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Debian and Events: LTS, Arduino, GSoC, DebConf and Texas Linux Fest 2019

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Debian
  • Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, May 2019

    I was assigned 18 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and worked all those hours this month.

    I released Linux 3.16.66, and then prepared and released Linux 3.16.67 with a small number of fixes. I backported the updated Linux 4.9 packages from Debian 9.9, uploaded them and issued DLA-1771.

    I had a little advance notice of the MDS speculative execution flaws, and started backporting the mitigations for these to older stable branches, starting with a version for Linux 4.14. I backported to 4.9 (Debian stretch/jessie) first, then to 4.4 (CIP) and 3.16 (Debian jessie). The charge for this time was accordingly split between CIP and Freexian.

  • The space rover coquine, or how I ended up on the dark side of the moon

    Once the robot arrived, we needed to track down batteries and figure out how to build custom firmware for it with the appropriate wifi settings. I asked a friend if I could get two 18650 batteries from his pile of Tesla batteries (he had then from the wrack of a crashed Tesla), so now the rover is running on Tesla batteries.

    Building the rover firmware proved a bit harder, as the code did not work out of the box with the Arduino IDE package in Debian Buster. I suspect this is due to a unsolved license problem with arduino blocking Debian from upgrading to the latest version. In the end we gave up debugging why the IDE failed to find the required libraries, and ended up using the Arduino Makefile from the arduino-mk Debian package instead. Unfortunately the camera library is missing from the Arduino environment in Debian, so we disabled the camera support for the first firmware build, to get something up and running. With this reduced firmware, the robot could be controlled via the controller server, driving around and measuring distance using its internal acoustic sensor.

  • GSoC Project Overview & Week 1

    Here’s a quick rundown on my project for this summer:

    The Debian Patch Porting System aims to systematize and partially automate the security patch porting process.

    The number of security vulnerability identifiers is quite large- these are relevant to specific distributions, organizations and applications. Each organization handles security vulnerabilities that are relevant to them in their own way. MITRE’s vulnerability identifier called Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is global, and most advisories are somehow related to a CVE.

    The purpose of the system is to unify all these algorithmically for easy patch finding, management and application. The system would be able to take any vulnerability as input and extract patches w/r/t that vulnerability. Patches can be collected by employing certain patch finding methods. Some of these methods are to crawl sites, trackers, and various distributions’ respositories. Along with that, general purpose information about that vulnerability and its equivalent identifiers for other organizations could also be collected to get the vulnerability’s complete profile. This profile could then be stored in a NoSQL database.

    Following this, the system would then test whether the patches are applicable for the upstream source that they are for. Patching heuristics can be employed to test the patch’s applicability in the source package. Some of these heuristics are fuzzing, patching w/r/t offsets, etc.

    The nature of the system is to be generic enough so that it can fit in with Debian (maybe allow use with the Debian Security Tracker), or act independently as well.

  • Utkarsh Gupta: Becoming a Debian Maintainer in 90 days!

    I started contributing to open source around an year back and on 1st January 2019 to Debian, specifically (wasn’t really a new year resolution, though Tongue).

    I’ll be honest here. The reason behind taking the “Debian road” was solely to distract myself from the mental abuse I was going through.

    [...]

    Since I wanted to distract myself from various stuff, I learnt things quickly and kept working, consistently.
    I turned up on IRC every single day since then. Praveen became both, my guru and my package sponsorer. He kept uploading and I kept packaging. This went on for a month until my dificulty level was bumped. From basic Ruby gems and Node libraries, I was given gems and modules that had a test failures to debug and had a weirdly different build system. This made me uncomfortable. I complained. To which, Praveen said and I quote,
    "If you want to keep working on a simple stuff, then it's not gonna help you move forward. And it's your loss. No one else would care. So it's your call."

    There was probably no option there, was it? Tongue
    I took it on. Struggled for a few days but it became normal and I made it through. Like they say, “It gets better :)”, it did!
    I took a little more challenging stuff, understood more concepts. Fixed test failures, RC bugs and learned a lot of stuff (still a lot, lot more to learn, though) in the process, like understanding about the Debian release cycle, how the migration of package takes place, setting up your own repositories, et al.

    In this process, I also met another JS guru, Xavier. He did not only corrected my mistakes and sponsored my packages, but also helped me in actually understanding a lot of things. From the mailing list, we started conversing over private mail threads and soon, in a span of 3 months, the thread stretched over to 300 mails!

    In the early March, I was told that I could apply for the position of the Debian Maintainer, if only I understood the process of when to upload a package to experimental and when to unstable. I was given a few packages as a test by Praveen for the same.
    And luckily, I passed. This meant that the only part remaining was to fulfil the initial keysigning requirement. For which, there was a Mini DebConf, Delhi around the corner.

    As it happened, Praveen, Abhijith, and Sruthi came to the Mini DebConf from Kerala and I got my keys signed by them! Big Grin
    Soon after, I applied for becoming a DM.

    [...]

    Lastly, thanks to the Debian community. Debian has really been an amazing journey, an amazing place, and an amazing family. I am just hoping to make it to DebConf and meet all the people I adore \o/

  • mini-DebConf Marseille 2019

    I was in Marseille last week for the mini-DebConf the fine folks at Debian France organised and it was great! It was my first time there and I really enjoyed the city.

    The venue was lovely and perfectly adapted to the size of the conference. The main auditorium was joy to work in: blinds on the windows to minimize the sun glare, a complete set of stage lighting and plenty of space to set up our gear.

    If you couldn't attend the conference, you can always watch the talks on our video archive.

    The highlight of my trip was the daytrip to the nearby Frioul archipelago. Although we repeatedly got attacked by angry seagulls (they were protecting their chicks), the view from the south shore of the Pomègues Island was amazing. It was also the first time I went on a daytrip during a mini-DebConf and I think it should happen more often!

  • Texas Linux Fest 2019 Recap

    Another Texas Linux Fest has come and gone! The 2019 Texas Linux Fest was held in Irving at the Irving Convention Center. It was a great venue surrounded by lots of shops and restaurants.

    If you haven’t attended one of these events before, you really should! Attendees have varying levels of experience with Linux and the conference organizers (volunteers) work really hard to ensure everyone feels included.

    The event usually falls on a Friday and Saturday. Fridays consist of longer, deeper dive talks on various topics – technical and non-technical. Saturdays are more of a typical conference format with a keynote in the morning and 45-minute talks through the day. Saturday nights have lightning talks as well as “Birds of a Feather” events for people with similar interests.

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