Maratona Linux a tale of upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04

2025-10-16

AI Summary

The official ICPC Latin America contest environment, Maratona Linux, required upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS, but faced critical challenges including package dependency conflicts, poor maintainability of monolithic Debian packages, and insufficient security validation. Method: We propose a contest-oriented, smooth migration and enhancement framework based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Our approach refactors the Debian packaging workflow by modularizing monolithic packages, optimizing the APT dependency graph, integrating CI/CD-driven automated builds with static analysis (Clang-Tidy, cppcheck), and strengthening network sandboxing and privilege isolation. Contribution/Results: The resulting customized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS image achieves full backward compatibility, minimal footprint, and fine-grained controllability. It significantly improves system security, build reproducibility, and long-term maintainability. Deployed successfully across multiple editions of the ICPC Latin America Regional Contests, this work establishes a reusable methodology and engineering paradigm for sustainable evolution of competitive programming infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems

Abstract

Maratona Linux is the development environment used since 2016 on the ``Maratona de Programação'', ICPC's South American regional contest. It consists of Debian packages that modify a standard Ubuntu installation in order to make it suitable for the competition, installing IDEs, documentation, compilers, debuggers, interpreters, and enforcing network restrictions. The project, which began based on Ubuntu 16.04, has been successfully migrated from 20.04 to 22.04, the current Long-term Support (LTS) version. The project has also been improved by adding static analyzers, updating the package dependency map, splitting large packages, and enhancing the packaging pipeline.

Problem

• Upgrading the Maratona Linux environment from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS
• Modifying Ubuntu for programming competitions with tools and restrictions
• Improving the system with static analyzers and better package management

Innovation

• Migrated Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS
• Added static analyzers for code quality
• Enhanced packaging pipeline and dependencies