Re: Question to all candidates: how is Debian doing?

On Friday, April 04 2025, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

> On 04/04/25 at 11:35 +0000, Gianfranco Costamagna wrote:
>> >What are the recent successes I might have missed?
>> 
>> Server adoption, market share, reproducibility efforts, gdb symbols handling...
>
> Regarding gdb symbols handling, could you be more specific? I found
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage (no changes since 2019) and
> https://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace (no change since 2021).
> Also, https://wiki.debian.org/Debuginfod sounds nice, but the service is
> run outside Debian (on a .debian.net domain). Was it discussed making it
> part of Debian? As the DPL, what do you pushes people to maintain such
> services outside Debian, and what would you do to improve on that?

On Sunday, April 06 2025, Gianfranco Costamagna wrote:

>>What is wrong with debuginfod.debian.net as explained in that wiki page 
>>referenced above? It's paid with Debian funds and run by a DD. Or are 
>>you implying that it should be run by DSA? In that case, what would be 
>>the reasoning behind that?
>
> Nope, I was unsure about the status of an actual server. Last time I spoke with
> the mentioned DD I remember the support inside gdb was still not upstream,
> and setting up a server was still something not yet done.
> I didn't test it yet, but I'm happy to see it live!
> (also, it would be nice to know why can't we have one single server for both
> Debian and Ubuntu and Fedora and so on). Maybe it is already one :)

Hello,

I really don't understand why I wasn't Cc'ed in this thread.  I wasn't
even mentioned by name.  BTW, thanks to Charles for bringing this
conversation to my attention.

First things first: the debuginfod.debian.net service exists since
February 2021.  I sent an email to debian-devel-announce[1], posted
about it on my blog (which is syndicated on planet.debian.org) a few
times[2], did a few presentations during DebConfs about it[3][4], and
more often than not I talk to people about the service and let them
know.

Yes, I am a Debian Developer, and yes, this service runs on
Debian-sponsored infrastructure.  Right after I put the service online I
reached out to DSA and expressed my desire to run the service on
official infrastructure.  I only received an official reply from the
team a few months ago.  I still have to sit down and follow up on that.

Last year I was planning to implement some major improvements to the
service, but life got in the way.  The most important thing I want to do
is to adjust the service so that it indexes and serves source code as
well, which is truly a life changer when you're debugging something.

I am also the person who set up and maintained Ubuntu's debuginfod
service, and it supports source code indexing for most packages now.
Give it a try if you'd like to know how it feels.

I'm still planning to work on source code indexing for our service this
year.  Hopefully I can have some proof of concept ready to demonstrate
during DebConf.

Please Cc me in subsequent emails, as I'm not actively following
debian-vote.

Thank you,

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2021/02/msg00003.html
[2]: https://blog.sergiodj.net/posts/debuginfod-for-debian/
[3]: https://debconf22.debconf.org/talks/88-debuginfoddebiannet-current-status-and-next-steps/
[4]: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/132-a-plan-to-support-source-code-indexing-on-debuginfoddn/