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You are here: Home / News / Debian News / My Free Software Activities in December 2012

My Free Software Activities in December 2012

January 7, 2013 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (836.78 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian Packaging

I uploaded Zim 0.58, WordPress 3.5 (and I had to file a ticket about the availability of sources of minified javascript files — again) and another security update for python-django (696535).

Speaking of python-django, I forwarded one bug report of Anders Kaseorg concerning Django’s bash completion (#695811).

I also sponsored the upload of ledgersmb 1.3.25-1.

Other Debian work

I contributed some patches to improve debian-installer support in live-build. I also added a work-around for bug #652946 in live-installer and committed a fix for this same bug in a jessie branch of partman-target.

I also prepared a bugfix for a counter-productive behavior of choose-mirror (#695261, it was not possible to override the codename of the release to install via preseed if you install from a CD with a full base system).

I discovered an oddity in the Packages.diff/Index file for the architectures armhf and s390x, I reported it to ftpmasters in #696792.

(All those issues were discovered while working for a customer)

Debian France

I spent quite some time on Debian France this month again. I started by setting up an internal gitolite to manage our accounting/administrative documents.

Then I updated galette, the web application that we are using to manage our database of members. In the process, I filed two bugs that we discovered. I immediately tested Galette by registering 4 members that joined during the former mini-Debconf in Paris.

We have plans to automate the membership renewal process so we have opened a Paypal account. This month we also cleared the last steps so that I and Sylvestre Ledru have full control on the Debian France bank account.

I also registered the new officers at the “Tribunal d’instance de Sarreguemines”.

Salt bug reports

During the last mini-debconf, I discovered Salt (thanks to Julien Cristau!) and since I had to switch some servers of mine, I took this opportunity to upgrade to wheezy and try out salt at the same time.

It took much more time than expected but the result is pleasant. The configuration of all my servers is now well documented/specified in a central Git repository, and moving services is much easier than before.

In the process, I filed quite some bugs (#2865, #2851, #2866 and #2875), most of them have been fixed in the 0.11.1 release that just happened.

Thanks

I wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2013!

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Filed Under: Debian News, News Tagged With: Activity summary, d-i, Debian, Debian France, Debian Live, galette, Me, Salt

Comments

  1. Niklas Rosenqvist says

    January 7, 2013 at 10:55 pm

    Hi! I’ve been having trouble with a package on Ubuntu-Server called ssmtp. I first tried to report a bug to launchpad but the page pointed me to the debian bug tracker and it’s very complicated to file a bug there (there is instructions on how to do it with an email with special headers). I was wondering if you could file it for me since you are a debian developer? The ssmtp version in Ubuntu 12.04.1 is 2.64 and it has bug that doesn’t allow for passwords containing spaces for it’s smtp configuration. You can’t enclose the password in “, ‘, or [] either. Can you please submit this so that it may be fixed in a later release? I would be very grateful 🙂

    Thank you very much for the time and effort you put in to these projects!

    • Raphaël Hertzog says

      January 8, 2013 at 8:49 am

      Hi, can you give the URL of the page which pointed you to the Debian bug tracker? It doesn’t seem right to direct you to Debian if you’re not a Debian user… and I don’t see anything like this on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ssmtp/+filebug

      Then if you believe that Debian should be informed, you should rather try to contact the current package maintainer, i.e. Anibal Monsalve Salazar . If you want to file a debian bug, you can use “reportbug” to generate that mail with special headers (though I don’t know what it does on an Ubuntu system).

      Hope this helps!

      • Niklas says

        January 8, 2013 at 9:27 am

        I must have ended up on this launchpad page earlier:
        https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/ssmtp

        Thank you for pointing me in the right direction, here is now the reported bug!
        https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ssmtp/+bug/1097172

  2. Thorsten says

    January 14, 2013 at 8:59 pm

    I`m very interested in your salt-config. Because I´m searching for a replacement of my cfengine2 setup (managing 58 boxes).
    It would be great, if you could do a post on this topic!

    With best regards
    /thorsten

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