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My Free Software Activities in August 2016

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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 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.

This months is rather light since I was away in vacation for two weeks.

Kali related work

The new pkg-security team is working full steam and I reviewed/sponsored many packages during the month: polenum, accheck, braa, t50, ncrack, websploit.

I filed bug #834515 against sbuild since sbuild-createchroot was no longer usable for kali-rolling due to the embedded dash. That misfeature has been reverted and implemented through an explicit option.

I brought the attention of ftpmasters on #832163 since we had unexpected packages in the standard section (they have been discovered in the Kali live ISO while we did not want them).

I uploaded two fontconfig NMU to finally push to Debian a somewhat cleaner fix for the problem of various captions being displayed as squares after a font upgrade (see #828037 and #835142).

I tested (twice) a live-build patch from Adrian Gibanel Lopez implementing EFI boot with grub and merged it into the official git repository (see #731709).

I filed bug #835983 on python-pypdf2 since it has an invalid dependency forbidding co-installation with python-pypdf.

I orphaned splint since its maintainer was missing in action (MIA) and immediately made a QA upload to fix the RC bug which kicked it out of testing (this package is a build dependency of a Kali package).

django-jsonfield

I wrote a patch to make python-django-jsonfield compatible with Django 1.10 (#828668) and I committed that patch in the upstream repository.

Distro Tracker

I made some changes to make the codebase compatible with Django 1.10 (and added Django 1.10 to the tox test matrix). I added a “Debian Maintainer Dashboard” link next to people’s name on request of Lucas Nussbaum (#830548).

I made a preliminary review of Paul Wise’s patch to add multiarch hints (#833623) and improved the handling of the mailbot when it gets MIME Headers referencing an unknown charset (like “cp-850”, Python only knows of “cp850”)

I also helped Peter Palfrader to enabled a .onion address for tracker.debian.org, see onion.debian.org for the full list of services available over Tor.

Misc stuff

I updated my letsencrypt.sh salt formula to work with the latest version of letsencrypt.sh (0.2.0)

I merged updated translations for the Debian Administrator’s Handbook from weblate.org and uploaded a new version to Debian.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2016

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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 July, 136.6 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré has been allocated 4 hours again but in the end he put back his 8 pending hours in the pool for the next months.
  • Balint Reczey did 18 hours (out of 7 hours allocated + 2 remaining, thus keeping 2 extra hours for August).
  • Ben Hutchings did 15 hours (out of 14.7 hours allocated + 1 remaining, keeping 0.7 extra hour for August).
  • Brian May did 14.7 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 14 hours (out of 14.7 hours, thus keeping 0.7 hours for next month).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 13 hours (out of 14.7 hours allocated, thus keeping 1.7 hours extra hours for August).
  • Guido Günther did 8 hours.
  • Markus Koschany did 14.7 hours.
  • Ola Lundqvist did 14 hours (out of 14.7 hours assigned, thus keeping 0.7 extra hours for August).
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 14 hours (out of 14.7h allocated + 11.25 remaining, the 11.95 extra hours will be put back in the global pool as Santiago is stepping down).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.7 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours jumped to 159 hours per month thanks to GitHub joining as our second platinum sponsor (funding 3 days of work per month)! Our funding goal is getting closer but it’s not there yet.

The security tracker currently lists 22 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file likewise. That’s a sharp decline compared to last month.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

My Free Software Activities in July 2016

by

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.

DebConf 16

I was in South Africa for the whole week of DebConf 16 and gave 3 talks/BoF. You can find the slides and the videos in the links of their corresponding page:

I was a bit nervous about the third BoF (on using Debian money to fund Debian projects) but discussed with many persons during the week and it looks like the project evolved quite a bit in the last 10 years and while it’s still a sensitive topic (and rightfully so given the possible impacts) people are willing to discuss the issues and to experiment. You can have a look at the gobby notes that resulted from the live discussion.

I spent most of the time discussing with people and I did not do much technical work besides trying (and failing) to fix accessibility issues with tracker.debian.org (help from knowledgeable people is welcome, see #830213).

Debian Packaging

I uploaded a new version of zim to fix a reproducibility issue (and forwarded the patch upstream).

I uploaded Django 1.8.14 to jessie-backports and had to fix a failing test (pull request).

I uploaded python-django-jsonfield 1.0.1 a new upstream version integrating the patches I prepared in June.

I managed the (small) ftplib library transition. I prepared the new version in experimental, ensured reverse build dependencies do still build and coordinated the transition with the release team. This was all triggered by a reproducible build bug that I got and that made me look at the package… last time upstream had disappeared (upstream URL was even gone) but it looks like he became active again and he pushed a new release.

I filed wishlist bug #832053 to request a new deblog command in devscripts. It should make it easier to display current and former build logs.

Kali related Debian work

I worked on many issues that were affecting Kali (and Debian Testing) users:

  • I made an open-vm-tools NMU to get the package back into testing.
  • I filed #830795 on nautilus and #831737 on pbnj to forward Kali bugs to Debian.
  • I wrote a fontconfig patch to make it ignore .dpkg-tmp files. I also forwarded that patch upstream and filed a related bug in gnome-settings-daemon which is actually causing the problem by running fc-cache at the wrong times.
  • I started a discussion to see how we could fix the synaptics touchpad problem in GNOME 3.20. In the end, we have a new version of xserver-xorg-input-all which only depends on xserver-xorg-input-libinput and not on xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (no longer supported by GNOME). This is after upstream refused to reintroduce synaptics support.
  • I filed #831730 on desktop-base because KDE’s plasma-desktop is no longer using the Debian background by default. I had to seek upstream help to find out a possible solution (deployed in Kali only for now).
  • I filed #832503 because the way dpkg and APT manages foo:any dependencies when foo is not marked “Multi-Arch: allowed” is counter-productive… I discovered this while trying to use a firefox-esr:any dependency. And I filed #832501 to get the desired “Multi-Arch: allowed” marker on firefox-esr.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2016

by

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

Individual reports

In June, 158.25 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

DebConf 16 Presentation

If you want to know more about how the LTS project is organized, you can watch the presentation I gave during DebConf 16 in Cape Town.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours increased a little bit at 135 hours per month thanks to 3 new sponsors (Laboratoire LEGI – UMR 5519 / CNRS, Quarantainenet BV, GNI MEDIA). Our funding goal is getting closer but it’s not there yet.

The security tracker currently lists 40 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 38 packages awaiting an update.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

Tags

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