Hello!
If you didn't know - "Amber" is out! It's full name is "The new stable release of PureOS 9.0 Hephaestus codename Amber." Hopefully you didn't notice, although we've recently had a blog post.[0] If you didn't notice it is because the entire process was quite smooth. I firmly believe this stable release will help our customers.
We need release notes for Amber, there have been a couple requests for them. I think that maybe we can do a high-level info page? Or something along the line of a "NEWS" page? Feedback most welcome.
Also, you'll note that I said PureOS 9.0 above but that the actual ISOs say PureOS 8.0. What gives? Well the change will be made shortly as we update the myriad places we have the version number.
Apropos downloads, we have a new mirror page[1] and new mirrors[2] as well as the requisite blog post.[3] We've had discussions about mirrors before but when the topic came up again on Riot there was an urgency that matched the need I think and slow downloads will only get slower as we add devices. I've put in a request to the FSF to add PureOS to their mirror[4] and while they're busy, the response was generally positive.
There has been a bit of pause in forward movement of reproducible builds. This is largely due to the fact that the cron jobs needed updating since 'green' became 'amber' but that has been fixed and I believe we should have some good data to work with. The diffs from diffoscope have been shrinking in size but I worry that not all the software in our amber release, which is based on Buster, is patched to the latest versions needed for a "clean" diffoscope run. I'm also having trouble with diffoscope getting killed now, I'll document that in a bug report on squash and friends.
We also run some tarballs of a minimal PureOS image through diffoscope and the diff is nice and small, but there needs to be some clean-up before that URL is ready.
I'm working on the RYF application for the Librem Key. I've been in communcation with the FSF, hope to hear back soon.
More soon, thanks for reading!
Jeremiah
0. https://puri.sm/posts/pureos-rolls-on-as-stable/ 1. https://tracker.pureos.net/w/installation_guide/mirrors/ 2. https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/ 3. https://puri.sm/posts/mirrors-for-speedier-downloads/ 4. https://mirror.fsf.org/