We are pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to sponsor DebConf26 as a Platinum Sponsor.

Infomaniak is an independent, employee-owned Swiss technology company that designs, develops, and operates its own cloud infrastructure and digital services entirely in Switzerland. With over 300 employees - more than 70% engineers and developers - the company reinvests all profits into R&D. Its public cloud is built on OpenStack, with managed Kubernetes, Database as a Service, object storage, and sovereign AI services accessible via OpenAI- compatible APIs, all running on its own Swiss infrastructure. Infomaniak also develops a sovereign collaborative suite - messaging, email, storage, online office tools, videoconferencing, and a built-in AI assistant - developed in- house and as a privacy-respecting solution to proprietary platforms. Open source is central to how Infomaniak operates. Its latest data center (D4) runs on 100% renewable energy and uses no traditional cooling: all the heat generated by its servers is captured and fed into Geneva's district heating network, supplying up to 6,000 homes in winter and hot water year-round. The entire project has been documented and open-sourced at d4project.org.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak is contributing to the Debian annual Developers' conference, directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software. Infomaniak contributes to strengthen the community that collaborates on Debian projects from all around the world throughout all of the year.

Thank you very much, Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf26!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf26 will take place from 20th to July 25th 2026 in Santa Fe, Argentina, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 13th to 19th July 2026.

DebConf26 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf26 website at https://debconf26.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.

11 Mar 2026 12:12am GMT

Debian Contributions: 2026-02

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian's mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 26 Registration, by Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, and Santiago Ruano Rincón

DebConf 26, to be held in Santa Fe Argentina in July, has opened for registration and event proposals. Stefano, Antonio, and Santiago all contributed to making this happen.

As always, some changes needed to be made to the registration system. Bigger changes were planned, but we ran out of time to implement them for DebConf 26. All 3 of us have had experience in hosting local DebConf events in the past and have been advising the DebConf 26 local team.

Debian CI improvements, by Antonio Terceiro

Debian CI is the platform responsible for automated testing of packages from the Debian archive, and its results are used by the Debian Release team automation as Quality Assurance to control the migration of packages from Debian unstable into testing, the base for the next Debian release. Antonio started developing an incus backend, and that prompted two rounds of improvements to the platform, including but not limited to allowing user to select a job execution backend (lxc, qemu) during the job submission, reducing the part of testbed image creation that requires superuser privileges and other refactorings and bug fixes. The platform API was also improved to reduce disruption when reporting results to the Release Team automation after service downtimes. Last, but not least, the platform now has support for testing packages against variants of autopkgtest, which will allow the Debian CI team to test new versions of autopkgtest before making releases to avoid widespread regressions.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles improved po-debconf-manager while users requested features / found bugs. Improvements done - add packages from "unstable" instead of just salsa.debian.org, upgrade and merge templates of upgraded packages, finished adding typing annotations, improved deleting packages: support multiple line texts, add -debug to see "subprocess.run" commands, etc.
• Carles, using po-debconf-manager, reviewed 7 Catalan translations and sent bug reports or MRs for 11 packages. Also reviewed the translations of fortunes-debian-hints and submitted possible changes in the hints.
• Carles submitted MRs for reportbug (reportbug --ui gtk detecting the wrong dependencies), devscript (delete unused code from debrebuild and add recommended dependency), wcurl (format -help for 80 columns). Carles submitted a bug report for apt not showing the long descriptions of packages.
• Carles resumed effort for checking relations (e.g. Recommends / Suggests) between Debian packages. A new codebase (still in early stages) was started with a new approach in order to detect, report and track the broken relations.
• Emilio drove several transitions, most notably the haskell transition and the glibc/gcc-15/zlib transition for the s390 31-bit removal. This last one included reviewing and requeueing lots of autopkgtests due to britney losing a lot of results.
• Emilio reviewed and uploaded poppler updates to experimental for a new transition.
• Emilio reviewed, merged and deployed some performance improvements proposed for the security-tracker.
• Stefano prepared routine updates for pycparser, python-confuse, python-cffi, python-mitogen, python-pip, wheel, platformdirs, python-authlib, and python-virtualenv.
• Stefano updated Python 3.13 and 3.14 to the latest point releases, including security updates, and did some preliminary work for Python 3.15.
• Stefano reviewed changes to dh-python and merged MRs.
• Stefano did some debian.social sysadmin work, bridging additional IRC channels to Matrix.
• Stefano and Antonio, as DebConf Committee Members, reviewed the DebConf 27 bids and took part in selecting the Japanese bid to host DebConf 27.
• Helmut sent patches for 29 cross build failures.
• Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap addressing issues relating to specific architectures (such as musl-linux-any, hurd-any or s390x) or specific packages (such as binutils, brotli or fontconfig).
• Helmut worked on diagnosing bugs such as rocblas #1126608, python-memray #1126944 upstream and greetd #1129070 with varying success.
• Antonio provided support for multiple MiniDebConfs whose websites run wafer + wafer-debconf (the same stack as DebConf itself).
• Antonio fixed the salsa tagpending webhook.
• Antonio sent specinfra upstream a patch to fix detection of Debian systems in some situations.
• Santiago reviewed some Merge Requests for the Salsa CI pipeline, including !703 and !704, that aim to improve how the build source job is handled by Salsa CI. Thanks a lot to Jochen for his work on this.
• In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago proposed a couple of projects for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026 round. Santiago has been reviewing applications and giving feedback to candidates.
• Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of ipp-usb, brlaser and gutenprint.
• Raphaël updated publican to fix an old bug that became release critical and that happened only when building with the nocheck profile. Publican is a build dependency of the Debian's Administrator Handbook and with that fix, the package is back into testing.
• Raphaël implemented a small feature in Debusine that makes it possible to refer to a collection in a parent workspace even if a collection with the same name is present in the current workspace.
• Lucas updated the current status of ruby packages affecting the Ruby 3.4 transition after a bunch of updates made by team members. He will follow up on this next month.
• Lucas joined the Debian orga team for GSoC this year and tried to reach out to potential mentors.
• Lucas did some content work for MiniDebConf Campinas - Brazil.
• Colin published minor security updates to "bookworm" and "trixie" for CVE-2025-61984 and CVE-2025-61985 in OpenSSH, both of which allowed code execution via ProxyCommand in some cases. The "trixie" update also included a fix for mishandling of PerSourceMaxStartups.
• Colin spotted and fixed a typo in the bug tracking system's spam-handling rules, which in combination with a devscripts regression caused bts forwarded commands to be discarded.
• Colin ported 12 more Python packages away from using the deprecated (and now removed upstream) pkg_resources module.
• Anupa is co-organizing MiniDebConf Kanpur with Debian India team. Anupa was responsible for preparing the schedule, publishing it on the website, co-ordination with the fiscal host in addition to attending meetings.
• Anupa attended the Debian Publicity team online sprint which was a skill sharing session.

10 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

So you want to join Outreachy but you don't understand it, you're scared, or you don't know what open source is about.

What is FOSS anyway?

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to software that anyone can use, modify, and share freely. Think of it as a community garden; instead of one company owning the "food," people from all over the world contribute, improve, and maintain it so everyone can benefit for free. You can read more here on what it means to contribute to open source.

Outreachy provides paid internships to anyone from any background who faces underrepresentation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technical industry where they live. Their goal is to increase diversity in open source. Read their website for more. I spent a good amount of time reading all the guides listed, including the applicant guide and the how-to-apply guide.

The "Secret" to Applying (Spoiler: It's not a secret)

I know newcomers are scared or unsure and would prefer answers from previous participants, but the Outreachy website is actually a goldmine, almost every question you have is already answered there if you look closely. I used to hate reading documentation, but I've learned to love it. Documentation is the "Source of Truth."

• My Advice: Read every single guide on their site. The applicant guide is your roadmap. Embracing documentation now will make you a much better contributor later.

The AI Trap: Be Yourself

Now for the part most newcomers have asked about is the initial essay. I know it's tempting to use AI, but I really encourage you to skip it for this. Your own story is much more powerful than a generated one. Outreachy and its mentoring organizations value your unique story. They are strongly against fabricated or AI-exaggerated essays.

For example, when I contributed to Debian using openQA, the information wasn't well established on the web. When I tried to use AI, it suggested imaginary ideas. The project maintainers had a particular style of contributing, so I had to follow the instructions carefully, observe the codebase, and read the provided documentation. With that information, I always wrote a solution first before consulting AI, and mine was always better. AI can only be intelligent in the context of what you give it; if it doesn't have your answer, it will look for the most similar solution (hallucinate). We do not want to increase the burden on reviewers-their time is important because they are volunteers, too. This is crucial when you qualify for the contribution phase.

The Application Process

There are two main stages:

• The initial application: Here you fill in basic details, time availability, and essay questions (you can find these on the Outreachy website).
• The contribution phase: This is where you show you have the skills to work on the projects. Every project will list the skills needed and the level of proficiency.

When you qualify for the contribution phase:

• A lot of people will try to create buzz or even panic; you just have to focus. Once you've gotten the hang of the project, remember to help others along the way.
• You can start contributions with spelling corrections, move to medium tasks (do multiple of these), then a hard task if possible. You don't need to be a guru on day one.
• It's all about community building. Do your part to help others understand the project too; this is also a form of contribution.
• Lastly, every project mentor has a way of evaluating candidates. My summary is: be confident, demonstrate your skills, and learn where you are lacking. Start small and work your way up, you don't have to prove yourself as a guru.

Tips

• Watch this: This step-by-step video is a great walkthrough of the initial application process.
• Sign up for the email list to get updates: https://lists.outreachy.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/announce
• Be fast: Complete your initial application in the first 3 days, as there are a lot of applicants.
• Back it up: In your essay about systemic bias, include some statistics to back it up.
• Learn Git: Even if you don't have programming skills, contributions are pushed to GitHub or GitLab. Practice some commands and contribute to a "first open issue" to understand the flow: https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions

The most important tip? Apply anyway. Even if you feel underqualified, the process itself is a massive learning experience.

09 Mar 2026 9:10pm GMT