Hi,
Summer is here on the East Coast of North America and that means
another edition of Bits from PureOS. And no, I wasn't eaten by a shark
last week on Cape Cod, but thanks for asking.
To reiterate, the long-running topics we're responsible for are;
1. Reproducible builds
2. Supporting Pureboot and Purism hardware
3. Continuous delivery of PureOS
4. PureOS store (and application discovery)
To that list I think we ought to add;
5. PureOS Security
6. Additional packages for PureOS
We have already a security mailing list here:
https://lists.puri.sm/listinfo/security We should likely develop a plan
for its use. Other security topics perhaps ought to be discussed
privately and I intend to kick off the topic with stakeholders.
On the reproducible builds front you can follow the thread here;
https://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-project/2019-July/000177.html
What is happening is we're trying to adjust various time stamps that
various tools insert into a given build. Those time stamps vary between
builds (of course, because any two builds occur at different times).
Lamby has patched many of the tools and I'm trying to find the right
context to inform the tools that they're to use the standardised time
stamp.
Discussion with various folks has led us to cease maintaining
PureBrowser. The reasons are pretty simple; we are investing in the
GNOME ecosystem and GNOME web runs as a flatpak bringing in a bit of
isolation to the browser which adds an additional layer of security. I
think that we should make an announcement about this going forward in
various places since there is often much discussion on browsers in our
forums.
Upcoming discussions on how to seed a build of PureOS for the L5 should
be interesting, I plan to send out an invitation for discussing this in
the next day or so. More info to come.
Lastly, getting apps into PureOS needs to be better documented. I'm
doing some packaging but am struggling with getting pbuilder to play
nicely with my requests to pull in older versions of software. If we
had clear instructions on how to build a PureOS image for pbuilder that
would help me immensely. I'll reach out to folks regarding this since
I'm certain that the knowledge needed is available. Also, uploads to
Laniakea of certain packages are failing occasionally, something Guido
has pointed out. We ought to speak with him to determine what the
issues are and to smooth out the upload process.
As always, feedback most welcome.
Hello!
It appears as if Amber is on it's way. What is Amber? Amber is the code
name for the new stable version of PureOS. As one can see from the
PureOS changes mailing list, Matthias has added Amber to debootstrap;
https://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-changes/2019-August/000414.html
I look forward to testing it on my Librem 15. I've already tested it a bit in a Docker container (see deets in pureos-dev chat on matrix.)
Speaking of the PureOS changes mailing list, there is now a bridge from
Laniakea to Matrix. Ask Matthias or myself for an invite.
In discussing the new Buster based version of Amber internally, I note
that there continues to be interest in having Green be the stable
version of PureOS. I worry that if we don't use Green, lots of users
who would benefit from stability will get a huge update once we move
back to a rolling release. Right now, using a Docker image of an
updated Green, I note there are 114[0] packages waiting to be updated
if I switch over to Debian Testing, and that is just for a minimal
image. I imagine those who have a lot more packages installed will see
a lot more updates. This might get messy quickly.
Fortunately I beleive that Matthias and I have a plan that will work
and be minimaly invasive to users. The plan is to _append_ the various
Amber suites to /etc/apt/sources.list and have users update that way.
There are some new Docker images for 'green' and 'landing' available
here: https://cloud.docker.com/u/pureos/repository/docker/pureos/green
I plan to create one for Amber and Purple as well. I'm automating the
process to build these images since updated images will likely get
consumed in other parts of our CI/CD.
Lots of testing coming up to ensure Amber is easy to update to.
Feedback most welcome.
Cheers,
Jeremiah
[0.] See attached list of upated package to minimal PureOS image
Hi,
Welcome to another bits from PureOS email. Your irregular email for all
things PureOS! Or maybe for _some_ things PureOS. Okay, mostly just
what I've been doing and noticed happening.
Firstly, I can't make GUADEC despite the fact that my talk has been
approved and I'd really like to go. I just cannot find child care for
my daughter. I would bring her but she starts school on the 28th and
that's the day that there is flatpak hacking, including work on a
store. *sigh*
Secondly, I'd like to point out that our intrepid dak hacker (dacker?)
Matthias has already begun work on a new stable distro called "amber".
This is going to be pretty exciting stuff I think, at least I'm excited
to offer a more stable distro to users who're asking for a more stable
distro;
https://forums.puri.sm/t/would-you-use-a-pureos-rolling-release-or-do-you-w…
Thirdly, I've uploaded a couple packages (and am working on a couple
more.) See
https://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-changes/2019-August/thread.html
for details but what's happened is I've made some tiny config changes to Gnupg to support the made-in-America Librem Key and pushed a new version of flashrom into PureOS.
I'm trying to upload Lollypop but having some problems getting the orig
taball uploaded, not sure what triggers that even though its in my
.changes file. Hopefully the dak gods will assist.
- There's a meeting being planned for next week to talk about the
design of software.pureos.net
- The download ISO of pureos.net/download has finally been updated to
the image that Matthias created in July
- Lots of meetings this week including a infrastructure meeting which
will hopefully lay the ground work for bringing the work done on L5
into purple.
- We have a patch upstream in Gnupg to add the Librem Key into Debian,
as soon as that package is live we'll no longer need the Gnupg package
I uploaded
That's it for this bits email, as always, feedback welcome.