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 (44.52 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
The Debian Administrator’s Handbook
Wheezy update completed. Roland and I completed the update of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook for Debian 7 Wheezy. We still have some proofreading work to do but you can already enjoy the result here: https://debian-handbook.info/browse/wheezy/
Feel free to report back any problem that you discover. You can also submit us patches ready to apply if you want to go one step further.
Publican contributions. The book is generated with publican and I maintain its Debian package. This month I got a release critical bug because it stopped working… it turns out that the problem lied in libxml-treebuilder-perl and I thus reassigned #728885 while providing a tentative patch to the upstream author. After a few days without action from the pkg-perl team, and after having received a FTBFS bug on debian-handbook (of course publican was broken in unstable!), I prepared a fixed package myself and I uploaded it (I’m still part of the pkg-perl team although I’m inactive).
Since I used publican heavily this month, I filed two tickets in its bugzilla. I requested a new feature in #1034836 (the possibility to keep around the former string for fuzzy strings to update), and I reported a problem with the handling of “\n” in PO files in #1036150.
Debian France
Galette update. I updated the galette package and its paypal plugin, and I deployed those on france.debian.net. It had some fixes for the reminder mails sent to members.
Bylaws update. I also resumed my work on preparing new bylaws for Debian France. Sylvestre Ledru came up with a draft (with the help of a lawyer) a few months ago and I’m reviewing/improving them now. The main goal is to clarify that Debian France is meant to be a Trusted Organization for the Debian project.
Debian France Shop. We had the idea since a few months already but Sylvestre did the leg work to open a Debian France shop with the help of EnVenteLibre. I asked our members to prepare some CSS that better match the Debian colors and this should be fixed in a few days. The first goodies will also start to appear shortly, just in time for Christmas!
Misc Debian work
Distro Tracker. In the continuation of the Google Summer of Code, I asked the DSA team to setup a new virtual machine to host tracker.debian.org, an instance of Distro Tracker, the rewritten Package Tracking System. They have done their part of the job (except the mail setup), it’s now waiting on me to find some time to complete some cleanups and deploy the thing.
WordPress. I packaged wordpress 3.7.1 and sent a call for help on debian-mentors. I got 3 replies, I gave them some initial direction but I haven’t heard back anything since. WordPress 3.8 is expected in a few days, hopefully one of the new volunteers will take care of preparing the next update.
Dpkg regressions. I haven’t done anything for multiple months but at least I keep running the git version of dpkg and I detected two regressions. Good to have them squashed before the upcoming 1.17.2 upload to unstable.
PTS fix. I fixed some warnings that the PTS code started generating since the upgrade of its host to wheezy. They were generating some annoying backscatter mails to users of the pts@qa.debian.org bot.
Ruby security update. I helped the ruby team to prepare the required security updates of ruby1.8 and ruby1.9.1 (see #730178 and #730189). This work was sponsored by Kali/Offensive Security.
Smartcard setup. I bought 2 OpenPGP smartcards with a reader and I moved all my private keys on those devices (one card with the master key for signature/certification to be kept at home, one card for daily/mobile usage with the subkeys for encryption/signature/authentication). My laptop’s harddrive doesn’t contain any private key anymore. I have kept the required offline backup in a safe place, but in the end, my private keys are much harder to steal. I should write down my findings in another article…
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
The smartcard setup thing is very interesting, especially WRT to the reader you bought and any issue you might have faced. A big +1 to a followup article!
FWIW I bought the following readers: http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/product_info.php?cPath=1_26&products_id=121 (Gemalto PC Express Card) and http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/product_info.php?cPath=1_26&products_id=124 (Gemalto PC TR)
Both are recognized without problems.