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Debian’s “secret” sauce

While Debian's "sauce" is not actually all that secret, it is not particularly well-known either, Samuel Henrique said at the start of his DebConf24 talk. There is a lot of software-engineering effort that has been put in place by the distribution in order to create and maintain its releases, but " loads of people are not aware" of it.

He chose to focus on a few of those in his talk, but all of them are freely available; " anybody can just query all of the build logs of Debian packages, identify a pattern of something that's wrong, and provide patches" to fix the problems found. A 2021 test failure for the aeskeyfind utility, which is a forensic tool to find AES keys in memory, silently failed because it was relying on undefined behavior that changed due to a different GCC version. There were a few other tools he briefly mentioned, including one to ensure there are no multi-arch problems and Janitor, which will proactively scan source repositories and send merge requests with suggested improvements.

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