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Debian Update: Stretch Frozen, Bug-Squashing Parties Planned (phoronix.com)
"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?"
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps it would be more efficient to pay $100 for a fixed bug?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anyone wants to organize a systemd-Squashing party in Lisbon, count me in...
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.
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
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.
I'll believe they are serious about bug squashing when they drop xz from the deb package format.
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.