Debian: Work by Ben Hutchings, Reproducible Builds, and the Debian XMPP Team
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January/February 2023
In January I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and worked 8 hours. In February I was assigned another 8 hours and worked 8 hours.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but didn't upload it. I merged the latest bullseye point release into the linux-5.10 package and uploaded that.
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 238 released
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version
238
. This version includes the following changes:* autopkgtest: fix tool name in the skippable list.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.
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Debian XMPP Team: XMPP What's new in Debian 12 bookworm
On Tue 13 July 2021 there was a blog post of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye). Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm.
A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been enhanced.
Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done, but will try to highlight some of the changes and new features.
BTW, feel free to join the Debian User Support on Jabber at xmpp:debian@conference.debian.org?join.
You can find a list of 58 packages of the Debian XMPP team on the XMPP QA Page.
- Dino, modern XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.2.0 to 0.4.0. The new version supports encrypted calls and group calls and reactions give you a way to respond to a message with an emoji. You can find more information about Dino 0.3.0 and Dino 0.4.0 in the release notes of the upstream project. Dino is using GTK4 / libadwaita which provides widgets for mobile-friendly UIs. Changes has been done on the main view of Dino.
- Gajim, a GTK+-based Jabber client has been upgraded from 1.3.1 to 1.7.1. Since 1.4 Gajim has got a new UI, which supports spaces. 1.5.2 supports a content viewer for PEP nodes. 1.6.0 is using libsoup3 and python 3.10. Audio preview looks a lot nicer with a wave graph visualization and profile images (avatar) are not limited to only JPG anymore. The plugins gajim-appindicatorintegration, gajim-plugininstaller, gajim-syntaxhighlight und gajim-urlimagepreview are obsolete, these features has been moved to gajim. There were a lot of releases in Gajim. You can find the full story at https://gajim.org/post/
- Profanity, the console based XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.10.0 to 0.13.1. Profanity supports XEP-0377 Spam Reporting, and XEP-0157 server contact information discovery. It now marks a window with an attention flag, updated HTTP Upload XEP-0363, and messages can be composed with an external editor. It also features easy quoting, in-band account registration (XEP-0077), Print OMEMO verification QR code, and many more.
- Kaidan, a simple and user-friendly Jabber/XMPP client based on Qt has been updated from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0. The new release supports XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications and XEP-0313: Message Archive Management.
- Poezio, a console-based XMPP client as been updated from 0.13.1 to 0.14. Poezio is now under GPLv3+. The new release supports request for voice and the /join command support using an XMPP URI. More information at https://lab.louiz.org/poezio/poezio/-/raw/v0.14/CHANGELOG.
- [Swift][swift-im], back in Debian is the Swift XMPP client - a cross-platform Client written in C++. In 2015 the client was removed from testing and is back with version 5.0.
Linuxiac:
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Debian 12 Will Include the KDE Plasma 5.27 Desktop Environment
One of the distinctive features of Debian is its conservative approach to including software in its repositories. Unlike other distributions, Debian does not rush to include the latest software versions, instead preferring to thoroughly test and evaluate each new release before adding it to its repos. This approach has several benefits, including enhanced stability, reliability, and security.
On the other hand, however, this has its drawbacks. For example, if you use the distro as a desktop system, the versions of the applications and the desktop environments are not the most up-to-date. For example, the current stable version of Debian 11 relies on GNOME 3.38 and KDE Plasma 5.20. Given that these versions are far from the most up-to-date, it is expected that as a new stable release of the distribution approaches, one of the main topics to be how up-to-date the included software will be.