Posts tagged: debian

Debian firmware GR vote

My #Debian firmware GR vote is 6437215. In order of preference: Amend the Social Contract to allow for non-free firmware in installers. Have a installer w/ non-free firmware next to the fully free one. None of the above Have only a non-free installer OR status quo, the installer w/ non-free…

Kiwix in Debian, 2022 update

Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017. This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for…

Wiki-leak

Today's #MediaWiki security release fixes a pretty bad wiki-leak: https://w.wiki/4ZAeThere's a pretty simple mitigation that can be applied via configuration in LocalSettings.php if you can't patch immediately.Fixes are out for Debian packages, the "official" Docker image, and should land in my Ubuntu PPA for focal/bionic shortly...

Kiwix returns in Debian Bullseye

(This is my belated #newindebianbullseye post.) The latest version of the Debian distro, 11.0 aka Bullseye, was released last week and after a long absence, includes Kiwix! Previously in Debian 10/Buster, we only had the underlying C/C++ libraries available. If you're not familiar with it, Kiwix is an offline content…

Starting a new job

Last week I officially joined the Site Reliability Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'll be working with the Service Operations team, which "...takes care of public and “user-visible” services." I'm glad to be back at the WMF; I had originally started working there in 2013 but recently took a…

libkiwix9 in NEW

Took me a while, but libkiwix9 is now waiting in Debian's NEW queue: https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/libkiwix_9.2.2+dfsg-1.htmlAlso, hopefully going to have another cool announcement in the future, still waiting on a PR to be merged :)

Eliminating PHP polyfills

The Symfony project has recently created a set of pure-PHP polyfills for both PHP extensions and newer language features. It allows developers to add requirements upon those functions or language additions without increasing the system requirements upon end users. For the most part, I think this is a good thing,…