Mike Gabriel

Lomiri in Debian - Convergence for all Device Form Factors

For Debian, Lomiri is a new operating environment provided in a usable scope of functionalities starting with Debian 13. Some may remember the Ubuntu Touch project initiated by Canonical Ltd. with their initiative to come up with a convergent desktop, or rather… ‘operating’ environment called ‘Unity 8’ that could be used across all device form factors (desktop, tablet, phone).

After Canonical Ltd. discontinued their work on Ubuntu Touch in 2017, the developers at the UBports community (now under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation) took over the upstream maintenance of the complete Ubuntu Touch software ecosystem. Part of this take-over was forking Unity8 as Lomiri.

Over two cycles of Debian (we started before the Debian 12 release), a team of Debian maintainers and Lomiri / Ubuntu Touch upstream developers worked on bringing the complete Lomiri software stack to Debian. With the release of Debian 13 a major milestone of this work will be / has been reached.

In this talk, we will recapitulate the history of the project, look at the challenges of the whole endeavour, get an idea of what a convergent operating environment like Lomiri can do for its users and, last but not least, learn: Ubuntu Touch (i.e. Lomiri upstream) is still alive and a vibrant community these days.

d/copyright - how to get 99% of your uploads to NEW pass the ftp-masters' review

There are probably 1000 ways / strategies of writing and maintaining the debian/copyright (short: d/copyright) file. I want to share my personal approach of doing this which has proven to be quite successful over the past years.

This talk got inspired by feedback from one of the ftp-masters: ‘I don’t get that, why can I accept most (98-99%) of your package uploads to NEW without any complaints or comments?’. The major reason for getting REJECTs when uploading a Debian package to Debian’s NEW queue is due to a flawed or incomplete d/copyright file. Obviously, my uploads don’t show those symptoms.

Whereas the initial upload of a NEW Debian package might still be doable, assuring the correctness of a (large) package’s copyright attributions over various releases of a software possibly over years or decades is a completely different cup of team.

My approach of maintaining d/copyright embraces both: the initial upload and the long-term maintenance, and both with a high degree of accuracy.

During this BoF I demonstrate the d/copyright writing technique on an example package (send me suggestions via mail, if you like).