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 13.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:
- I prepared and released DLA 330-1 fixing two CVE on unzip.
- I prepared a bouncycastle update fixing CVE-2015-7940 (after having requested that CVE assignment since nobody had done it yet) but I have not yet released the corresponding DLA yet since I’m waiting for a review by the upstream author. This is hairy cryptographic Java code that was non-trivial to backport and I’d rather make sure that I do not mess anything. The patches are available in the bug report #802671 that I opened.
- I tested the update to MySQL 5.5 with multiple packages and sent back my findings to the debian-lts mailing list.
I also started a conversation about what paid contributors could work on if they have some spare cycle as the current funding level might allow us to invest some time on work outside of just plain security updates.
The Debian Administrator’s Handbook
I spent quite some time finalizing the Jessie book update, both for the content and for the layout of the printed book.
Misc Debian work
GNOME 3.18. I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer working with GNOME Shell 3.18 and I filed bugs #800660 and #802480 about an annoying gnome-keyring regression… I did multiple test rounds with the Debian maintainers (Dmitry Shachnev, kudos to him!) and the upstream developers (see here and here). Apart from those regressions, I like GNOME 3.18!
Python-modules team migration to Git. After the Git migration, and since the team policy now imposes usage of git-dpm on all members, I made some tries with it on the python-django package while pushing version 1.8.5 to experimental. And the least I can say is that I’m not pleased with the result. I thus filed 3 bugs summarizing the problems I have with git-dpm: #801666 (no way to set the upstream branch names from within the repository), #801667 (no clean way to merge between packaging branches), #801668 (does not create upstream tag immediately on tarball import). That is on top of other randomly stupid bugs that were already reported like #801548 (does not work with perfectly valid pre-existing upstream tags).
Django packaging. I filed bugs on all packages build-depending on python-django that fail to build with Django 1.8 and informed them that I would upload Django 1.8 to unstable in early November (it’s done already). Then I fixed python-django-jsonfield myself since Distro Tracker relies on this package.
Following this small mass-bug filing, I filed a wishlist bug on devscripts to improve the “mass-bug” helper script (see #801926). And since I used “ratt” to rebuild the packages, I filed a wishlist issue on this new tool as well.
Tryton 3.6 upgrade. I upgraded my own Tryton installation to version 3.6 and filed bug #803066 because the SysV init script was not working properly. That also reminded me that the DD process of Matthias Behrle (the tryton package maintainer) was stalled due to a bug in the NM infrastructure so I pinged the NM team and we sorted out a way for me to advocate him and get his process going…
Distro Tracker. I continued my work to refactor the way we handle incoming mail processing (branch people/hertzog/mailprocessing). It’s now mostly finished and I need to deploy it in a test environment before being able to roll it out on tracker.debian.org.
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
