Freexian’s third report about Debian Long Term Support

Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In October 2014, we affected 13.75h works hours to 3 contributors:

Thorsten Alteholz
Raphaël Hertzog worked only 10 hours. The remaining hours will be done over November.
Holger Levsen did nothing (for unexpected personal reasons), he will catch up in November.

Obviously, only the hours done have been paid. Should the backlog grow further, we will seek for more paid contributors (to share the workload) and to make it easier to redispatch work hours once a contributor knows that he won’t be able to handle the hours that were affected to him/her.

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we gained two new sponsors (Daevel and FOSSter, thanks to them!) and we have now 45.5 hours of paid LTS work to “spend” each month. That’s great but we are still far from our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit worse than last month: while the dla-needed.txt file only lists 33 packages awaiting an update (6 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total. This differences has two explanations: CVE triaging for squeeze has not been done in the last days, and the POODLE issue(s) with SSLv3 affects a very large number of packages where it’s not always clear what the proper action is.

In any case, it’s never too late to join the growing list of sponsors and help us do a better job, please check with your company managers. If not possible for this year, consider including it in the budget for next year.