Advent of Code, for those not in the know, is a yearly Advent calendar (since 2015) of coding puzzles many people participate in for a plenary of reasons ranging from speed coding to code golf with stops at learning a new language or practicing already known ones.

I usually write boring C++, but any language and then some can be used. There are reports of people implementing it in hardware, solving them by hand on paper or using Microsoft Excel… so, after solving a puzzle the easy way yesterday, this time I thought: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! as I somehow remembered an old 2008 article about solving Sudoku with aptitude (Daniel Burrows via archive.org as the blog is long gone) and the good same old a package management system that can solve [puzzles] based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having (Russell Coker).

Day 8 has a rather lengthy problem description and can reasonably be approached in a bunch of different way. One unreasonable approach might be to massage the problem description into Debian packages and let apt help me solve the problem (specifically Part 2, which you unlock by solving Part 1. You can do that now, I will wait here.)

Be warned: I am spoiling Part 2 in the following, so solve it yourself first if you are interested.

I will try to be reasonable consistent in naming things in the following and so have chosen: The input we get are lines like acedgfb cdfbe gcdfa fbcad dab cefabd cdfgeb eafb cagedb ab | cdfeb fcadb cdfeb cdbaf. The letters are wires mixed up and connected to the segments of the displays: A group of these letters is hence a digit (the first 10) which represent one of the digits 0 to 9 and (after the pipe) the four displays which match (after sorting) one of the digits which means this display shows this digit. We are interested in which digits are displayed to solve the puzzle. To help us we also know which segments form which digit, we just don't know the wiring in the back.

So we should identify which wire maps to which segment! We are introducing the packages wire-X-connects-to-Y for this which each provide & conflict¹ with the virtual packages segment-Y and wire-X-connects. The later ensures that for a given wire we can only pick one segment and the former ensures that not multiple wires map onto the same segment.

As an example: wire a's possible association with segment b is described as:

Package: wire-a-connects-to-b
Provides: segment-b, wire-a-connects
Conflicts: segment-b, wire-a-connects

Note that we do not know if this is true! We generate packages for all possible (and then some) combinations and hope dependency resolution will solve the problem for us. So don't worry, the hard part will be done by apt, we just have to provide all (im)possibilities!

What we need now is to translate the 10 digits (and 4 outputs) from something like acedgfb into digit-0-is-eight and not, say digit-0-is-one. A clever solution might realize that a one consists only of two segments so a digit wiring up seven segments can not be a 1 (and must be 8 instead), but again we aren't here to be clever: We want apt to figure that out for us! So what we do is simply making every digit-0-is-N (im)possible choice available as a package and apply constraints: A given digit-N can only display one number and each N is unique as digit – so for both we deploy Provides & Conflicts again.

We also need to reason about the segments in the digits: Each of the digit packages gets Depends on wire-X-connects-to-Y where X is each possible wire (e.g. acedgfb) and Y each segment forming the digit (e.g. cf for one). The different choices for X are or'ed together, so that either of them satisfies the Y.

We know something else too through: The segments which are not used by the digit can not be wired to any of the Xs. We model this with Conflicts on wire-X-connects-to-Y.

As an example: If digit-0s acedgfb would be displaying a one (remember, it can't) the following package would be installable:

Package: digit-0-is-one
Version: 1
Depends: wire-a-connects-to-c | wire-c-connects-to-c | wire-e-connects-to-c | wire-d-connects-to-c | wire-g-connects-to-c | wire-f-connects-to-c | wire-b-connects-to-c,
         wire-a-connects-to-f | wire-c-connects-to-f | wire-e-connects-to-f | wire-d-connects-to-f | wire-g-connects-to-f | wire-f-connects-to-f | wire-b-connects-to-f
Provides: digit-0, digit-is-one
Conflicts: digit-0, digit-is-one,
  wire-a-connects-to-a, wire-c-connects-to-a, wire-e-connects-to-a, wire-d-connects-to-a, wire-g-connects-to-a, wire-f-connects-to-a, wire-b-connects-to-a,
  wire-a-connects-to-b, wire-c-connects-to-b, wire-e-connects-to-b, wire-d-connects-to-b, wire-g-connects-to-b, wire-f-connects-to-b, wire-b-connects-to-b,
  wire-a-connects-to-d, wire-c-connects-to-d, wire-e-connects-to-d, wire-d-connects-to-d, wire-g-connects-to-d, wire-f-connects-to-d, wire-b-connects-to-d,
  wire-a-connects-to-e, wire-c-connects-to-e, wire-e-connects-to-e, wire-d-connects-to-e, wire-g-connects-to-e, wire-f-connects-to-e, wire-b-connects-to-e,
  wire-a-connects-to-g, wire-c-connects-to-g, wire-e-connects-to-g, wire-d-connects-to-g, wire-g-connects-to-g, wire-f-connects-to-g, wire-b-connects-to-g

Repeat such stanzas for all 10 possible digits for digit-0 and then repeat this for all the other nine digit-N. We produce pretty much the same stanzas for display-0(-is-one), just that we omit the second Provides & Conflicts from above (digit-is-one) as in the display digits can be repeated. The rest is the same (modulo using display instead of digit as name of course).

Lastly we create a package dubbed solution which depends on all 10 digit-N and 4 display-N – all of them virtual packages apt will have to choose an installable provider from – and we are nearly done!

The resulting Packages file² we can give to apt while requesting to install the package solution and it will spit out not only the display values we are interested in but also which number each digit represents and which wire is connected to which segment. Nifty!

$ ./skip-aoc 'acedgfb cdfbe gcdfa fbcad dab cefabd cdfgeb eafb cagedb ab | cdfeb fcadb cdfeb cdbaf'
[…]
The following additional packages will be installed:
  digit-0-is-eight digit-1-is-five digit-2-is-two digit-3-is-three
  digit-4-is-seven digit-5-is-nine digit-6-is-six digit-7-is-four
  digit-8-is-zero digit-9-is-one display-1-is-five display-2-is-three
  display-3-is-five display-4-is-three wire-a-connects-to-c
  wire-b-connects-to-f wire-c-connects-to-g wire-d-connects-to-a
  wire-e-connects-to-b wire-f-connects-to-d wire-g-connects-to-e
[…]
0 upgraded, 22 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

We are only interested in the numbers on the display through, so grepping the apt output (-V is our friend here) a bit should let us end up with what we need as calculating³ is (unsurprisingly) not a strong suit of our package relationship language so we need a few shell commands to help us with the rest.

$ ./skip-aoc 'acedgfb cdfbe gcdfa fbcad dab cefabd cdfgeb eafb cagedb ab | cdfeb fcadb cdfeb cdbaf' -qq
5353

I have written the skip-aoc script as a testcase for apt, so to run it you need to place it in /path/to/source/of/apt/test/integration and built apt first, but that is only due to my laziness. We could write a standalone script interfacing with the system installed apt directly – and in any apt version since ~2011.

To hand in the solution for the puzzle we just need to run this on each line of the input (~200 lines) and add all numbers together. In other words: Behold this beautiful shell one-liner: parallel -I '{}' ./skip-aoc '{}' -qq < input.txt | paste -s -d'+' - | bc

(You may want to run parallel with -P to properly grill your CPU as that process can take a while otherwise – and it still does anyhow as I haven't optimized it at all… the testing framework does a lot of pointless things wasting time here, but we aren't aiming for the leaderboard so…)

That might or even likely will fail through as I have so far omitted a not unimportant detail: The default APT resolver is not able to solve this puzzle with the given problem description – we need another solver!

Thankfully that is as easy as installing apt-cudf (and with it aspcud) which the script is using via --solver aspcud to make apt hand over the puzzle to a "proper" solver (or better: A solver who is supposed to be good at "answering set" questions). The buildds are using this for experimental and/or backports builds and also for installability checks via dose3 btw, so you might have encountered it before.

Be careful however: Just because aspcud can solve this puzzle doesn't mean it is a good default resolver for your day to day apt. One of the reasons the default resolver has such a hard time solving this here is that or-groups have usually an order in which the first is preferred over every later option and so fort. This is of no concern here as all these alternatives will collapse to a single solution anyhow, but if there are multiple viable solutions (which is often the case) picking the "wrong" alternative can have bad consequences. A classic example would be exim4 | postfix | nullmailer. They are all MTAs but behave very different. The non-default solvers also tend to lack certain features like keeping track of auto-installed packages or installing Recommends/Suggests. That said, Julian is working on another solver as I write this which might deal with more of these issues.

And lastly: I am also relatively sure that with a bit of massaging the default resolver could be made to understand the problem, but I can't play all day with this… maybe some other day.

Disclaimer: Originally posted in the daily megathread on reddit, the version here is just slightly better understandable as I have hopefully renamed all the packages to have more conventional names and tried to explain what I am actually doing. No cows were harmed in this improved version, either.

Remember what I said last time? I started with "One of the main jobs of a package manager like apt is to download packages". So let us talk about downloading a bit more this time.

APT doesn't hardcode certain protocols like HTTP for downloading. It uses instead external binaries it calls "transport" via a self-defined text protocol similar in style to HTTP.

APT comes with a large set of more or less common protocols by default, but can in this way also be extended to support other protocols… lets look at the available protocols for APT:

The strange kids on the block: gpgv, rred & store¶

Methods like gpgv, rred and store usually have only a short stay in the progress indication of an update call and are hardly useable by anyone, but they exist as standalone methods to have (potentially many of them) run in parallel and make use of features like switching to a non-root user for their execution.

There is no cloud: file and copy¶

Feeling limited by the bandwidth-cap of your internet connection? No problem, apt doesn't need the internet – at least if you have a local mirror or a repository in general which resides on a local hard-drive or is e.g. mounted via NFS as a network share.

file will try to reuse the data in the location it is at the moment – which can lead to apt seeing changes in the repository without an update call – while copy will as the name implies store a copy of the data in the usual places data copied from the internet would reside.

In the past sort-of temporary repositories were added to apt with these, but given the features mentioned in APT for package self-builders they slowly approach the state of being considered also one of the strange kids mentioned previously.

Blast from the past: ftp and ssh¶

ftp is heavily on the decline for file transfer as for apt the usage of http is actually much better as we can make us of many advanced HTTP features. Debian dropped its ftp mirrors and we might end up dropping the method some day… it has surely not seen any active development for years at least.

ssh (also known as rsh) never was that popular to begin with, but can still be used to access repositories on remote systems via SSH assuming you manage to configure it correctly. It could also use some love from active users…

Teaching an old dog new tricks: cdrom¶

cdrom is something many users will need for the initial installation, but after that… you can through. It is also nowadays a misnomer as it can of course handle all the other rotating discs you can place in a drive like DVDs and Bluerays – as well as the (usually) less round ISO file storage device: USB sticks. The method is so special that it comes with its own binary apt-cdrom to help users work with it. It would also really need some love through, so if you were looking for some way to contribute to Debian and love playing with CDs & USB sticks…

The usual suspect: http¶

In all likelihood that is what you are using on all your systems. So, there isn't much to say about it expect that in buster it finally got its own manpage… have a look at apt-transport-http(1) someday (even translations are available).

That it is used so often doesn't mean people know or use all the features through: See e.g. auth.conf (granted, not that many repositories are password protected) and automatic proxy configuration. Tip: Have a look at the auto-apt-proxy package.

HTTP2 isn't supported yet and that might still be a while given there isn't a whole lot of point in it for the apt usecase as we know which files we want to acquire & that they are static, but at some point perhaps… [Yours truly still vividly remembers being told by some proxy/mirror people at a conference years ago that pipelining is way too much state keeping to support and apt shouldn't use it just like browsers! These guys probably love HTTP2…]

What most people don't realize is that this transport actually does more than wget, curl or even your webbrowser like having support for SRV records – something your webbrowser doesn't and probably never will support. SRV records are what powers deb.debian.org in case you wonder whats the point. Oh, and apropos point…

The pointless: apt-transport-https¶

SCNR. What the title actually refers to is that apt contains in the 1.6 series the https transport directly, so apt-transport-https is now an empty transitional package (aka: pointless to install).

Implied is of course something different: That HTTPS would be pointless for APT. It might or might not be, depending on your specific angle. There was a lot written about it, so feel free to read that if you must – e.g. Why does APT not use HTTPS. My point here is mainly that APT can if you want and its easier than ever. deb.debian.org can be accessed via https if you are looking for a mirror.

It also comes with a manpage since recently with apt-transport-https(1) which also mentions the most interesting feature of HTTPS: Client certificates – as access control via username and password is boring.

A small "gotcha" of sorts is that we have opted to forbid redirects from https to http, which breaks a lot more https sources than you would hope, but we decided that if you go for https, you probably don't want to compromise it all for an unsafe redirect. Other less specialized downloaders like wget or curl are less picky…

Sidenote: https is nowadays implemented as a tiny layer over http. We used to use the curl library to implement a semi-independent https but over time that became really ugly. The redirect-downgrade mentioned in the previous paragraph was colossal pain, redirections in general needed to be handled carefully, SRV support not on the horizon and so on. That isn't to say that curl is bad – it is just not really compatible with the architecture we already have.

The tearjerker: apt-transport-tor¶

Pretty much every reason for using HTTPS is potentially better served by using Tor and thankfully it is super easy to use it: Just install the package and prepend tor+ to all URLs you have in your sources.list files. The README has details and also points to various onion-addresses you can use instead of boring normal domains (that hopefully explains also the tear-pun).

Sidenote: Implementation wise Tor is just a SOCKS proxy, so all this method does is setting some Proxy configuration and then let http(s) do its job, so we wouldn't really need an extra package for it – but its easier for a user that way and I would really like to make it even easier if we had some more contributions on the documentation and scripting front… (hint hint).

The magician: mirror¶

With my rewrite in 1.6 mirror became my personal favorite and it might be yours too at the end of this section. 🙂

This method doesn't implement a download protocol on its own, it instead just acts as manager instructing other methods to do stuff by first downloading a file listing one or more mirrors and then distributing all requests it is asked to handle to a mirror from the list – and potentially a different mirror for each request… so, it is a potentially local variant of the decommissioned httpredir service, but integrated into apt resolving some (or all) problems it had.

Beside the obvious "I want apt to pull packages from 3 mirrors at the same time" usecase this obviously has it can deal gracefully with partial mirrors as well as mirrors which are less frequently synced without requiring a clever service keeping tabs on it (which was one of the reasons httpredir eventually died).

The manpage apt-transport-mirror uses this contrived advanced example:

file:/srv/local/debian/mirror/     priority:1 type:index
http://partial.example.org/mirror/ priority:2 arch:amd64 arch:all type:deb
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/   type:deb
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/   type:deb
https://deb.debian.org/debian/

That is just to show off, but should be enough reason for you to go read that manpage. Yours will likely be a lot simpler… mine just mentions some mirrors, is a local file and accessed via the slight arcane tor+mirror+file transport which means: get the local mirror file and access all mirrors listed in there via Tor…

There is a lot you can do with that already, but there is certainly some more stuff missing or could be improved. Feel free to get in touch if you have ideas, with or without patch attached. 😉

Street vendors united: Third-party transports¶

All transports mentioned so far are either bundled with apt or maintained by the team, but with -s3 and -spacewalk there are at least two transports in Debian maintained by others and in the past there was also -debtorrent but that is no longer maintained. -tor started in this group here as well.

Sadly, some things which should be implemented in transports (if at all) aren't like the dreaded never-ending stream of apt-fast implementations which usually ship with enormous security problems – but at least they are very fast at being insecure –, so I can only encourage exploring the transport system if you think apt should learn to acquire files in a certain fashion or over a certain protocol.

Bonus: Using apt as wget/curl replacement¶

Okay, it might be a bit of an overstatement, but for a quick download you can call /usr/lib/apt/apt-helper download-file https://example.org /path/to/file and with an optional third parameter you can provide a hashsum for the file. The killer feature might be that you can use any transport here, so tor+http works and does the right thing: That tends to be harder to do with wget/curl. As a bonus this will drop privileges and might even use seccomp, but security might be the topic of another day…

tl;dr

I will leave you now to reconfiguring your sources, especially mirror hopefully gave you some ideas. See you next time! 🙂

P.S.: As seems usual by now, this post was basically done months ago, but I didn't want to post it while people where arguing if curl or apt has more CVEs in its implementation as that was rather silly to watch and also not at the time some people were asking for my head for suspected intended CVE code injection. But after that nonsense cooled off I had forgotten that this was never published… well, better late than never.

One of the main jobs of a package manager like apt is to download packages (ideally in a secure way) from a repository so that they can be processed further – usually installed. FSVO "normal user" this is all there ever is to it in terms of getting packages.

Package maintainers and other users rolling their own binary packages on the other hand tend to have the packages they want to install and/or play-test with already on their disk. For them, it seems like an additional hassle to push their packages to a (temporary) repository, so apt can download data from there again… for the love of supercow, there must be a better way… right?

For the sake of a common start lets say I want to modify (and later upload) hello, so I acquire the source via apt source hello. Friendly as apt is it ran dpkg-source for me already, so I have (at the time of writing) the files hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz, hello_2.10-1.debian.tar.xz and hello_2.10-1.dsc in my working directory as well as the extracted tarballs in the subdirectory hello-2.10.

Anything slightly more complex than hello probably has a bunch of build-dependencies, so what I should do next is install build-dependencies: Everyone knows apt build-dep hello and that works in this case, but given that you have a dsc file we could just as well use that and free us from our reliance on the online repository: apt build-dep ./hello_2.10-1.dsc. We still depend on having a source package built previously this way… but wait! We have the source tree and this includes the debian/control file so… apt build-dep ./hello-2.10 – the later is especially handy if you happen to add additional build-dependencies while hacking on your hello.

So now that we can build the package have fun hacking on it! You probably have your preferred way of building packages, but for simplicity lets just continue using apt for now: apt source hello -b. If all worked out well we should have now (if you are on a amd64 machine) also a hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes file as well as two binary packages named hello_2.10-1_amd64.deb and hello-dbgsym_2.10-1_amd64.deb (you will also get a hello_2.10-1_amd64.buildinfo which you can hang onto, but apt has currently no way of making use of it, so I ignore it for the moment).

Everyone should know by now that you can install a deb via apt install ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.deb but that quickly gets boring with increasing numbers, especially if the packages you want to install have tight relations. So feel free to install all debs included in a changes file with apt install ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes.

So far so good, but all might be a bit much. What about install only some debs of a changes file? Here it gets interesting as if you play your cards right you can test upgrades this way as well. So lets add a temporary source of metadata (and packages) – but before you get your preferred repository builder setup and your text editor ready: You just have to add an option to your apt call. Coming back to our last example of installing packages via a changes file, lets say we just want to install hello and not hello-dbgsym: apt install --with-source ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes hello.

That will install hello just fine, but if you happen to have hello installed already… apt is going to tell you it has already the latest version installed. You can look at this situation e.g. with apt policy --with-source ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes hello. See, the Debian repository ships a binary-only rebuild as 2.10-1+b1 at the moment, which is a higher version than the one we have locally build. Your usual apt-knowledge will tell you that you can force apt to install your hello with apt install --with-source ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes hello=2.10-1 but that isn't why I went down this path: As you have seen now metadata inserted via --with-source participates as usual in the candidate selection process, so you can actually perform upgrade tests this way: apt upgrade --with-source ./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes (or full-upgrade).

The hello example reaches its limits here, but if you consider time travel a possibility we will jump back into a time in which hello-debhelper existed. To be exact: Right to the moment its maintainer wanted to rename hello-debhelper to hello. Most people consider package renames hard. You need to get file overrides and maintainerscripts just right, but at least with figuring out the right dependency relations apt can help you a bit. How you can feed in changes files we have already seen, so lets imagine you deal with with multiple packages from different sources – or just want to iterate quickly! In that case you want to create a Packages file which you would normally find in a repository. You can write those by hand of course, but its probably easier to just call dpkg-scanpackages . > Packages (if you have dpkg-dev installed) or apt-ftparchive packages . > Packages (available via apt-utils) – they behave slightly different, but for our proposes its all the same. Either way, ending up with a Packages file nets you another file you can feed to --with-source (sorry, you can't install a Packages file). This also allows you to edit the dependency relations of multiple packages in a single file without constant "fiddle and build" loops of the included packages – just make sure to run as non-root & in simulation mode (-s) only or you will make dpkg (and in turn apt) very sad.

Of course upgrade testing is only complete if you can influence what is installed on your system before you try to upgrade easily. You can with apt install --with-source ./Packages hello=2.10-1 -s -o Dir::state::status=/dev/null (it will look like nothing is installed) or feed a self-crafted file (or some compressed /var/backups/dpkg.status file from days past), but to be fair that gets a bit fiddly, so at some point its probably easier to write an integration test for apt which are just little shellscript in which (nearly) everything is possible, but that might be the topic of another post some day.

Q: How long do I have to wait to use this?

A: I think I have implemented the later parts of this in the 1.3 series. Earlier parts are in starting with 1.0. Debian stable (stretch) has the 1.4 series, so… you can use it now. Otherwise use your preferred package manager to upgrade your system to latest stable release. I hope it is clear which package manager that should be… 😉

Q: Does this only work with apt?

A: This works just the same with apt-cache (where the --with-source option is documented in the manpage btw) and apt-get. Everything else using libapt (so aptitude included) does not at the moment, but potentially can and probably will in the future. If you feel like typing a little bit more you can at least replicate the --with-source examples by using the underlying generic option: aptitude install -s hello-dbgsym -o APT::Sources::With::=./hello_2.10-1_amd64.changes (That is all you really need anyhow, the rest is syntactic sugar). Before you start running off to report bugs: Check before reporting duplicates (and don't forget to attach patches)!

Q: Why are you always typing ./packages.deb?

A: With the --with-source option the ./ is not needed actually, but for consistency I wrote it everywhere. In the first examples we need it as apt needs to know somehow if the string it sees here is a package name, a glob, a regex, a task, … or a filename. The string "package.deb" could be a regex after all. And any string could be a directory name… Combine this with picking up files and directories in the current directory and you would have a potential security risk looming here if you start apt in /tmp (No worries, we hadn't realized this from the start either).

Q: But, but, but … security anyone?!?

The files are on your disk and apt expects that you have verified that they aren't some system-devouring malware. How should apt verify that after all as there is no trustpath. So don't think that downloading a random deb suddently became a safe thing to do because you used apt instead of dpkg -i. If the dsc or changes files you use are signed and you verfied them through, you can rest assured that apt is verifying that the hashes mentioned in those files apply to the files they index. Doesn't help you at all if the files are unsigned or other users are able to modify the files after you verified them, but apt will check hashes in those cases anyhow.

Q: I ❤ u, 🍑 tl;dr

Just 🏃 those, you might 😍 some of them:

apt source hello
apt build-dep ./hello-*/ -s
apt source -b hello
apt install ./hello_*.deb -s
apt install ./hello_*.changes -s
apt install --with-source ./hello_*.changes hello -s
apt-ftparchive packages . > ./Packages
apt upgrade --with-source ./Packages -s

P.S.: If you have expected this post to be published sometime inbetween the last two months… welcome to the club! I thought I would do it, too. Lets see how long I will need for the next one… I have it partly written already, but that was the case for this one as well… we will see.

(Note: Updated table in 2019 for the new election, the rest of the article remains unchanged and is still as true as it is provocative)

Today is a special day for apt: 20 years ago after much discussion in the team as well as in the Debian project at large "APT" was born.

What happened in all these years? A lot! But if there is one common theme then it is that many useful APT features, tricks and changes are not as known to the general public or even most Debian Developers as they should be.

A few postings are unlikely to change that, but I will try anyhow and this post is the start of a mini-series of "APT for …" articles showing off things: For the first installment I want to show nothing less but the longest running vote-rigging scheme in the known free (software) world. But lets start from the beginning:

Humans pride themselves having evolved over simple animals following their instincts by having a mind of their own to form decisions. On this concept, humans hold votes to agree upon stuff, including the Debian Project Leader for the next year.

DPL candidates are encouraged to provide a platform and a discussion between the candidates and the voters ensures that everyone can form a well informed opinion on the candidates in question and based on this information choose a candidate with their own free will.

Or, That is at least the theory Debian Developers want to believe in.

The following table tallies each leader vote since 1999 with the information if the candidate (68 over all, 37 unique) had contributed to APT (31/13), dpkg (29/17) or both (18/9) for cases I could identify (if I missed anything feel free to get in touch). The candidate in bold has won the election in the given year, candidates in italics won a later election:

We can see directly that until recently it was nearly mandatory to have contributed to apt or dpkg to be accepted as a DPL candidate. The recent no streak before Chris entered the table gets doubly weird if we factor in that I joined Debian and the APT project around 2009… We might get to the bottom of this coincident in the future, but for now lets get back to the topic at hand:

DDs have no free will

It is hard to accept for a human, but the table above shows that DDs aren't as free in their choice as they think they are; they follow a simple rule:

If at least one of the candidates contributed to APT, an APT contributor wins the election.

You can read this directly from the table above (20 votes total, including 6 votes without an apt candidate). Interestingly, the same rule for dpkg does not hold at all. In fact there are years in which the defining difference for the winning candidate is that he¹⁵ hasn't contributed to dpkg but only to apt (e.g. 2002).

Praying via bugreports and sacrifices in the form of patches in the Pantheon of the Supercow, the deity@ mailinglist, can have profound effects: Take the very first elections as an example: After being an unsuccessful candidate in 1999 and 2000, candidate Ben implemented the rsh transport method for apt and as a result became DPL in 2001.

And as if that wouldn't be enough, being on good terms with Supercow has additional benefits:

Contribution beats Re-Election

While it seems like DPLs are granted a second term if they wish the recent 2017 election shows that contributing to APT is stronger. Two other non-re-elections are on record: In 2003 where the bugreporter Bdale lost against the patchprovider Martin, so contribution size and recency seem to play a role as well, but that might not be everything there is to infights between contributors as shown in 2007 where Anthony lost against Sam in the biggest vote so far with 5 out of 8 candidates supported by apt (including the present and future DPL in this year).

The "Super" rubs of on the DPL

Many DPLs run for two terms, but only a single one managed to run a third time: After unsuccessful campaigning in 2009 Stefano not only worked on apt in 2010 and the following year(s) but also consulted with a certain highpriest of the Supercow netting a record three-year stint as DPL as a result.

It is to be seen if intercession of a highpriest is needed for long DPL terms, but it certainly doesn't hurt – and I make myself of course selflessly available (for a reasonable monetary offering) as said highpriest should a DPL (candidate) be in need of my divine bovine help (again)…

Every contribution matters – for real!

No contribution is too small, everything counts & supercow sees everything. Even "just" downgrading the severity of a bug counts¹⁰. Supercow values all contributors: Join their rank today and win the next DPL election in 2019!

Of course, supercow likes big and groundbreaking patches as much as the next project, but while other projects are just talking about how they like testers, bugreporters, translators and documentation improvers we in the apt project have the election-rigging data of 20 years to proof it! Supercow really cares for its contributors!

So to all past, present and future DPL candidates: Thanks for your contributions to APT (and Debian)!

That… this… what the f…edora?!?

Look at the calendar: Its not only easter sunday, its also the beginning of voting period for DPL 2018. What better day would there be for some fun about humans, genesis, elections and the 20th birthday of apt.

I promise that future installments in the series will be more practically useful but until then enjoy the festive days (if applicable) around apts birthday, have fun, take care and make sure to contribute to apt!

Mooooo!