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My Free Software Activities in July & August 2018

September 3, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog 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.

Distro Tracker

A lot of things happened in the last two months. First of all there was a Google summer of code project adding new synoptic views for Debian teams (example here). I reviewed and merged many merge requests (31, 40, 42, 43). While investigating how to improve the performances, I discovered an annoying limitation the database-backed Django cache backend which I reported to the upstream developers (Django ticket #29584).

With the many incremental changes made over the last months, the documentation was really lacking. I used this opportunity to entirely restructure it with one big section for each kind of readers: simple users, administrators, developers/contributors. Have a look at it. When I did this, I merged the part of the documentation which was in the developers-reference and left there only a pointer to the new documentation.

I then made an announce to debian-devel-announce to let people know of the new features (and of the corresponding documentation).

I went away two weeks in vacation (around DebConf) and used this free time to start a big refactoring that I had planned for a long time (see Task redesign). I submitted the result in a merge request to get some feedback and put this into production when I came back home. I had to deal with a few regressions but I’m pleased with the result since it already helped me to fix a few longstanding issues (run tasks more often, better handling of standards-version see #895393 and #904694, catch up with extraction of some files that failed to be extracted and were never retried, etc.).

Finally, I did some bug triage and fixed a couple of issues along the way:

Fix the WNPP task to know about “RFS” tags
Fixed issue with custom auth backend
Dropped files that were incorrectly extracted twice (#784164)
Fix the management of keywords in subscription page (#906963), add functional tests for this
Fix regression in autopkgtest action item due to “neutral” status (#907062)
Improve distro-tracker vcswatch output (#906663)
I forbid users to login with their old Alioth SSL certificate, as the associated emails are no longer working.

And I also filed some tickets for things to improve in the future:

Improve the extract_source_files plugin by recording the absence of files and by making checkpoints of the progress
Replace ActionItem model with PackageData
Make UserEmail entirely separate from data imported from package repositories.

pkg-security

I sponsored many uploads (patator, wifite, hashcat, masscan, brutespray, curvedns, ledger-wallets-udev, ccrypt) and made many uploads by myself as we have to upload all our packages to fix the Maintainer field. I asked other team members to join and step in.

I noticed the IRC notifications were broken and I helped Alexander Wirt to fix them for all projects hosted on salsa. I also submitted a pull request to invite the BTS bot on our channel (to announce uploads and bugs).

After having investigated the RC bug file against acccheck, I requested its removal in #904200. And I also requested a bin-nmu for wcc due to changes in binutils (#904073).

Last but not least, I advocated Philippe Thierry (a team member) for his process to become a Debian developer!

Misc Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored asciidoc for Joseph Herlant and asked him to apply to the Debian Developer status. He did so a bit later and I advocated him. Yay for saving time for the future!

Pyside2 packaging. After lots of work, at Freexian, we were able to finish the pyside2 package and upload it to the archive. Along the way we filed a few issues to upstream: #740 (segfault in shiboken), #741 (python3.7 compatibility issue), #758 (small license problem), #759 (better compat with usual setup.py parameters), #764 (armel/armhf build failure), #765 (ppc* build failure).

Misc bug reports. I filed #907246 on git-buildpackage: gbp import-dsc should warn users when changes will be lost. And I also filed #903483 on dropbear with a patch to set a PATH for root that includes /usr/sbin and /sbin.

Other stuff. I submitted a pull request on pysimplesoap. I uploaded easy-rsa 3.0.4-2 adding the missing make-cadir command and adding autopkgtest (problem discovered while working on my book).

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2018

August 24, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog Leave a Comment

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

Individual reports

In July, about 224 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 12 hours (out of 10 hours allocated + 2 extra hours).
Antoine Beaupré did 15 hours.
Ben Hutchings did 10 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 3 extra hours, thus keeping 8 extra hours for August).
Brian May did 10 hours.
Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 17.25 hours (out of 30 hours allocated + 6.75 extra hours, thus keeping 19.5 extra hours for August).
Holger Levsen did nothing (out of 8 hours allocated + 8 extra hours, thus keeping 16 extra hours for August).
Hugo Lefeuvre did 7.75 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 9.5 extra hours, but gave back the 16.75 remaining hours).
Markus Koschany did 30 hours.
Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
Ola Lundqvist did 4 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 4 remaining hours, thus keeping 8 extra hours for August).
Roberto C. Sanchez did 18 hours.
Santiago Ruano Rincón did 17.5 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 9.5 extra hours).
Thorsten Alteholz did 30 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours did not change.

The security tracker currently lists 51 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 43 packages needing an update.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 34 months)
GitHub (for 25 months)
Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP)

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 51 months)
Blablacar (for 49 months)
Linode (for 39 months)
Babiel GmbH (for 29 months)
Plat’Home (for 28 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 50 months)
Trollweb Solutions (for 47 months)
Nantes Métropole (for 44 months)
Dalenys (for 40 months)
Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 36 months)
Univention GmbH (for 35 months)
Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 29 months)
maxcluster GmbH (for 23 months)
Exonet B.V. (for 19 months)
Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 13 months)
Vente-privee.com (for 10 months)
CINECA (for 3 months)

Bronze sponsors:

David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 51 months)
Evolix (for 50 months)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 50 months)
Freeside Internet Service (for 49 months)
MyTux (for 49 months)
Intevation GmbH (for 47 months)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 47 months)
Daevel SARL (for 46 months)
Bitfolk LTD (for 45 months)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 45 months)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 44 months)
NUMLOG (for 44 months)
WinGo AG (for 43 months)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 39 months)
Sig-I/O (for 37 months)
Entr’ouvert (for 34 months)
Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 32 months)
GNI MEDIA (for 26 months)
Laboratoire LEGI – UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 26 months)
Quarantainenet BV (for 26 months)
RHX Srl (for 23 months)
Bearstech (for 18 months)
LiHAS (for 18 months)
People Doc (for 14 months)
Catalyst IT Ltd (for 12 months)
Supagro (for 8 months)
Demarcq SAS (for 6 months)
TrapX Security (for 3 months)

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2018

July 20, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog Leave a Comment

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

Individual reports

In June, about 202 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 8 hours (out of 10 hours allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for July).
Antoine Beaupré did 24 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 12 extra hours).
Ben Hutchings did 12 hours (out of 15 hours allocated, thus keeping 3 extra hours for July).
Brian May did 10 hours.
Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 17 hours (out of 23.75 hours allocated, thus keeping 6.75 extra hours for July).
Holger Levsen did nothing (out of 8 hours allocated, thus keeping 8 extra hours for July).
Hugo Lefeuvre did 4.25 hours (out of 23.75 hours allocated, but gave back 10 hours, thus keeping 9.5 hours for July).
Markus Koschany did 23.75 hours.
Ola Lundqvist did 6 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 17.5 remaining hours, but gave back 15.5 unused hours, thus keeping 4 extra hours for July).
Roberto C. Sanchez did 29.5 hours (out of 18 hours allocated + 11.5 extra hours).
Santiago Ruano Rincón did 5.5 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 7 extra hours, thus keeping 9.5 extra hours for July).
Thorsten Alteholz did 23.75 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours increased to 210 hours per month. We lost a silver sponsor but gained a new platinum sponsor with the Civil Infrastructure Platform project (hosted by the Linux Foundation, see their announce).

We are very happy to see the CIP project engage directly with the Debian project and try to work together to build the software stack for tomorrow’s world’s infrastructure.

The security tracker currently lists 57 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 52.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 33 months)
GitHub (for 24 months)
Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP)

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 49 months)
Blablacar (for 48 months)
Linode (for 38 months)
Babiel GmbH (for 28 months)
Plat’Home (for 27 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 49 months)
Trollweb Solutions (for 46 months)
Nantes Métropole (for 43 months)
Dalenys (for 39 months)
Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 35 months)
Univention GmbH (for 34 months)
Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 28 months)
maxcluster GmbH (for 22 months)
Exonet B.V. (for 18 months)
Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 12 months)
Vente-privee.com (for 9 months)
CINECA

Bronze sponsors:

David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 50 months)
Evolix (for 49 months)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 49 months)
Freeside Internet Service (for 48 months)
MyTux (for 48 months)
Intevation GmbH (for 46 months)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 46 months)
Daevel SARL (for 45 months)
Bitfolk LTD (for 43 months)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 43 months)
NUMLOG (for 43 months)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 42 months)
WinGo AG (for 42 months)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 38 months)
Sig-I/O (for 36 months)
Entr’ouvert (for 33 months)
Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 31 months)
GNI MEDIA (for 25 months)
Laboratoire LEGI – UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 25 months)
Quarantainenet BV (for 25 months)
RHX Srl (for 22 months)
Bearstech (for 17 months)
LiHAS (for 17 months)
People Doc (for 13 months)
Catalyst IT Ltd (for 11 months)
Supagro (for 7 months)
Demarcq SAS (for 5 months)
TrapX Security

My Free Software Activities in June 2018

July 4, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog Leave a Comment

Distro Tracker

I merged a branch adding appstream related data (thanks to Matthias Klumpp). I merged multiple small contributions from a new contributor: Lev Lazinskiy submitted a fix to have the correct version string in the documentation and ensured that we could not use the login page if we are already identified (see MR 36).

Arthur Del Esposte continued his summer of code project and submitted multiple merge requests that I reviewed multiple times before they were ready to be merged. He implemented a team search feature, created a small framework to display an overview of all packages of a team.

On a more administrative level, I had to deal with many subscriptions that became immediately invalid when alioth.debian.org shut down. So I tried to replace all email subscriptions using *@users.alioth.debian.org with alternate emails linked to the same account. When no fallback was possible, I simply deleted the subscription.

pkg-security work

I sponsored cewl 5.4.3-1 (new upstream release) and wfuzz_2.2.11-1.dsc (new upstream release), masscan 1.0.5+ds1-1 (taken over by the team, new upstream release) and wafw00f 0.9.5-1 (new upstream release). I sponsored wifite2, made the unittests run during the build and added some autopkgtest. I submitted a pull request to skip tests when some tools are unavailable.

I filed #901595 on reaver to get a fixed watch file.

Misc Debian work

I reviewed multiple merge requests on live-build (about its handling of archive keys and the associated documentation). I uploaded a new version of live-boot (20180603) with the pending changes.

I sponsored pylint-django 0.11-1 for Joseph Herlant, xlwt 1.3.0-2 (bug fix) and python-num2words_0.5.6-1~bpo9+1 (backport requested by a user).

I uploaded a new version of ftplib fixing a release critical bug (#901224: ftplib FTCBFS: uses the build architecture compiler).

I submitted two patches to git (fixing french l10n in git bisect and marking two strings for translation).

I reviewed multiple merge requests on debootstrap: --components not carried over with --foreign/--second-stage and enabling --merged-usr by default.

Thanks

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

Distro Tracker

pkg-security

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Individual reports

Evolution of the situation

Thanks to our sponsors

Individual reports

Evolution of the situation

Thanks to our sponsors

Distro Tracker

pkg-security work

Misc Debian work

Thanks

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