Well, yes, that sounds somewhat pompous. But I do think this is a worthwhile release goal; from where I stand I think that hard-hat security is a critical option for any OS to remain viable in the current security conscious environment, and Debian, after a period of being well ahead of the curve (thanks to Russell Coker, Colin Walters, Brian May, and others), has fallen well behind entities like Red Hat and Gentoo when it comes to providing a hardened, secure platform.
So, along with a few other people (Greg T. Norris, Lorenzo
Garcia-Heirro), I have started a mini
project to bring Debian’s SELinux patched packages back in sync
with the latest upstream and the latest SELinux patches, and to
make it easier for Debian developers to access SELinux patches. The
only package that is ready to go is coreutils, and
that is thanks to Greg.
I’ve just come back from the Se-Linux symposium, followed by the Central Pennsylvania LUG Security conference, which was a lot of fun. I also managed to get myself talked into upgrading to the X Org server, which is to be 3expected after spending two days sitting Next to Jim Gettys at a conference watching the neat gizmos.
And, if I get through this key signing process, I may get my key connectivity ranking up again (also thanks to getting it signed by Russell Coker). Of course, due to my weird key signing protocol this is more tedious than the norm, but hey, that’s what you get for trying to add value to your signature.