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
I did not ask for any paid hours this month and won’t be requesting paid hours for the next 5 months as I have a big project to handle with a deadline in June. That said I still did a few LTS related tasks:
- I uploaded a new version of debian-security-support (2016.01.07) to officialize that virtualbox-ose is no longer supported in Squeeze and that redmine was not really supportable ever since we dropped support for rails.
- Made a summary of the discussion about what to support in wheezy and started a new round of discussions with some open questions. I invited contributors to try to pickup one topic, study it and bring the discussion to some conclusion.
- I wrote a blog post to recruit new paid contributors. Brian May, Markus Koschany and Damyan Ivanov candidated and will do their first paid hours over February.
Distro Tracker
Due to many nights spent on playing Splatoon (I’m at level 33, rank B+, anyone else playing it?), I did not do much work on Distro Tracker.
After having received the bug report #809211, I investigated the reasons why SQLite was no longer working satisfactorily in Django 1.9 and I opened the upstream ticket 26063 and I had a long discussion with two upstream developers to find out the best fix. The next point release (1.9.2) will fix that annoying regression.
I also merged a couple of contributions (two patches from Christophe Siraut, one adding descriptions to keywords, cf #754413, one making it more obvious that chevrons in action items are actionable to show more data, a patch from Balasankar C in #810226 fixing a bad URL in an action item).
I fixed a small bug in the “unsubscribe” command of the mail bot, it was not properly recognizing source packages.
I updated the task notifying of new upstream versions to use the data generated by UDD (instead of the data generated by Christoph Berg’s mole-based implementation which was suffering from a few bugs).
Debian Packaging
Testing experimental sbuild. While following the work of Johannes Schauer on sbuild, I installed the version from experimental to support his work and give him some feedback. In the process I uncovered #810248.
Python sponsorship. I reviewed and uploaded many packages for Daniel Stender who keeps doing great work maintaining prospector and all its recursive dependencies: pylint-common, python-requirements-detector, sphinx-argparse, pylint-django, prospector. He also prepared an upload of python-bcrypt which I requested last month for Django.
Django packaging. I uploaded Django 1.8.8 to jessie-backports.
My stable updates for Django 1.7.11 was not handled before the release of Debian 8.3 even though it was filed more than 1.5 months before.
Misc stuff. My stable update for debian-handbook has been accepted fairly shortly after my last monthly report (thank you Adam!) so I uploaded the package once acked by a release manager. I also sponsor a backports upload of zim prepared by Joerg Desch.
Kali related work
Kernel work. The switch to Linux 4.3 in Kali resulted in a few bug reports that I investigated with the help of #debian-kernel and where I reported my findings back so that the Debian kernel could also benefit from the fixes I uploaded to Kali: first we included a patch for a regression in the vmwgfx video driver used by VMWare virtual machines (which broke the gdm login screen), then we fixed the input-modules udeb to fix support of some Logitech keyboards in debian-installer (see #796096).
Misc work. I made a non-maintainer upload of python-maxminddb to fix #805689 which had been removed from stretch and that we needed in Kali. I also had to NMU libmaxminddb since it was no longer available on armel and we actually support armel in Kali. During that NMU, it occurred to me that dh-exec could offer a feature of “optional install”, that is installing a file that exists but not failing if it doesn’t exist. I filed this as #811064 and it stirred up quite some debate.
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
