Devuan and Debian Updates, News, Analysis, Development

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2026,
updated Jan 03, 2026

• Devuan Family

  • Dyne ☛ [devuan-dev] Devuan Excalibur 6.1.0 Point-Release

    Updated isos for Devuan Excalibur 6.1.0 are now available from your favorite mirror.

    [...]

    The next Devuan release 7, is codenamed Freia. Repositories are already available for the adventurous to test.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Devuan 6.1 Point Release Ships With Debian 13.2 Updates

    Kept in sync with Debian 13.2, this point release introduces no major new features and focuses on correctness, stability, and installation reliability. In light of this, all images include up-to-date packages from the Excalibur repositories, ensuring that new installations start from a fully current software baseline without requiring extensive post-install updates.

• Debian Family

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Rewriting Git merge history, part 1

    I remember that when Git was new and hip (around 2005), one of the supposed advantages was that “merging is so great!”. Well, to be honest, the competition at the time (mostly CVS and Subversion) wasn't fantastic, so I guess it was a huge improvement, but it's still… problematic. And this is even more visible when trying to rewrite history.

  • Bisco ☛ Birger Schacht: Status update, December 2025

    December 2025 started off with a nice event, namely a small gathering of Vienna based DDs. Some of us were at DebConf25 in Brest and we thought it might be nice to have a get-together of DDs in Vienna. A couple of months after DebConf25 I picked up the idea, let someone else ping the DDs, booked a table at a local cafe and in the end we were a group of 6 DDs. It was nice to put faces to names, names to nicknames and to hear what people are up to. We are definitely planning to repeat that!

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Debian maintainer criticizes email-managed bug tracker as outdated for modern development — there is a web interface for viewing, but email remains the only way to perform critical functions

    Pakkanen, who maintains Meson packages in Debian, said the project’s Bug Tracking System still requires developers to manage bug states by sending specially formatted emails to control addresses. While Debian provides a web interface for viewing bugs, actions such as closing, reassigning, or adjusting severity are typically performed via email commands rather than through a modern authenticated web UI.

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Jussi Pakkanen: New year, new Pystd epoch, or evolving an API without breaking it

    One of the core design points of Pystd has been that it maintains perfect API and ABI stability while also making it possible to improve the code in arbitrary ways. To see how that can be achieved, let's look at what creating a new "year epoch" looks like. It's quite simple.

  • Dima Kogan ☛ Dima Kogan: Using libpython3 without linking it in; and old Python, g++ compatibility patches

    I just released mrcal 2.5; much more about that in a future post. Here, I'd like to talk about some implementation details.

Update

3 more reports this week(end):

• Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in December 2025

  Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world.

• Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in December 2025

• Joachim Breitner: Seemingly impossible programs in Lean

  In 2007, Martin Escardo wrote a often-read blog post about “Seemingly impossible functional programs”. One such seemingly impossible function is find, which takes a predicate on infinite sequences of bits, and returns an infinite sequence for which that predicate hold (unless the predicate is just always false, in which case it returns some arbitrary sequence).

  Inspired by conversations with and experiments by Massin Guerdi at the dinner of LeaningIn 2025 in Berlin (yes, this blog post has been in my pipeline for far too long), I wanted to play around these concepts in Lean.