Matthew Vernon

Fediverse Profile link: https://wikis.world/@demoographics

Matthew has been a Debian developer since 1999, and has maintained a variety of packages since then. They are currently Chair of the Technical Committee.

Professionally, they are a site reliability engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, with a particular focus on distributed storage. They have previously worked in academic and scientific computing. In the distant past, they qualified as a veterinary surgeon, and did postdoctoral work in veterinary epidemiology.

Accepted Talks:

Meet the Technical Committee

An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at DebConf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues.

Automating "downstream" Debian package builds and updates in CI

The Wikimedia Foundation’s infrastructure runs on Debian. We sometimes need to make local changes to packages provided by Debian, or to backport Debian packages from newer releases to run in our production environments. Wherever we’ve done this, we also need to be able to apply updates from Debian, particularly bug-fix updates from stable point releases or security updates.

We’ve developed tooling to do this automatically in our gitlab-based CI environment. This tooling can periodically poll Debian for updates, attempt to merge those updates with local changes, and then build the resulting package and upload it to our staging apt repository. Further, it uses a git-first workflow, which means users do not have to be familiar with complex quilt-based workflows to make changes to Debian packages and have them built in CI.

This talk will explain how this tooling works, and how it has made our lives easier. The tooling is Free Software, so it will also explain how it could be used outside of the Wikimedia environment; if you use Debian packages in your environment and sometimes need to modify or backport what Debian ships, this could be for you!