heads 0.4 released

Not dead yet!

It's been a while, but heads is a part of a larger ecosystem that needed work, to enable heads moving forward. 0.4 (except possible bugfixes and updates) is probably the final release before heads is ready to apply for the GNU free distribution list, and of course, will bring cool new features.

Lots of work has been done on the Devuan SDK, which is the base environment used for the heads build system. heads is now based on Devuan Beowulf (Testing), which is equivalent to Debian Buster. Here we have access to actual up to date software, rather than old frozen versions which lack today's features. The plan for the persistence setup in heads is laid down and will be ready for 1.0.

I also want to thank you for the bitcoins that have been donated to heads. This is very appreciated. During the time of heads' existence, people have donated close to 0.1033 BTC. Thank you ❤ By the way, due to popular demand - the "financial report" is now automatically regenerated every 15 minutes.

As for the changelog:

Privesc bug fixed

A privilege escalation bug was reported randomly on Twitter. Nobody cared to open a bug on the bugtracker it seems.

https://twitter.com/cchuatl/status/941088017325977601

This has been fixed in a combination of the following commits in heads' rootfs-overlay repository:

59f2f0328198634e449ef792ab7ccb0770c83337

4f449a461d20806b7b800c733c91c3ed3d37fe33

76befa329e99e6e589e5431e40c78cd060ecf489

In any case, this update feature is still not being utilized, and more work will be done regarding it in the future.

Rebase to Devuan Beowulf

heads has been rebased on Devuan Beowulf (Testing), which brings us current-day software and no planned obsolecence.

OpenRC

Our new init system is sysvinit combined with OpenRC. This is a modern approach to init and it's working quite stable.

Less bloat

heads does not depend on Debian's live-boot/live-config anymore. Instead, we have a minimal way of bringup that is a lot more auditable than the thousands of lines of spaghetti shell scripts Debian is able to produce.

This release also removes some big software like evince, in order to replace it with more minimal replacements - in this case zathura. More can be seen in the git commits of heads' build system.

heads' own initramfs

More Debian bloat. heads now builds and ships with its own initramfs, which holds just enough to bring up the system, and is statically linked in its entirety, instead of having random kernel modules, dynamic libraries, and other scary stuff inside. The logic stays the same, half of the available RAM ends up as the volatile storage. The storage is the same that live-boot produces - overlayfs over /. The fun thing is that we are able to do this in about 100 lines of shell.

For more detailed changes, see the git logs, and the ChangeLog file in the build system repository.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/headslive/build-system/master/ChangeLog

Eat Liver!

~ parazyd (2018-03-26)