Toulouse

I had the pleasure of attending the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, which featured a range of engaging talks, complementing those from the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge. Both events were preceded by a DebCamp, which provided a valuable opportunity for focused work and collaboration.

DebCamp

During these events, I participated in numerous technical discussions on topics such as maintaining long-neglected packages, team-based maintenance, FTP master policies, Debusine, and strategies for separating maintainer script dependencies from runtime dependencies, among others. I was also fortunate that members of the Publicity Team attended the MiniDebCamp, giving us the opportunity to meet in person and collaborate face-to-face.

Independent of the ongoing lengthy discussion on the Debian Devel mailing list, I encountered the perspective that unifying Git workflows might be more critical than ensuring all packages are managed in Git. While I'm uncertain whether these two questions--adopting Git as a universal development tool and agreeing on a common workflow for its use--can be fully separated, I believe it's worth raising this topic for further consideration.

Attracting newcomers

In my own talk, I regret not leaving enough time for questions--my apologies for this. However, I want to revisit the sole question raised, which essentially asked: Is the documentation for newcomers sufficient to attract new contributors? My immediate response was that this question is best directed to new contributors themselves, as they are in the best position to identify gaps and suggest improvements that could make the documentation more helpful.

That said, I'm personally convinced that our challenges extend beyond just documentation. I don't get the impression that newcomers are lining up to join Debian only to be deterred by inadequate documentation. The issue might be more about fostering interest and engagement in the first place.

My personal impression is that we sometimes fail to convey that Debian is not just a product to download for free but also a technical challenge that warmly invites participation. Everyone who respects our Code of Conduct will find that Debian is a highly diverse community, where joining the project offers not only opportunities for technical contributions but also meaningful social interactions that can make the effort and time truly rewarding.

In several of my previous talks (you can find them on my talks page –just search for "team," and don't be deterred if you see "Debian Med" in the title; it's simply an example), I emphasized that the interaction between a mentor and a mentee often plays a far more significant role than the documentation the mentee has to read. The key to success has always been finding a way to spark the mentee's interest in a specific topic that resonates with their own passions.

Bug of the Day

In my presentation, I provided a brief overview of the Bug of the Day initiative, which was launched with the aim of demonstrating how to fix bugs as an entry point for learning about packaging. While the current level of interest from newcomers seems limited, the initiative has brought several additional benefits.

I must admit that I'm learning quite a bit about Debian myself. I often compare it to exploring a house's cellar with a flashlight –you uncover everything from hidden marvels to things you might prefer to discard. I've also come across traces of incredibly diligent people who have invested their spare time polishing these hidden treasures (what we call NMUs). The janitor, a service in Salsa that automatically updates packages, fits perfectly into this cellar metaphor, symbolizing the ongoing care and maintenance that keep everything in order. I hadn't realized the immense amount of silent work being done behind the scenes--thank you all so much for your invaluable QA efforts.

Reproducible builds

It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I'd like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar's contributions and legacy. Personally, I've encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.

Advent calendar bug squashing

I’d like to promote an idea originally introduced by Thorsten Alteholz, who in 2011 proposed a Bug Squashing Advent Calendar for the Debian Med team. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of an Advent Calendar, you can find an explanation on Wikipedia.) While the original version included a fun graphical element —which we’ve had to set aside due to time constraints (volunteers, anyone?)— we’ve kept the tradition alive by tackling one bug per day from December 1st to 24th each year. This initiative helps clean up issues that have accumulated over the year.

Regardless of whether you celebrate the concept of Advent, I warmly recommend this approach as a form of continuous bug-squashing party for every team. Not only does it contribute to the release readiness of your team’s packages, but it’s also an enjoyable and bonding activity for team members.

Best wishes for a cheerful and productive December

Andreas.

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2024 - March 2025 round.

Patrick Noblet Appiah will work on Automatic Indi-3rd-party driver update, mentored by Thorsten Alteholz.

Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work on Making the Debian main website more attractive by switching to HuGo as site generator, mentored by Carsten Schoenert, Subin Siby and Thomas Lange.

Congratulations and welcome Patrick Noblet Appiah and Divine Attah-Ohiemi!

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

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

• Joachim Bauch (fancycode)
• Alexander Kjäll (capitol)
• Jan Mojžíš (janmojzis)
• Xiao Sheng Wen (atzlinux)

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

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

Congratulations!

You may have seen this toot announcing OpenStreetMap's migration to Debian on their infrastructure.

🚀 After 18 years on Ubuntu, we've upgraded the @openstreetmap servers to Debian 12 (Bookworm). 🌍 openstreetmap.org is now faster using Ruby 3.1. Onward to new mapping adventures! Thank you to the team for the smooth transition. #OpenStreetMap #Debian 🤓

We spoke with Grant Slater, the Senior Site Reliability Engineer for the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Grant shares:

Why did you choose Debian?

There is a large overlap between OpenStreetMap mappers and the Debian community. Debian also has excellent coverage of OpenStreetMap tools and utilities, which helped with the decision to switch to Debian.

The Debian package maintainers do an excellent job of maintaining their packages - e.g.: osm2pgsql, osmium-tool etc.

Part of our reason to move to Debian was to get closer to the maintainers of the packages that we depend on. Debian maintainers appear to be heavily invested in the software packages that they support and we see critical bugs get fixed.

What drove this decision to migrate?

OpenStreetMap.org is primarily run on actual physical hardware that our team manages. We attempt to squeeze as much performance from our systems as possible, with some services being particularly I/O bound. We ran into some severe I/O performance issues with kernels ~6.0 to < ~6.6 on systems with NVMe storage. This pushed us onto newer mainline kernels, which led us toward Debian. On Debian 12 we could simply install the backport kernel and the performance issues were solved.

How was the transition managed?

Thankfully we manage our server setup nearly completely with code. We also use Test Kitchen with inspec to test this infrastructure code. Tests run locally using Podman or Docker containers, but also run as part of our git code pipeline.

We added Debian as a test target platform and fixed up the infrastructure code until all the tests passed. The changes required were relatively small, simple package name or config filename changes mostly.

What was your timeline of transition?

In August 2024 we moved the www.openstreetmap.org Ruby on Rails servers across to Debian. We haven't yet finished moving everything across to Debian, but we will upgrade the rest when it makes sense. Some systems may wait until the next hardware upgrade cycle.

Our focus is to build a stable and reliable platform for OpenStreetMap mappers.

How has the transition from another Linux distribution to Debian gone?

We are still in the process of fully migrating between Linux distributions, but we can share that we recently moved our frontend servers to Debian 12 (from Ubuntu 22.04) which bumped the Ruby version from 3.0 to 3.1 which allowed us to also upgrade the version of Ruby on Rails that we use for www.openstreetmap.org.

We also changed our chef code for managing the network interfaces from using netplan (default in Ubuntu, made by Canonical) to directly using systemd-networkd to manage the network interfaces, to allow commonality between how we manage the interfaces in Ubuntu and our upcoming Debian systems. Over the years we've standardised our networking setup to use 802.3ad bonded interfaces for redundancy, with VLANs to segment traffic; this setup worked well with systemd-networkd.

We use netboot.xyz for PXE networking booting OS installers for our systems and use IPMI for the out-of-band management. We remotely re-installed a test server to Debian 12, and fixed a few minor issues missed by our chef tests. We were pleasantly surprised how smoothly the migration to Debian went.

In a few limited cases we've used Debian Backports for a few packages where we've absolutely had to have a newer feature. The Debian package maintainers are fantastic.

What definitely helped us is our code is libre/free/open-source, with most of the core OpenStreetMap software like osm2pgsql already in Debian and well packaged.

In some cases we do run pre-release or custom patches of OpenStreetMap software; with Ubuntu we used launchpad.net's Personal Package Archives (PPA) to build and host deb repositories for these custom packages. We were initially perplexed by the myriad of options in Debian (see this list - eeek!), but received some helpful guidance from a Debian contributor and we now manage our own deb repository using aptly. For the moment we're currently building deb packages locally and pushing to aptly; ideally we'd like to replace this with a git driven pipeline for building the custom packages in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us.

Thank you to all the awesome people who make Debian!

We are overjoyed to share this in-use case which demonstrates our commitment to stability, development, and long term support. Debian offers users, companies, and organisations the ability to plan, scope, develop, and maintain at their own pace using a rock solid stable Linux distribution with responsive developers.

Does your organisation use Debian in some capacity? We would love to hear about it and your use of 'The Universal Operating System'. Reach out to us at Press@debian.org - we would be happy to add your organisation to our 'Who's Using Debian?' page and to share your story!

About Debian

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian. Installers and images, such as live systems, offline installers for systems without a network connection, installers for other CPU architectures, or cloud instances, can be found at Getting Debian.

Dear Debian community,

this is Bits from DPL for October. In addition to a summary of my recent activities, I aim to include newsworthy developments within Debian that might be of interest to the broader community. I believe this provides valuable insights and foster a sense of connection across our diverse projects. Also, I welcome your feedback on the format and focus of these Bits, as community input helps shape their value.

Ada Lovelace Day 2024

As outlined in my platform, I'm committed to increasing the diversity of Debian developers. I hope the recent article celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2024–featuring interviews with women in Debian–will serve as an inspiring motivation for more women to join our community.

MiniDebConf Cambridge

This was my first time attending the MiniDebConf in Cambridge, hosted at the ARM building. I thoroughly enjoyed the welcoming atmosphere of both MiniDebCamp and MiniDebConf. It was wonderful to reconnect with people who hadn't made it to the last two DebConfs, and, as always, there was plenty of hacking, insightful discussions, and valuable learning.

If you missed the recent MiniDebConf, there's a great opportunity to attend the next one in Toulouse. It was recently decided to include a MiniDebCamp beforehand as well.

FTPmaster accepts MRs for DAK

At the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge, I discussed potential enhancements for DAK to make life easier for both FTP Team members and developers. For those interested, the document "Hacking on DAK" provides guidance on setting up a local DAK instance and developing patches, which can be submitted as MRs.

As a perfectly random example of such improvements some older MR, "Add commands to accept/reject updates from a policy queue" might give you some inspiration.

At MiniDebConf, we compiled an initial list of features that could benefit both the FTP Team and the developer community. While I had preliminary discussions with the FTP Team about these items, not all ideas had consensus. I aim to open a detailed, public discussion to gather broader feedback and reach a consensus on which features to prioritize.

• Accept+Bug report

Sometimes, packages are rejected not because of DFSG-incompatible licenses but due to other issues that could be resolved within an existing package (as discussed in my DebConf23 BoF, "Chatting with ftpmasters"[1]). During the "Meet the ftpteam" BoF (Log/transcription of the BoF can be found here), for the moment until the MR gets accepted, a new option was proposed for FTP Team members reviewing packages in NEW:

Accept + Bug Report

• Binary name changes - for instance if done to experimental not via new

When binary package names change, currently the package must go through the NEW queue, which can delay the availability of updated libraries. Allowing such packages to bypass the queue could expedite this process. A configuration option to enable this bypass specifically for uploads to experimental may be useful, as it avoids requiring additional technical review for experimental uploads.

Previously, I believed the requirement for binary name changes to pass through NEW was due to a missing feature in DAK, possibly addressable via an MR. However, in discussions with the FTP Team, I learned this is a matter of team policy rather than technical limitation. I haven't found this policy documented, so it may be worth having a community discussion to clarify and reach consensus on how we want to handle binary name changes to get the MR sensibly designed.

• Remove dependency tree

When a developer requests the removal of a package – whether entirely or for specific architectures – RM bugs must be filed for the package itself as well as for each package depending on it. It would be beneficial if the dependency tree could be automatically resolved, allowing either:

a) the DAK removal tooling to remove the entire dependency tree
   after prompting the bug report author for confirmation, or

b) the system to auto-generate corresponding bug reports for all
   packages in the dependency tree.

The latter option might be better suited for implementation in an MR for reportbug. However, given the possibility of large-scale removals (for example, targeting specific architectures), having appropriate tooling for this would be very beneficial.

In my opinion the proposed DAK enhancements aim to support both FTP Team members and uploading developers. I'd be very pleased if these ideas spark constructive discussion and inspire volunteers to start working on them--possibly even preparing to join the FTP Team.

On the topic of ftpmasters: an ongoing discussion with SPI lawyers is currently reviewing the non-US agreement established 22 years ago. Ideally, this review will lead to a streamlined workflow for ftpmasters, removing certain hurdles that were originally put in place due to legal requirements, which were updated in 2021.

Contacting teams

My outreach efforts to Debian teams have slowed somewhat recently. However, I want to emphasize that anyone from a packaging team is more than welcome to reach out to me directly. My outreach emails aren't following any specific orders--just my own somewhat naïve view of Debian, which I'm eager to make more informed.

Recently, I received two very informative responses: one from the Qt/KDE Team, which thoughtfully compiled input from several team members into a shared document. The other was from the Rust Team, where I received three quick, helpful replies–one of which included an invitation to their upcoming team meeting.

Interesting readings on our mailing lists

I consider the following threads on our mailing list some interesting reading and would like to add some comments.

Sensible languages for younger contributors

Though the discussion on debian-devel about programming languages took place in September, I recently caught up with it. I strongly believe Debian must continue evolving to stay relevant for the future.

"Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same." -- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

I encourage constructive discussions on integrating programming languages in our toolchain that support this evolution.

Concerns regarding the "Open Source AI Definition"

A recent thread on the debian-project list discussed the "Open Source AI Definition". This topic will impact Debian in the future, and we need to reach an informed decision. I'd be glad to see more perspectives in the discussions−particularly on finding a sensible consensus, understanding how FTP Team members view their delegated role, and considering whether their delegation might need adjustments for clarity on this issue.

Kind regards Andreas.