- PureOS-project - Purism Mailing Lists

Bits from PureOS
by Jeremiah C. Foster 12 Jul '19

12 Jul '19

Hi! There's been some discussion amongst various folks that our communication culture can be suboptimal at times. I thought I would try and encourage greater use of our mailing list to compliment our chat channel and this irregular (but hopefully frequent) email is a collection of "bits" in the spirit of a Debian's "Bits from . . . " In PureOS we have a number of current topics which I'll enumerate here; 1. Reproducible builds 2. Supporting Pureboot and Purism hardware 3. Continuous delivery of PureOS 4. PureOS store (and application discovery) These are high level topics which are organized in no particular priority. I thought that I'd try to have updates in each of these areas and to tie in the work being done in other parts of Purism that may have an impact on those topics expanding the topic list where necessary. In regard to reproducible builds, Chris Lamb and I have been meeting regularly to discuss PureOS builds and their reproducibility. We've managed to create a automated scan of PureOS builds via diffoscope; http://45.33.86.90/pureos-8.0-images.html That page is created automatically each day from two builds done on that host. I believe that we'll be able to say that the PureOS ISO is reproducible when the builds are byte-for-byte identical. We hold some documentation here; https://tracker.pureos.net/w/development/reproducible_isos/ The next topic I'd like to talk about is the delta between PureOS and Debian. I mention this because I feel it fits into the Continuous Delivery topic above and is something that I've been talking to Matthias and Gunther about, albeit breifly. The reason to understand the delta between PureOS and Debian is to be able to calculate roughly the effort needed to move our currently Phone OS from Debian to PureOS. Hopefully being able to specify what is different between the two distros will enable us to create a PureOS image that matches the versions and/or the functionality of the work being done in the L5 team. I'll send a separate email regarding this topic as it is important and we may need to gather a number of people to participate. Work is ongoing on the PureOS Store. Rodolfo has been working recently on adaptive design and it looks good. More work to be done of course. I'm working on getting a round trip for Animatch and other flatpaks, like Lollypop. At this stage I'm looking to export the built flatpak to the server and see if I can't use the "install" button to install it on the devkit. More updates soon. We may have an additional colleague if the org chart is any indication, I think that will be a welcome addition. I'll let everyone know more as soon as I know more. Well, just a medium length email this time, if they get too long they tend to get a bit boring. There's still lots to write about but hopefullly another "Bits from PureOS" will be coming soon to an inbox near you. Cheers, Jeremiah

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[Fwd: Suite name for security updates changing with Debian 11 "bullseye"]
by Jeremiah C. Foster 11 Jul '19

11 Jul '19

Speaking of suite name changes . . .

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Re: [PureOS] "PureOS changes" notifications
by Chris Lamb 11 Jul '19

11 Jul '19

Matthias Klumpp wrote: > I didn't actually understand your mails as "I want Git notifications" > but rather as "I want notifications on archive uploads and other > archive actions", so I never actually directly asked our sysadmins for > the former. (Sure. The [sysadmin] ticket I filed has this and other details in so I felt no need to duplicate its contents here.) Best wishes, -- Chris Lamb https://puri.sm

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Fresh+Stable Debian, Upstream
by Tobias Bernard 09 Jul '19

09 Jul '19

Hi all, As part of the discussions around the need for more stability in PureOS to support enterprise use cases we agreed a few months ago that ideally what we'd want is an OS that comes with a recent user-facing stack *and* a reasonable degree of stability. Currently with Debian we only have 2 choices: Follow stable and get a new user-facing platform stack every 3 years or follow testing and get it every day. Unfortunately, neither of these makes sense for consumer desktop use. Testing is too unstable, and stable is almost always way behind the current GNOME platform. We can't afford to be too far behind, because ecosystem-wide changes (e.g. the app menu migration, the new icon style, etc.) affect third party applications regardless of what version of the platform we ship. This goes for both desktop and phone. What would like is something like a yearly cycle, in sync with at least every other upstream GNOME release, similar to other consumer-facing OSes. I had a discussion with Jonas the other week, and an interesting idea we came upon about was trying to change the options we have from the Debian side, from within upstream. Debian currently doesn't have a great branch for desktop use, so commonly people run Debian testing for that, but everyone agrees that this is not ideal. It would be interesting to explore if there's enough interest in the Debian community to try and establish an additional branch between stable and testing, which matches people's expectations for a desktop system in terms of stability/freshness. Seeing as we work upstream as much as possible, it seems to me that the "Purism Way" to solve this problem would be to work with other interested parties upstream to find a solution that will be beneficial for all Debian desktop users, and of course require less maintenance for us in the long run. I know this is a complicated issue that has been discussed already in various forms in various places but we still need a solution, so here we go again :) Cheers, Tobias

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Re: [PureOS] "PureOS changes" notifications
by Chris Lamb 04 Jul '19

04 Jul '19

Dear Matthias, > > Whilst the social-ish (Purism) IRC channels are helpful to some > > degree, I'm starting to feel somewhat isolated with my work on PureOS. > > Me too, a bit - we might just need more communication in general on > what we are working on, like this particular mail thread :-) I'm generally not one to send "me too" or "+1" emails, but I will get over my usual reticence that here to underline that this would be great. How can I help? Best wishes, -- Chris Lamb https://puri.sm

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Re: [PureOS] PureOS | Debian delta
by Matthias Klumpp 04 Jul '19

04 Jul '19

Am Mi., 3. Juli 2019 um 16:47 Uhr schrieb Chris Lamb <chris.lamb(a)puri.sm>: > [...] > These patches should canonically be in the source.puri.sm repositories: > > https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages > > For example, here is a patch of mine to Gimp: > > https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages/gimp/blob/10711bb1ccbf9be950445a6a6b… > > > […] as well as the fact that we do not have a non-free repo. > > These parts of "negative space" are less obvious. Whilst you mention > the absense of the non-free repository we also have removed other > specific packages from "main". I am unsure how to canonically generate > such a list from our archive software, but it is likely possible with > some grep-dctrl foo and a quick refresher on set theory. Or by looking at the list of intentionally not-synced packages: https://master.pureos.net/synchrotron/blacklist > In addition, there is the delta in unmodified packages that we have > migrated from unstable, which additionally add to the delta from > Debian buster. This could be a refinement othe programming task > outlined in my previous paragraph if one was inclined to locate the > exact answer. > > > Knowing the delta would help us to understand how to move the work > > being done on the L5 phone into our CD system for example > > Can you elaborate on this, just out of interest? In particular, what > is specific about the CD system that I am perhaps missing? I would also be interested in that answer! Additionally to all the delta opportunities mentioned by Chris, there is also a "built-in" difference by compiling packages differently on PureOS compared to Debian. That is for example the case for gnome-software and grub which compile with different settings depending on the OS they are built on. So, finding the complete delta is a bit tricky, but definitely possible. Cheers, Matthias

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PureOS | Debian delta
by Jeremiah C. Foster 03 Jul '19

03 Jul '19

Hi, What is the PureOS < > Debian delta? I assume that it is a set of patches that we apply to packages, like the work Jonas does on Firefox ESR, as well as the fact that we do not have a non-free repo. Knowing the delta would help us to understand how to move the work being done on the L5 phone into our CD system for example. Just documenting it would be a big help. Where can I find this information? Cheers, Jeremiah

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"PureOS changes" notifications
by Chris Lamb 14 Jun '19

14 Jun '19

Hi -project, Many years ago I created an IRC bot for Debian that would live on its own channel and simply notify on new uploads, bugs and similar changes in that distribution: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/projects/debian-devel-changes-bot … it is now rather popular and, indeed, many people have noted to me in the interim years not only how motivating it was to be exposed to others' work like that without having to explicitly or actively look for it but it informs & keeps them up-to-date on the project in a wider, less-technical, sense. I found it also a valuable learning tool — if I don't understand a bug report that scrolls past I sometimes click it and invariably end up learning something I didn't previously know. § In this light, I created the following ticket early last year to get this rolling for PureOS: https://tracker.pureos.net/T375 … however, movement on this appears to have stalled or otherwise is lower on others' priority lists than I believe it should be. The basic idea would be to have a separate "dev/pureos/changes" (or similarly named) Matrix room that would have this info spammed into it. Discussions would remain on dev/pureos or, of course, on issue tracker, etc. The bug itself unfortunately is a little ambiguous about what we would like to include in the notifications (tracker bugs vs uploads vs Git commits...), but I firmly and adamently believe that getting *anything* at the moment would be great start so I wasn't being overly specific by design. (The task is also being tracked in parallel on the sysadmin tasks tracker too, adding somewhat to the confusion.) Note that this would also help relieve some developers of feeling like they are the only ones who know about certain areas, preventing further potential "siloing" of knowledge. Just to underline, whilst it might appear to be a "wishlist" feature, I believe it will provide some always-needeed social cohesion and connection within the PureOS development team! As geeks we often criminally underrated such things.. we are humans too! Any thoughts? In particular, can we get some strong +1's from you all (especially Jeremiah) to take back to the ticket and hopefully parley that into getting this reprioritised? Best wishes, -- Chris Lamb https://puri.sm

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Updates to tracker.pureos.net
by Jeremiah C. Foster 25 May '19

25 May '19

Hello, Today (Friday May 24th) there has been an update to the machine that runs our Phabricator instance. It has had the OS updated to Stretch (Debian 9.9). There also has been the installation of service files to start phabricator on boot. I think it might be nice to update phabricator as well the version running now is kinda old: https://tracker.pureos.net/config/version/ I'm happy to upgrade phabricator if it's simply a case of 'git pull' and then launching the apps but perhaps Matthias you know of a right way to do this? Cheers, Jeremiah

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Certificate renewal and tracker.pureos.net going offline this weekend
by Jeremiah C. Foster 21 May '19

21 May '19

Hi, There are some expired certs and some general DNS cruft that admins are going to be addressing in the coming week on the tracker.pureos.net site. I mention this just as a heads-up. I hope to come back with more info once it is firmed up. Regards, Jeremiah

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