fidzu : debian

I miss the US more and more, and have recently been trying to perfect Southern Biscuits using British ingredients. It took me eight or nine tries before I was consistently getting good results. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients

• 190g plain flour
• 60g strong white bread flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp cream of tartar (optional)
• 1 tsp salt
• 100g unsalted butter
• 180ml buttermilk, chilled
  • If your buttermilk is thicker than the consistency of ordinary milk, you'll need around 200ml.
• extra buttermilk for brushing

Method

1. Slice and then chill the butter in the freezer for at least fifteen minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 220°C with the fan turned off.
3. Twice sieve together the flours, leaveners and salt. Some salt may not go through the sieve; just tip it back into the bowl.
4. Cut cold butter slices into the flour with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs: some small lumps of fat remaining is desirable. In particular, the fine crumbs you are looking for when making British scones are not wanted here. Rubbing in with fingertips just won't do; biscuits demand keeping things cold even more than shortcrust pastry does.
5. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk, and stir with a metal spoon until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Avoid overmixing, but I've found that so long as the ingredients are cold, you don't have to be too gentle at this stage and can make sure all the crumbs are mixed in.
6. Flour your hands, turn dough onto a floured work surface, and pat together into a rectangle. Some suggest dusting the top of the dough with flour, too, here.
7. Fold the dough in half, then gather any crumbs and pat it back into the same shape. Turn ninety degrees and do the same again, until you have completed a total of eight folds, two in each cardinal direction. The dough should now be a little springy.
8. Roll to about ½ inch thick.
9. Cut out biscuits. If using a round cutter, do not twist it, as that seals the edges of the biscuits and so spoils the layering.
10. Transfer to a baking sheet, placed close together (helps them rise). Flour your thumb and use it to press an indent into the top of each biscuit (helps them rise straight), brush with buttermilk.
11. Bake until flaky and golden brown: about fifteen minutes.

Gravy

It turns out that the "pepper gravy" that one commonly has with biscuits is just a white/béchamel sauce made with lots of black pepper. I haven't got a recipe I really like for this yet. Better is a "sausage gravy"; again this has a white sauce as its base, I believe. I have a vegetarian recipe for this to try at some point.

Variations

• These biscuits do come out fluffy but not so flaky. For that you can try using lard instead of butter, if you're not vegetarian (vegetable shortening is hard to find here).
• If you don't have a pastry blender and don't want to buy one you can try not slicing the butter and instead coarsely grating it into the flour out of the freezer.
• An alternative to folding is cutting and piling the layers.
• You can try rolling out to 1-1½ inches thick.
• Instead of cutting out biscuits you can just slice the whole piece of dough into equal pieces. An advantage of this is that you don't have to re-roll, which latter also spoils the layering.
• Instead of brushing with buttermilk, you can take them out after they've started to rise but before they've browned, brush them with melted butter and put them back in.

Notes

• I've had more success with Dale Farm's buttermilk than Sainsbury's own. The former is much runnier.
• Southern culture calls for biscuits to be made the size of cat's heads.
• Bleached flour is apparently usual in the South, but is illegal(!) here. Apparently bleaching can have some effect on the development of the gluten which would affect the texture.

• British plain flour is made from soft wheat and has a lower percentage of protein/gluten, while American all-purpose flour is often(?) made from harder wheat and has more protein. In this recipe I mix plain and strong white flour, in a ratio of 3:1, to emulate American all-purpose flour.

  I am not sure why this works best. In the South they have soft wheats too, and lower protein percentages. The famous White Lily flour is 9%. (Apparently you can mix US cake flour and US all-purpose flour in a ratio of 1:1 to achieve that; in the UK, Shipton Mill sell a "soft cake and pastry flour" which has been recommended to me as similar.)

  This would suggest that British plain flour ought to be closer to Southern flour than the standard flour available in most of the US. But my experience has been that the biscuits taste better with the plain and strong white 3:1 mix. Possibly Southeners would disprefer them. I got some feedback that good biscuits are about texture and moistness and not flavour.

• Baking powder in the US is usually double-acting but ours is always single-acting, so we need double quantities of that.

04 Mar 2026 8:47pm GMT

We recently launched tag2upload, aka cloud dgit or dgit-as-a-service. This was something of a culmination of work I've been doing since 2016 towards modernising Debian workflows, so I thought I'd write a short personal retrospective.

When I started contributing to Debian in 2015, I was not impressed with how packages were represented in Git by most package maintainers, and wanted a pure Git workflow. I read a couple of Joey Hess's blog posts on the matter, a rope ladder to the dgit treehouse and upstream git repositories and made a bug report against dgit hoping to tie some things together.

The results of that early work were the git-deborig(1) program and the dgit-maint-merge(7) tutorial manpage. Starting with Joey's workflow pointers, I developed a complete, pure Git workflow that I thought would be suitable for all package maintainers in Debian. It was certainly well-suited for my own packages. It took me a while to learn that there are packages for which this workflow is too simple. We now also have the dgit-maint-debrebase(7) workflow which uses git-debrebase, something which wasn't invented until several years later. Where dgit-maint-merge(7) won't do, you can use dgit-maint-debrebase(7), and still be doing pretty much pure Git. Here's a full, recent guide to modernisation.

The next most significant contribution of my own was the push-source subcommand for dgit. dgit push required a preexisting .changes file produced from the working tree. I wanted to make dgit push-source prepare that .changes file for you, but also not use the working tree, instead consulting HEAD. The idea was that you were doing a git push - which doesn't care about the working tree - direct to the Debian archive, or as close as we could get. I implemented that at DebConf18 in Taiwan, I think, with Ian, and we also did a talk on git-debrebase. We ended up having to change it to look at the working tree in addition to HEAD to make it work as well as possible, but I think that the idea of a command which was like doing a Git push direct to the archive was perhaps foundational for us later wanting to develop tag2upload. Indeed, while tag2upload's client-side tool git-debpush does look at the working tree, it doesn't do so in a way that is essential to its operation. tag2upload is dgit push-source-as-a-service.

And finally we come to tag2upload, a system Ian and I designed in 2019 during a two-person sprint at his place in Cambridge, while I was visiting the UK from Arizona. With tag2upload, appropriately authorised Debian package maintainers can upload to Debian with only pure Git operations - namely, making and pushing a signed Git tag to Debian's GitLab instance. Although we had a solid prototype in 2019, we only finally launched it last month, February 2026. This was mostly due to political delays, but also because we have put in a lot of hours making it better in various ways.

Looking back, one thing that seems notable to me is that the core elements of the pure Git workflows haven't changed much at all. Working out all the details of dgit-maint-merge(7), designing and writing git-debrebase (Ian's work), and then working out all the details of dgit-maint-debrebase(7), are the important parts, to me. The rest is mostly just large amounts of compatibility code. git-debrebase and dgit-maint-debrebase(7) are very novel but dgit-maint-merge(7) is mostly just an extrapolation of Joey's thoughts from 13 years ago. And yet, adoption of these workflows remains low.

People prefer to use what they are used to using, even if the workflows have significant inconveniences. That's completely understandable; I'm really interested in good workflows, but most other contributors care less about it. But you would expect enough newcomers to have arrived in 13 years that the new workflows would have a higher uptake. That is, packages maintained by contributors that got involved after these workflows became available would be maintained using newer workflows, at least. But the inertia seems to be too strong even for that. Instead, new contributors used to working purely out of Git are told they need to learn Debian's strange ways of representing things, tarballs and all. It doesn't have to be that way. We hope that tag2upload will make the pure Git workflows seem more appealing to people.

04 Mar 2026 8:45pm GMT

Mathmos had a sale on spare Lava lamp bottles around Christmas, so I bought a couple of new-to-me colour combinations.

The lamp I have came with orange wax in purple liquid, which gives a strong red glow in a dark room. I bought blue wax in purple liquid, which I think looks fantastic and works really nicely with my Rob Sheridan print.

The other one I bought was pink in clear, which is nice, but I think the coloured liquids add a lot to the tone of lighting in a room.

Recently, UK vid-blogger Techmoan did some really nice videos about Mathmos lava lamps: Best Lava Lamp? and LAVA LAMPS Giant, Mini & Neo.

04 Mar 2026 4:21pm GMT