Simon Willison’s Weblog

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7 posts tagged “debian”

2025

I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.

In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.

If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.

Julian Andres Klode, debian-devel mailing list

# 1st November 2025, 5:34 pm / debian, linux, open-source, rust

2022

webvm.io (via) This is one heck of a tech demo: it’s a full copy of Debian, compiled to WebAssembly and running in your browser. It’s fully stocked with Python, Perl, Ruby, Node.js and even a working gcc compiler! The underlying technology, CheerpX, is a closed-source WebAssembly virtualization platform.

# 2nd February 2022, 2:29 am / debian, webassembly

2009

HOWTO Building a self-bundling Debian AMI. Not as terrifying as you would have thought. Also contains some neat hints as to how some of the more magical parts of EC2 work (like the way your SSH public key automatically ends up in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys).

# 19th May 2009, 7:49 pm / amazon, ami, cloud-computing, debian, ec2

2008

Package Management Sudoku. "A package management system that can solve Sudoku based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having" - like a red flag to a bull. (Internet Archive)

# 21st August 2008, 7:09 pm / apt, debian, funny, sudoku

2007

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released. Includes Iceweasel (Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird), Iceape (Seamonkey) and Python 2.4.4 as standard.

# 8th April 2007, 6:25 pm / debian, linux, mozilla, python

2003

Debian’s Response. Praise for Debian’s handling of their recent security incident

# 9th December 2003, 3:16 am / debian, security