[PureOS] Bits from PureOS

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

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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