Debian's "secret" sauce

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2024-10-25 02:00:08

While Debian's "sauce" is not actually all that secret, it is not particularly well-known either, Samuel Henrique said at the start of his DebConf24 talk. There is a lot of software-engineering effort that has been put in place by the distribution in order to create and maintain its releases, but "loads of people are not aware" of it. That may be due to the fact that all of that is not really documented anywhere in a central location that he can just point someone to. Recognizing that is what led him to give the talk; hopefully it will be a "first step toward" helping solve the problem.

Henrique said that he is a Brazilian and has been a Debian Developer since 2018. He mostly works in the security tools packaging team, but also maintains some packages outside of that team, including curl and rsync. In addition, he mentors Debian newcomers, mostly on packaging tasks. He works on the Amazon Linux security team. He noted that his web site contains links to the slides from the talk; a WebM video is also available. [Update: A YouTube video with subtitles in English and Portuguese is also available.]

A distribution is a project set up to distribute software; it can choose defaults or tweak how a software package behaves to make it easier to use, for example, as part of that work. But it is important not to ship bugs or other issues, including security problems, in those packages. Some distributions try to stay as close as possible to the upstream code, but "in Debian, we like to improve things" by "applying our own judgment" to the code.