My Free Software Activities for December 2014

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 20 hours on Debian LTS. I did the following tasks:

• CVE triage: I pushed 47 commits to the security tracker this month. Due to this, I submitted two wishlist bugs against the security tracker: #772927 and #772961.
• I released DLA-106-1 which had been prepared by Osamu Aoki.
• I released DLA-111-1 fixing one CVE on cpio.
• I released DLA-113-1 and DLA-114-1 on bsd-mailx/heirloom-mailx fixing one CVE for the former and two CVE for the latter.
• I released DLA-120-1 on xorg-server. This update alone took more than 6h to backport all the patches, fixing a massive set of 12 CVE.

Not in the paid hours, but still related to Debian LTS, I kindly asked Linux Weekly News to cover Debian LTS in their security page and this is now live. You will see DLA on the usual security page and there’s also a dedicated page tracking this: http://lwn.net/Alerts/Debian-LTS/

I modified the LTS wiki page to have a dedicated Funding sub-page. This avoids having a direct link to Freexian’s offer on the main LTS page (which surprised a few persons) and allows to give some more background information and makes it possible for other persons/companies to also get listed in the same way (since there’s no exclusive relationship between Debian and Freexian here!).

And I also answered some questions of Nguyen Cong (a new LTS contributor, employed by Toshiba with explicit permission to contribute to LTS during work hours! \o/), on IRC, on ask.debian.net (again) and on the mailing list! It’s great to see the LTS project expanding beyond current members of the Debian project.

Distro Tracker

I want to give again some more priority to Distro Tracker at least to complete the transition from the old PTS to this new service… last month has been a bit better than November but not by much.

I reviewed a patch in #771604 (about displaying long descriptions), I merged another patch in #757443 (fixing bad markup which rendered the page unusable with Konqueror), I fixed #760382 where package gone through NEW would never lose their version in NEW.

Kali related contributions

I’m not covering my Kali work here but only some things which got contributed upstream (or to Debian).

First I ensured that we could build the Kali ISO with live-build 4.x in jessie. This resulted in multiple patches merged to the Debian live project (1 2 3 4). I also submitted a patch for a regression in the handling of conditionals in package lists, it got dropped and has been fixed differently instead. I also filed #772651 to report a problem in how live-build decided of the variant of the live-config package to install.

Kali has forked the sysvinit package to be able to disable the services by default and I was investigating how to port this feature in the new systemd world. It turns out systemd has such a feature natively: it’s called Preset files. Unfortunately it’s not usable in Debian because Debian does not call systemctl preset during package installation. I filed bug #772555 to get this fixed (in Stretch, it’s too late for Jessie :-().

Saltstack

I’m using salt to automate some administration task in Kali, at home and at work. I discovered recently that the project tries to collect “Salt Formulas”: those are ready to use instructions for as many services as possibles.

I started using this for some simple services and quickly felt the need to extend “salt-formula”, the set of states used to configure salt with salt. I submitted 5 pull requests (#73 and #74 to configure salt in standalone mode, #75 to enable the upstream package repositories, #76 to automatically download and enable the desired salt formulas, #77 for some bugfixes) and they have all been merged in less than 24 hours (that’s the kind of thing that motivates you to contribute again in the future!).

I also submitted a bug fix for samba-formula and a bug report in salt itself (#19180).

BTW I have some salt states to setup schroot and sbuild. I will try to package those as proper salt formulas in the future…

Misc stuff

Mailing list governance. In Debian, we often complain about meta-discussion on mailing lists (i.e. discussions about how we discuss together) and at the same time we need to have that kind of discussions from time to time. So I suggested to host those discussions in a new mailing list and to get this new list setup, our rules require to have other people interested in having this list. The idea had some support when we discussed it on debian-private, so I relaunched it on debian-project while filing the official request in the BTS: #772645. Unfortunately, I only got one second. So if you’re interested in pursuing this idea, speak up now…

Sponsorship. I sponsored another Galette plugin this month: galette-plugin-fullcard. Thanks to François-Régis Vuillemin for his work.

Publican. Following one of my bug report against Publican and with the help of the upstream author, we identified the problem and I submitted a patch.

Thanks

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