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Debian Update: Stretch Frozen, Bug-Squashing Parties Planned (phoronix.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Debian-daily-news dept.

"Debian project leader Mehdi Dogguy has written a status update concerning the work going on for the first two months of 2017," reports Phoronix. An anonymous reader quotes their report: So far this year Debian 9.0 Stretch has entered its freeze, bug squashing parties are getting underway for Stretch, the DebConf Committee is now an official team within Debian, a broad Debian Project roadmap is in the early stages of talk, and more.
Bug-Squashing Parties have been scheduled this week in Germany and Brazil, with at least two more happening in May in Paris and Zurich, and for current Debian contributors, "Debian is willing to reimburse up to $100 (or equivalent in your local currency) for your travel and accommodation expenses for participating in Bug Squashing Parties..." writes Dogguy, adding "If there are no Bug Squashing Parties next to your city, can you organize one?"

55 comments

  1. How to find them? by Orphis · · Score: 1

    Is there a central place with all the BSP listed?

    I've had a look at https://wiki.debian.org/BSPPla... and only the upcoming one in Paris is mentioned, not the other one in Zurich or previous ones in Germany or Brazil.

    1. Re:How to find them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why there would be? If you are a part of your local community, you will know. If you are not, why do you think your participation would be helpful instead of a hindrance?

      BSPs are not the correct time and place to welcome new users or developers, regardless of how happy Debian would be to add you to their ranks: they're a crunch effort to get bugs fixed, which sort of requires people with experience with both Debian and the software being fixed, in that order (most bugs are Debian-specific: packaging, interaction with other packages, etc).

    2. Re:How to find them? by Orphis · · Score: 1

      Nice troll there. Don't be a party pooper please.

      They actually say they want to be beginner friendly. Even if you are not a Debian maintainer, you can still participate in QA effort.
      That said, I used to maintain the Debian packaging of a lot of software myself, I don't think that I would be a hindrance in any way.

  2. Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Germany and Brazil, with at least two more happening in May in Paris and Zurich

    That part concerns me. It sounds like to me that they now care more about being PC than producing good software.

    1. Re: Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They care more about politics than good software.

    2. Re: Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      American programmers are a small step above Indians.

    3. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by gweihir · · Score: 0

      Maybe you should ask Trump to do something about it.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by lucm · · Score: 0

      a wuss who sits to pee like a woman

      So you're against gender equality?

      http://dailycaller.com/2012/06...

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    5. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by tmmagee · · Score: 1

      Debian is a decentralized, global, volunteer-run organization. Anyone can organize a BSP. There is no "they" that you can speak of so uniformly. I do imagine however (though I do not know for sure since I am not a Debian developer) that Debian conferences are held outside of the U.S. because of incidents like this.

    6. Re: Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He is already fighting against untalented programmers which helps us.

    7. Re: Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where "a step" is defined as a large step.

    8. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      a wuss who sits to pee like a woman

      ayy kiddo, wait until have your own toilet outside the basement that mum cleans for you.

    9. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Brazilians are little better than walking germ warfare laboratories. I wouldn't want to use any code whipped up by someone whose brain is addled by third stage syphilis.

      We are really better at fucking rednecks mothers asses, with our big Latin cocks. Go suck a big dick you son of a whore.

    10. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really, Debconfs are held *around the world*, and that does include the USA. But yes, way too many people in Debian is just plain not going to subject themselves to the kind of abuse one can get when entering the USA with hardware. Canada is much friendlier.

      And *every* hardware and crypto material used to develop Debian is considered security sensitive, as it would allow someone to attempt to trojan the distro. One could travel without it, but then one would not be able to do much of the work that gets done during a Debconf.

      And it is not just the USA, the UK can also be a nightmare. So far, there were no suggestions of Russia, the middle-east, or other troublesome areas, so I have no idea how the debian developers would react to that... but I doubt there would be that much difference from the reaction to a Debconf in the USA or the UK (i.e. lots of people eager to go, lots of people really not amused and refusing to go).

    11. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The problem is that Americans cannot be trusted. That's really sad and a major step back.

    12. Re: Since America has the best programmers... by gweihir · · Score: 1

      He is? News to me. He seems to be fighting to replace bad foreign programmers with worse domestic ones.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    13. Re:Since America has the best programmers... by fgouget · · Score: 1

      Since America has the best programmers...

      > Germany and Brazil, with at least two more happening in May in Paris and Zurich

      That part concerns me. It sounds like to me that they now care more about being PC than producing good software.

      Wow! It just shows how prejudiced you are. First have a look at the Debian developers world map. Most of them are in Europe so this is the most logical location for Debian conventions.

      Second, America has the best programmers? Really? That's not what HackerRanksays. But more importantly you have to know that most everyone is going to think their country has the best programmers so starting with such a statement speaks a lot about you and discredits the rest of your post.

  3. Does it still work well without systemd? by gweihir · · Score: 1, Informative

    Debian 8 does. As long as that is the case, I do not care who wants to shoot themselves in the foot using that malware.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Informative

      While Stretch still installs that malware by default, it actually works a bit better with a sane init than Jessie. Stretch also has a remarkable lack of regressions when compared to, for example, Wheezy->Jessie, so you can upgrade safely already.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    2. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't weaken your argument with hyperbole. systemd is crapware, not malware.

    3. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, maybe it will. But it will not be thanks to *your* help.

      The sysvinit team in Debian is utterly understaffed, and it has been like that for a *decade*. I have absolutely no pity, or respect whatsoever, for anyone that bitches about systemd, but yet did not provide support for sysvinit with *actual work* in the last 10 years.

    4. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Excellent, thank you for that information.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Well, it is crapware certainly, but I think it also comes with malicious intent. Of course, I cannot demonstrate the second, after all "never attribute to malice, which can be adequately explained by stupidity", and the systemd team has plenty of stupidity and arrogance.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Whenever I find a bug in Debian or the kernel, I report it and try to report a solution as well if I can find one, including source-code patches. I will also run further tests on these on request and test proposed solutions. I would have done that for sysvinit as well, but so far it just worked for me. Is there a list of things in sysvinit that need looking at? It is very stable and non-problematic from my experience.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    7. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by ruir · · Score: 1

      Can you? I would advise googling for Debian 9 and "Unix and Linux"... and much less if you are not already into backports. I also have a lot of posts about changes in Debian 9 there.

    8. Re:Does it still work well without systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yet did not provide support for sysvinit with *actual work* in the last 10 years.

      Maybe there's no need to *actual work* becasue it *actually works*.

      It was replaced on the bizarre notion that shell scripts are bad. That on an OS where the shell is the primary and most powerful interface.
      smh

  4. Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are these actual bugs, or Debian bugs? As in, bugs caused by the Debian team messing around with upstream software just to avoid having to - god forbid - keep their software up to date. There's a "really funny" story about xscreensaver, that you should look up one day... that and the classic openssl fuck up. What fun times those were.

    It's funny. Debian bills itself as a "stable" distro, but I always end up having more trouble with Debian (and derivatives such as Ubuntu or Mint) than with Arch or Gentoo, which are supposedly "unstable" or "bleeding edge" (ooOOHH scary words).

    1. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup. It's the worst Linux distribution despite the hype.

    2. Re:Debian bugs by lucm · · Score: 1

      There's a "really funny" story about xscreensaver, that you should look up one day...

      Thanks to you, I just went down that rabbit hole. I just couldn't stop reading those email and mailing list exchanges. I can imagine how annoying it must be for the guy to get complaints about bugs in his app that he fixed years ago but that Debian maintainers won't include a more recent version. Here's my favorite part:

      Just "being old" is not a bug in itself, so it's not a reason good enough to upgrade, or a reason to ask the user that he/she has to upgrade.

      https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Debian has become one of the most passive-aggressive distros ever. If the people controlling it are completely decentralized volunteers, they have lost their way. If management is more centralized, those people are idiots.

    4. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they murdered the central guy what do you expect

    5. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      As in, bugs caused by the Debian team messing around with upstream software

      For the record:

      The OpenSSL patch was given the OK by the upstream OpenSSL developers at the time and the Debian maintainers trusted that.

      The xscreensaver upstream author inserted a low-grade malware time bomb in his code specifically to create a problem, just to be a dick with a plausibly reasonable complaint. In the ensuing uproar he clearly demonstrated himself to be someone I never want to be on a team with. He simply didn't get that "stability" in the Debian sense means well tested and well understood code, drawbacks and all. If you want the up to date channels use the Testing or Unstable branches and you will get new versions of things. It has been this way for about 20 years now so I guess people just assume others are aware of it. Compare that against the diplomacy and respectful to all parties way that the Debian maintainer eventually resolved the bug.

      Debian bills itself as a "stable" distro, but I always end up having more trouble with Debian

      My experience over most of the life of the distribution does not match yours.

    6. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You realize xscreensaver was up-to-date in the unstable and testing versions of the distro, and that the bug was about the "stable" version of the distro? Also, there is a "backports" version of the distro that could carry up-to-date xscreensaver without issues, but it is "opt-in".

      Also, IME, when a Debian maintainer actually isolates each bug worth the regression risk, and proposes a fix for that bug to the stable branch, it is almost always green-lighted on anything that is not a library. For library, there is a lot more work to be done because the regression risk on any dependencies are much larger.

      However, no Debian maintainer will do it for software where it is very difficult to isolate each and every relevant fix from the rest of them, or for cosmetic reasons. Or when upstream is too annoying to work with. Or when the complexity is too high to deal with, or regression testing is too difficult to do. There are also some Debian Maintainers that are just too overworked or lazy. I don't know what was the deal with xscreensaver, specifically, but the fact that there exists no access to a version control repository for xscreensaver upstream is telling (i.e. you get "source dumps" every new release, without individual changes) -- or at least I could not find one.

      What I do recall from the episode is: there was a lot of communication issues with jwz in the xscreensaver issue, for example nobody in Debian knew he was being annoyed by debian users directly re. "fixed upstream" bugs through the bug report email address added by jwz itself to the program. Otherwise, Debian would have patched it to point to a Debian bug reporting address. Debian users are *already* directed to report bugs against *debian* and not upstream by almost every maintainer, and then bugs are either forwarded upstream, or tagged "fixed upstream"... there are exceptions, but xscreensaver is not one of them.

      Also, the peanut gallery would do well to be reminded that xscreensaver *is considered security sensitive*, and that fact is relevant when triaging what kind of "fix" would be accepted for it in debian stable.

    7. Re:Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So are you, as an user, apparently. I bet the Debian guys are happy they don't have to deal with you... and apparently, so are you.

      So why can't you keep it to yourself?

    8. Re: Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, my experience with debian is: its ok its not the best, most other distros are "based" on it due to licensing (restriction s)

      The thing that I hate the most about debian is dpkg/apt. Its like it hasnt matured in 20 years. Yeah in the late 90-early 2000s you may have had a case that its superior to rpm ecosystem. But there's no way you can do it now, except through nostalgia

    9. Re:Debian bugs by l20502 · · Score: 1

      Gentoo is just a rolling release, you can unmask newer stuff but otherwise it doesn't change much and portage usually does a good job of prevent breakages, unlike Arch.

    10. Re: Debian bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When saying that something is bad it is usually a good idea to mention a better alternative.
      Trolls will typically not do this since it would mean that they can be shot down if they suggest an alternative that is worse.

      It's a bit like people who jump in to say that some music or a movie sucks.
      It is low effort and not helpful at all to just say that something is bad.
      What really helps is suggesting something better but that involves sticking out your neck for something.

    11. Re:Debian bugs by Kid+CUDA · · Score: 0

      There's a "really funny" story about xscreensaver, that you should look up one day...

      Thank you for the very entertaining read. Now I know not use Debian anymore.

      My favorite quote from that discussion:

      I'm personally totally fine with having an 18 months old xscreensaver in Stable. As I am with nearly all other packages. I mean, it's Stable, not bleeding edge.

      Guys, 1999 called, they want their Software Development practices back.

    12. Re:Debian bugs by Kidbro · · Score: 1

      There's a "really funny" story about xscreensaver, that you should look up one day...

      Thank you for the very entertaining read. Now I know not use Debian anymore.

      OK, so you're implying that you're already using Debian, but...

      My favorite quote from that discussion:

      I'm personally totally fine with having an 18 months old xscreensaver in Stable. As I am with nearly all other packages. I mean, it's Stable, not bleeding edge.

      Guys, 1999 called, they want their Software Development practices back.

      ...then you go on to demonstrate that you had absolutely no idea that Debian has a release cycle that averages well over two years.

      Can you explain how this very peculiar situation came to be?

      --
      May we live long and die out
    13. Re:Debian bugs by Raenex · · Score: 1

      Wow, I'm surprised jwz is still around and coding, on xscreensaver of all the stupid things. He's being an ass, though, as thoroughly explained by the Anon.

  5. when you going to fix the net install for jessie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    like seriously I downloaded the net install media from the exact same mirror that I used to tell it where to grab the files, and all I get is an error message and a bunch of forum tards telling me its a DNS error

    so I get the big disk and it works fine from the same damn mirror, I would like to install debian without a bunch of shit I will never use on a fileserver out in my garage

  6. Squashing systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bug squashing party? I hope this means they will squash systemd as this is a release critical bug if you ask me.

    That Poettering turd cannot be removed fast enough from my favorite distro.

  7. Re: Partij Voor de Vrijheid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mijn IQ is groter dan 80, maar toch bedankt.

  8. Systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are they still using systemd?

  9. $100 by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    Perhaps it would be more efficient to pay $100 for a fixed bug?

  10. Re:Nobody by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everybody on the world wide interweb says debian is dead.

  11. Lisbon by ruir · · Score: 2

    If anyone wants to organize a systemd-Squashing party in Lisbon, count me in...

  12. If only the kernel didn't crash by sl3xd · · Score: 1

    It's a shame the kernel they have crashes my machines after about 5 minutes, and I can't get a decent enough log of the kernel message to file a bug...

    --
    -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
  13. Bug squashing by Ocrad · · Score: 1

    I'll believe they are serious about bug squashing when they drop xz from the deb package format.