this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Could the XZ backdoor have been detected with better Git and Debian packaging practices? (optimizedbyotto.com)
submitted 3 months ago by otto@programming.dev to c/debian@lemmy.ml
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How did the changes in the binary test files tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz and tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma, and the makefile change in m4/build-to-host.m4) manifest to the Debian maintainer? Was there a chance of noticing something odd?

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[–] otto@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

There was a bunch of luck involved that Andres Freund detected this. Give more time, it would have ended up in stable releases eventually if not detected.