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My Free Software Activities in December 2017

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My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (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 was allocated 12h and I had two hours left but I only spent 13h. During this time, I managed the LTS frontdesk during one week, reviewing new security issues and classifying the associated CVE (18 commits to the security tracker).

I also released DLA-1205-1 on simplesamlphp fixing 6 CVE. I prepared and released DLA-1207-1 on erlang with the help of the maintainer who tested the patch that I backported. I handled tkabber but it turned out that the CVE report was wrong, I reported this to MITRE who marked the CVE as DISPUTED (see CVE-2017-17533).

During my CVE triaging work, I decided to mark mp3gain and libnet-ping-external-perl as unsupported (the latter has been removed everywhere already). I re-classified the suricata CVE as not worth an update (following the decision of the security team). I also dropped global from dla-needed as the issue was marked unimportant but I still filed #884912 about it so that it gets tracked in the BTS.

I filed #884911 on ohcount requesting new upstream (fixing CVE) and update of homepage field (that is misleading in current package). I dropped jasperreports from dla-needed.txt as issues are undetermined and upstream is uncooperative, instead I suggested to mark the package as unsupported (see #884907).

Misc Debian Work

Debian Installer. I suggested to switch to isenkram instead of discover for automatic package installation based on recognized hardware. I also filed a bug on isenkram (#883470) and asked debian-cloud for help to complete the missing mappings.

Packaging. I sponsored asciidoc 8.6.10-2 for Joseph Herlant. I uplodaded new versions of live-tools and live-build fixing multiple bugs that had been reported (many with patches ready to merge). Only #882769 required a bit more work to track down and fix. I also uploaded dh-linktree 0.5 with a new feature contributed by Paul Gevers. By the way, I no longer use this package so I will happily give it over to anyone who needs it.

QA team. When I got my account on salsa.debian.org (a bit before the announce of the beta phase), I created the group for the QA team and setup a project for distro-tracker.

Bug reports. I filed #884713 on approx, requesting that systemd’s approx.socket be configured to not have any trigger limit.

Package Tracker

Following the switch to Python 3 by default, I updated the packaging provided in the git repository. I’m now also providing a systemd unit to run gunicorn3 for the website.

I merged multiple patches of Pierre-Elliott Bécue fixing bugs and adding a new feature (vcswatch support!). I fixed a bug related to the lack of a link to the experimental build logs and a bit of bug triaging.

I also filed two bugs against DAK related to bad interactions with the package tracker: #884930 because it does still use packages.qa.debian.org to send emails instead of tracker.debian.org. And #884931 because it sends removal mails to too many email addresses. And I filed a bug against the tracker (#884933) because the last issue also revealed a problem in the way the tracker handles removal mails.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2017

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A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In October, about 144 work hours have been dispatched among 12 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 8.5h (out of 13h allocated + 3.75h remaining, thus keeping 8.25h for December).
  • Ben Hutchings did 17 hours (out of 13h allocated + 4 extra hours).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 13 hours.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 14.5 hours (out of 13 hours allocated + 15.25 hours remaining, thus keeping 13.75 hours for December).
  • Guido Günther did 14 hours (out of 11h allocated + 5.5 extra hours, thus keeping 2.5h for December).
  • Hugo Lefeuvre did 13h.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did not request any work hours, but he had 3 hours left. He did not publish any report yet.
  • Markus Koschany did 14.75 hours (out of 13 allocated + 1.75 extra hours).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7h.
  • Raphaël Hertzog did 10 hours (out of 12h allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
  • Roberto C. Sanchez did 32.5 hours (out of 13 hours allocated + 24.50 hours remaining, thus keeping 5 extra hours for November).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 13 hours.

About external support partners

You might notice that there is sometimes a significant gap between the number of distributed work hours each month and the number of sponsored hours reported in the “Evolution of the situation” section. This is mainly due to some work hours that are “externalized” (but also because some sponsors pay too late). For instance, since we don’t have Xen experts among our Debian contributors, we rely on credativ to do the Xen security work for us. And when we get an invoice, we convert that to a number of hours that we drop from the available hours in the following month. And in the last months, Xen has been a significant drain to our resources: 35 work hours made in September (invoiced in early October and taken off from the November hours detailed above), 6.25 hours in October, 21.5 hours in November. We also have a similar partnership with Diego Bierrun to help us maintain libav, but here the number of hours tend to be very low.

In both cases, the work done by those paid partners is made freely available for others under the original license: credativ maintains a Xen 4.1 branch on GitHub, Diego commits his work on the release/0.8 branch in the official git repository.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours did not change at 183 hours per month. It would be nice if we could continue to find new sponsors as the amount of work seems to be slowly growing too.

The security tracker currently lists 55 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 35 (we’re a bit behind in CVE triaging apparently).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

My Free Software Activities in November 2017

by Leave a Comment

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (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 was allocated 12h but I only spent 10h. During this time, I managed the LTS frontdesk during one week, reviewing new security issues and classifying the associated CVE (16 commits to the security tracker).

I prepared and released DLA-1171-1 on libxml-libxml-perl.

I prepared a new update for simplesamlphp (1.9.2-1+deb7u1) fixing 6 CVE. I did not release any DLA yet since I was not able to test the updated package yet. I’m hoping that the the current maintainer can do it since he wanted to work on the update a few months ago.

Distro Tracker

Distro Tracker has seen a high level of activity in the last month. Ville Skyttä continued to contribute a few patches, he helped notably to get rid of the last blocker for a switch to Python 3.

I then worked with DSA to get the production instance (tracker.debian.org) upgraded to stretch with Python 3.5 and Django 1.11. This resulted in a few regressions related to the Python 3 switch (despite the large number of unit tests) that I had to fix.

In parallel Pierre-Elliott Bécue showed up on the debian-qa mailing list and he started to contribute. I have been exchanging with him almost daily on IRC to help him improve his patches. He has been very responsive and I’m looking forward to continue to cooperate with him. His first patch enabled the use “src:” and “bin:” prefix in the search feature to specify if we want to lookup among source packages or binary packages.

I did some cleanup/refactoring work after the switch of the codebase to Python 3 only.

Misc Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored many new packages: python-envparse 0.2.0-1, python-exotel 0.1.5-1, python-aws-requests-auth 0.4.1-1, pystaticconfiguration 0.10.3-1, python-jira 1.0.10-1, python-twilio 6.8.2-1, python-stomp 4.1.19-1. All those are dependencies for elastalert 0.1.21-1 that I also sponsored.

I sponsored updates for vboot-utils 0~R63-10032.B-2 (new upstream release for openssl 1.1 compat), aircrack-ng 1:1.2-0~rc4-4 (introducing airgraph-ng package) and asciidoc 8.6.10-2 (last upstream release, tool is deprecated).

Debian Installer. I submitted a few patches a while ago to support finding ISO images in LVM logical volumes in the hd-media installation method. Colin Watson reviewed them and made a few suggestions and expressed a few concerns. I improved my patches to take into account his suggestions and I resolved all the problems he pointed out. I then committed everything to the respective git repositories (for details review #868848, #868859, #868900, #868852).

Live Build. I merged 3 patches for live-build (#879169, #881941, #878430).

Misc. I uploaded Django 1.11.7 to stretch-backports. I filed an upstream bug on zim for #881464.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2017

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A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In October, about 197 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 21h (out of 16h allocated + 8.75h remaining, thus keeping 3.75h for November).
  • Ben Hutchings did 20 hours (out of 15h allocated + 9 extra hours, thus keeping 4 extra hours for November).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 7 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 1.5 hours remaining, thus keeping 15.25 hours for November).
  • Guido Günther did 6.5 hours (out of 11h allocated + 1 extra hour, thus keeping 5.5h for November).
  • Hugo Lefeuvre did 20h.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 2 hours (out of 5h allocated, thus keeping 3 hours for November).
  • Markus Koschany did 19 hours (out of 20.75h allocated, thus keeping 1.75 extra hours for November).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 7h allocated + 0.5 extra hours).
  • Raphaël Hertzog did 13.5 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.5 extra hours).
  • Roberto C. Sanchez did 11 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 14.75 hours remaining, thus keeping 24.50 extra hours for November, he will give back remaining hours at the end of the month).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 20.75 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours increased slightly to 183 hours per month. With the increasing number of security issues to deal with, and with the number of open issues not really going down, I decided to bump the funding target to what amounts to 1.5 full-time position.

The security tracker currently lists 50 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36 (we’re a bit behind in CVE triaging apparently).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

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