Debian: The Latest From Debian Developers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 09, 2024

• Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in August 2024

  FTP master

  This month I accepted 441 and rejected 15 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 442.

  I am ashamed of some occurrences that happened this month and I apologize for this. Unfortunately I have no idea how to prevent this in the future without becoming a solo entertainer.

• Why I should be running Debian unstable right now

  So a common theme on the Internet about Debian is so old. And right, I am getting close to the stage that I feel a little laggy: I am using a bunch of backports for packages I need, and I'm missing a bunch of other packages that just landed in unstable and didn't make it to backports for various reasons.

  I disagree that "old" is a bad thing: we definitely run Debian stable on a fleet of about 100 servers and can barely keep up, I would make it older. And "old" is a good thing: (port) wine and (any) beer needs time to age properly, and so do humans, although some humans never seem to grow old enough to find wisdom.

  But at this point, on my laptop, I am feeling like I'm missing out. This page, therefore, is an evolving document that is a twist on the classic NewIn game. Last time I played seems to be #newinwheezy (2013!), so really, I'm due for an update. (To be fair to myself, I do keep tabs on upgrades quite well at home and work, which do have their share of "new in", just after the fact.)

  [...]

  Previously, I was running Debian testing (which why the slug on that article is why-trixie), but now I'm actually considering just running unstable on my laptop directly anyways. It's been a long time since we had any significant instability there, and I can typically deal with whatever happens, except maybe when I'm traveling, and then it's easy to prepare for that (just pin testing).

• NBD: Write Zeroes and Rotational

  The NBD protocol has grown a number of new features over the years. Unfortunately, some of those features are not (yet?) supported by the Linux kernel.

  I suggested a few times over the years that the maintainer of the NBD driver in the kernel, Josef Bacik, take a look at these features, but he hasn't done so; presumably he has other priorities. As with anything in the open source world, if you want it done you must do it yourself.

  I'd been off and on considering to work on the kernel driver so that I could implement these new features, but I never really got anywhere.

• Playing with fonts again

  This time I seem to be settling on either Commit Mono or Space Mono. For now I'm using Commit Mono because it's a little more compressed than Fira and does have a italic version. I don't like how Space Mono's parenthesis (()) is "squarish", it feels visually ambiguous with the square brackets ([]), a big no-no for my primary use case (code).

  So here I am using a new font, again. It required changing a bunch of configuration files in my home directory (which is in a private repository, sorry) and Emacs configuration (thankfully that's public!).