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My Free Software Activities in June 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.

Debian packaging

Django and Python. I uploaded Django 1.9.7 and filed an upstream ticket (#26755) for a failure seen in its DEP-8 tests.

I packaged/sponsored python-django-modeltranslation and python-paypal. I opened a pull request on model-translation to fix failing tests in the Debian package build.

I packaged a new python-django-jsonfield (1.0.0), filed a bug and discovered some regression in its PostgreSQL support. I helped on the upstream ticket and I have been granted commit rights. I used this opportunity to do some bug triage and push a few fixes. I also discussed the future of the module and ended up starting a discussion on Django’s developer list about the possibility to add a JSONField to the core.

CppUTest. I uploaded a new upstream version (3.8) with more than a year of work. I found out that make install does not install a required header so I opened a ticket with a patch. The package ended up not compiling on quite a few architectures so I opened a ticket and prepared a fix for some of those failures with the help of the upstream developers. I also added a DEP-8 tests after having uploaded a broken (untested) package…

systemd support in net-snmp and postfix. I worked on adding native systemd service units to net-snmp (#782243) and postfix (#715188). In both cases, the maintainers have not been very reactive so far so I uploaded my changes as delayed NMU.

pkg-security team. The team that I started quietly a few months ago is now growing, both with new members and new packages. I created the required Teams/pkg-security wiki page. I sponsored xprobe, hydra, made an upload of medusa to merge Kali changes into Debian (and at the same time submitting the patch to upstream).

fontconfig. After having read Jonathan McDowell’s analysis of a bug that I experienced multiple times (and that many Kali users had too), I opened bug #828037 to get it fixed once for all. Unfortunately, nothing happened yet.

DebConf 16

I spent some time to prepare the 2 talks and the BoF that I will give/manage in Cape Town next week:

  • Kali Linux’s Experience https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/39/
  • 2 Years of Work of Paid Contributors in the Debian LTS Project https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/40/
  • Using Debian Money to Fund Debian Projects https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/41/

Distro Tracker

I continued to mentor Vladimir Likic who managed to finish his first patch. He is now working on documentation for new contributors based on his recent experience.

I enhanced the tox configuration to run tests with Django 1.8 LTS with fatal warnings (python -Werror) so as to ensure that I’m not relying on any deprecated feature and so that I can be sure that the codebase will work on the next Django LTS release (1.11). Thanks to this, I did discover quite a few places where I have been using deprecated API and I fixed them all (the JSONField update to 1.0.0 I mentionned above was precisely to fix such a warning).

I also fixed a few more issues with folded mail headers that you can’t inject back in a new Message object and with messages lacking the subject field. All those have been caught through real (spam) email generating exceptions wich are then mailed to me.

Kali related work

I uploaded a new live-boot (5.20160608) to Debian to fix a bug where the boot process was blocking on some timeout.

I forwarded a Kali bug against libatk-wrapper-java (#827741) which turned out to be an OpenJDK bug.

I filed #827749 against reprepro to request a way to remove selected internal file references. This is required if you want to be able to make a file disappear and if that file is part of a snapshot that you want to keep despite this. But in truth, my real need is to be able to replace the .orig.tar.gz used by Kali by the orig.tar.gz used by Debian… those conflicts break the mirroring/import script.

Salt

I have been using salt to deploy a new service, and I developed patches for a few issues in salt formulas. I also created a new letsencrypt-sh formula to manage TLS certificates with the letsencrypt.sh ACME client.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 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 May, 166 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 20h.
  • Ben Hutchings did 10 hours (out of 15 hours allocated, keeping 5 extra hours for June).
  • Brian May did 15 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
  • Guido Günther did 17.25 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 9.25 remaining hours).
  • Markus Koschany did 30 hours (out of 31 hours allocated, thus keeping one extra hour for June).
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 20 hours (out of 20h allocated + 8 remaining, thus keeping 8 extra hours for June).
  • 8 hours that were initially affected to Scott Kitterman have been put back in the June pool after he resigned.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 31 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours stayed the same over May but will likely increase a little bit the next month as we have two new Bronze sponsors being processed.

The security tracker currently lists 36 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 36 packages awaiting an update.

Despite the higher than usual number of work hours dispatched in May, we still have more open CVE than we used to have at the end of the squeeze LTS period. So more support is always needed…

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

My Free Software Activities in May 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.

Debian LTS

Due to some departure and increased workload, I wanted to find out a few new paid contributors for Debian LTS. So I sent a mail to debian-jobs@lists.debian.org and contrary to last time (where I posted the announce only here on my blog), I had plenty of replies… I ended up enrolling 6 new contributors and refusing 3 persons that did not have the required profile.

All new contributors are supposed to handle at least one LTS update on their free time to get up to speed. But from the 6 new contributors only 3 managed to handle their “training update” in May. 🙁

During the month I spent quite some time providing guidance to the new contributors both in private mails and on the debian-lts mailing list.

I also reviewed a xen update where I had (rightfully) some doubts about the work done.

Packaging work

fonts-cantarell. After having diagnosed the problem last month, I got annoyed enough by the lack of a fixed package that I found a way to package a newer upstream release of fonts-cantarell without requiring a fontforge update that was likely to take some time still… so I prepared and uploaded 0.0.24-1.

cpputest. Bug #823711 reported some license issues with some of the files. I immediately forwarded this upstream (issue 961) and fixed it in Debian by repacking the upstream tarball. Fortunately upstream has been quick to handle his and there’s a new upstream release (3.8) where the problematic files have been dropped.

live-boot. Kali’s live images were no longer booting (stuck in the initrd) and with the help of Ben Hutchings we diagnosed this back to #823069 which I fixed in live-boot 20160511.

udev. I filed #824025 to request that the rule defining the MAC-based name of USB network interfaces be isolated in its own file so that it can be easily disabled (we do that in Kali).

Misc stuff. I packaged Django 1.8.13 in jessie-backports. I filed
#824165 against sbuild being broken with “$apt_allow_unauthenticated = 1;” in .sbuildrc. I filed a wishlist bug #824168 against apt-listchanges to suggest that it ignores news from auto-installed packages. I filed #825923 to report a regression in python-nltk (discovered in Kali first).

Infrastructure work

packages.debian.org. A few months ago, I wrote a patch for packages.debian.org so that it forwards emails to tracker.debian.org instead of packages.qa.debian.org. At that time, I was in touch with Rhonda and was hoping that she would apply it rather quickly (the patch is rather short). After a few more pings, she made it clear that she was not alone and that I should rather file a proper request so that someone else can also process it. So I filed #824085 and tried to find someone else to apply my patch. Most of the members of pkg_maint said that they were part of the group only due to generic webmaster involvement but that they did not want to touch that part. Fortunately, Martin Zobel Helas was more receptive to my request and helped me to deploy my changes. I committed my change and Martin pulled it in the live checkout on picconi.debian.org.

This update is also a first step towards the possibility to use foo@packages.debian.org and/or teams+foo@tracker.debian.org in the Maintainer field of a package. With this we can get rid of dedicated mailing lists that just duplicate the work of the package tracker. And we no longer need to care about the fact that the Maintainer is handled differently than Uploaders since all (human) co-maintainers would then be listed in Uploaders only (and the package tracker would deal appropriately with mails sent to the Maintainer).

Distro Tracker. I improved the import process to be able to force a new processing of source packages that were already imported. This was useful to let it recognize architectures which were newly added in its database (and that were ignored and thus not displayed up to now).

I also made a first review of the AppStream patch submitted by Matthias Klump in #806740.

Thanks

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

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

by

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

Individual reports

In April, 116.75 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 16h.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.25 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 5.50 extra hours remaining, he returned the remaining 8.25h to the pool).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did nothing (instead of the 16 hours he was allocated, his hours have been redispatched to other contributors over May).
  • Guido Günther did 2 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 3.25 remaining hours, leaving 9.25 extra hours for May).
  • Markus Koschany did 16 hours.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 7.50 hours (out of 12h allocated + 3.50 remaining, thus keeping 8 extra hours for May).
  • Scott Kitterman posted a report for 6 hours made in March but did nothing in April. His 18 remaining hours have been returned to the pool. He decided to stop doing LTS work for now.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.75 hours.

Many contributors did not use all their allocated hours. This is partly explained by the fact that in April Wheezy was still under the responsibility of the security team and they were not able to drive updates from start to finish.

In any case, this means that they have more hours available over May and since the LTS period started, they should hopefully be able to make a good dent in the backlog of security updates.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours reached a new record with 132 hours per month, thanks to two new gold sponsors (Babiel GmbH and Plat’Home). Plat’Home’s sponsorship was aimed to help us maintain Debian 7 Wheezy on armel and armhf (on top of already supported amd64 and i386). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position.

The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 44 packages awaiting an update.

This is a bit more than the 15-20 open entries that we used to have at the end of the Debian 6 LTS period.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

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