Improving .deb and Debian Social Status
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Improving .deb
Debian Linux and its family of derivatives (such as Ubuntu) are partly characterized by their use of .deb as the packaging format. Packages in this format are produced not only by the distributions themselves, but also by independent software vendors. The last major change of the format internals happened back in 1995. However, a discussion of possible changes has been brought up recently on the debian-devel mailing list by Adam Borowski.
As documented in the deb(5) manual page, modern Debian packages are ar archives containing three members in a particular order. The first file is named debian-binary and has the format version number, currently "2.0", as one line of text. The second archive member is control.tar.xz, containing the package metadata files and scripts that are executed before and after package installation or removal. Then comes the data.tar.xz file, the archive with the actual files installed by the package. For both the control and data archives, gzip, not xz, was used for compression historically and is still a valid option. The Debian tool for dealing with package files, dpkg, has gained support for other decompressors over time. At present, xz is the most popular one both for Debian and Ubuntu.
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Bits from the Debian Anti-harassment team
Bits from Debian AH (June 2019) Welcome to another edition of Bits from the Debian Anti-harassment team. 2019 started on a busy note for the team, but settled down over February and March. We had several incidents reported, and have been following discussions. Details below. * Added a new member (thanks Sledge!); * Follow up around community discussions; * Followed discussions on mailing lists and responded officially to several messages, but generally took no action; * Responded to one incident of inappropriate language; * Received several reports we have not yet closed; * Worked with several community members to help them proactively be more inclusive in their communications; * Handled one ongoing discussion around behavior of an individual; and We'd like to thank everyone who reported an incident, and especially thank those with whom we spoke, who have taken positive actions for the future. On the other hand, we can also report on work done on the team itself. * We have discussed, but did not settle, on a new name for our team. * There is going to be a sprint between AH, DAM, and the DPL later this month. This will hopefully help these three groups work together better and better define responsibilities. * We have been testing a web-based system to handle reports is a more structured and streamlined way. * After our last call for volunteers, we got a few submissions, and following a training period we now welcome Steve McIntyre to the team! * Laura Arjona Reina stepped down from the team, after years of hard work and dedication. Thank you Laura! We'd also like to let the community know a bit about how the team works. We meet every two weeks on IRC and discuss issues that have been sent in to us. Because of the nature of our work, these meetings are private. Also, because of the sensitive nature of issues we handle, we prefer to get consensus within the team for responses before sending them. That means in most cases, unless an issue is urgent, it will take until the next meeting for us to be able to respond to an issue.
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Debian's Anti-Harassment Team Continues Battling Community Issues In 2019
The team meanwhile has been working on alternative names to the "Debian Anti-Harassment Team", they are doing a sprint this month, they are testing a new web-based system for reporting harassment issues, and they have a few new submissions for volunteers to join their team.
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