February 29th 2020

Free software activities in February 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during February 2020 (previous month):

For the Tails privacy-oriented operating system, I uploaded the following packages to Debian:


Reproducible builds

One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to provide the ability to demonstrate these binaries originated from a particular — trusted — source release: if identical results are generated from a given source in all circumstances, reproducible builds provides the means for multiple third-parties to reach a consensus on whether a build was compromised via distributed checksum validation or some other scheme.

The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom.

Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter.

This month, I:

In our tooling, I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including uploading version 137 to Debian:


Debian

I submitted a Request for Package (RFP) bug for hsd, a blockchain-based top-level domain DNS protocol implementation that underpins Handshake and worked on some initial packaging. (#952472)

Debian LTS

This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project.

You can find out more about the project via the following video:


Uploads

Finally, I made a non-maintainer upload of adminer (4.7.6-1) on behalf of Alexandre Rossi.




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