Andrej Shadura

`pristine-tar` is a magical tool that can regenerate a pristine upstream tarball using only a small binary delta file and a revision control checkout of the upstream branch. Since its creation, it’s become part of the Mercurial- and Git-based workflows of many individual maintainers and teams, as it provides a way to essentially produce Debian source packages using Git-based tooling only, without the need to be able to talk to the archive or a package mirror. Despite its usefulness, `pristine-tar` suffers from [some inherent drawbacks](https://terceiro.xyz/2017/10/09/pristine-tar-updates/). It attempts to reconstruct output of unknown versions of compressors such as gzip, including all of their quirks and weirdness, generating byte-by-byte identical compressed files. This task is very difficult as compressors evolve and their output changes. `pristine-lfs` attempts to be a replacement for `pristine-tar`, while attacking the problem differently. It utilises the Git LFS mechanism to store the tarballs next to the Git repository in the dedicated file storage. Git LFS is supported by GitLab (and hence by Salsa), GitHub and other online Git hosting providers.

This BoF is to discuss the state of pkg-config and pkgconf in Debian, and the proposal to switch from pkg-config to pkgconf: its benefits and downsides, approaches etc. (To be extended)

`pristine-tar` is a magical tool that can regenerate a pristine upstream tarball using only a small binary delta file and a revision control checkout of the upstream branch. Since its creation, it’s become part of the Mercurial- and Git-based workflows of many individual maintainers and teams, as it provides a way to essentially produce Debian source packages using Git-based tooling only, without the need to be able to talk to the archive or a package mirror. Despite its usefulness, `pristine-tar` suffers from [some inherent drawbacks](https://terceiro.xyz/2017/10/09/pristine-tar-updates/). It attempts to reconstruct output of unknown versions of compressors such as gzip, including all of their quirks and weirdness, generating byte-by-byte identical compressed files. This task is very difficult as compressors evolve and their output changes. `pristine-lfs` attempts to be a replacement for `pristine-tar`, while attacking the problem in a different way. It utilises the Git LFS mechanism to store the tarballs next to the Git repository in the dedicated file storage. Git LFS is supported by GitLab (and hence by Salsa), GitHub and other online Git hosting providers.

Apertis, an automotive Debian derivative, has historically relied on a combination of Open Build System and Git to store packages. However, since OBS provides only rudimentary Subversion-like version control, this workflow has been proven to be inefficient, especially when it comes to merging updates from Debian or rebasing to a new release. Apertis is currently underway a migration which will result in all packages stored in Git only with OBS used for builds only. This transition is challenging since the way Debian packages have traditionally been built does not translate well to all-in-Git workflows. Lessons learnt as part of this transition are as beneficial for Apertis as they are for Debian itself and other derivatives. Since this work is currently in progress, but a major part of it is scheduled to be completed before DebConf, the description and the title of the talk are subject to change.

Debian System Images are usually generated by custom scripts around debootstrap. In this talk I shall present a Debian tool (`debos`) that helps creating customized Debian System images for different environments. `debos` has been created having embedded systems in mind. Images are customized via YAML description file, often called `recipe`. `debos` parses `debos recipes` to generate custom Debian images. `debos` is not only suitable for embedded images, but it can be used in other environments such creating VM images, cloud images, … `debos` is core component of several Debian derivatives CI loop. It also does not require sysadmin capabilities.