[PureOS] Bits from PureOS | Sharks!

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

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.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 659 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-project/attachments/20190728/2b6c2327/attachment.sig>