Hi,
Summer is here on the East Coast of North America and that means another edition of Bits from PureOS. And no, I wasn't eaten by a shark last week on Cape Cod, but thanks for asking.
To reiterate, the long-running topics we're responsible for are;
1. Reproducible builds 2. Supporting Pureboot and Purism hardware 3. Continuous delivery of PureOS 4. PureOS store (and application discovery)
To that list I think we ought to add;
5. PureOS Security 6. Additional packages for PureOS
We have already a security mailing list here: https://lists.puri.sm/listinfo/security We should likely develop a plan for its use. Other security topics perhaps ought to be discussed privately and I intend to kick off the topic with stakeholders.
On the reproducible builds front you can follow the thread here; https://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-project/2019-July/000177.html What is happening is we're trying to adjust various time stamps that various tools insert into a given build. Those time stamps vary between builds (of course, because any two builds occur at different times). Lamby has patched many of the tools and I'm trying to find the right context to inform the tools that they're to use the standardised time stamp.
Discussion with various folks has led us to cease maintaining PureBrowser. The reasons are pretty simple; we are investing in the GNOME ecosystem and GNOME web runs as a flatpak bringing in a bit of isolation to the browser which adds an additional layer of security. I think that we should make an announcement about this going forward in various places since there is often much discussion on browsers in our forums.
Upcoming discussions on how to seed a build of PureOS for the L5 should be interesting, I plan to send out an invitation for discussing this in the next day or so. More info to come.
Lastly, getting apps into PureOS needs to be better documented. I'm doing some packaging but am struggling with getting pbuilder to play nicely with my requests to pull in older versions of software. If we had clear instructions on how to build a PureOS image for pbuilder that would help me immensely. I'll reach out to folks regarding this since I'm certain that the knowledge needed is available. Also, uploads to Laniakea of certain packages are failing occasionally, something Guido has pointed out. We ought to speak with him to determine what the issues are and to smooth out the upload process.
As always, feedback most welcome.