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My Free Software Activities in November 2014

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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 LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian LTS (14h allocated by Freexian + 4h I did not spend last month). I did the following tasks:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 19 commits to the security tracker. I also tried to encourage some maintainers to provide security updates for packages that are not in use by the current LTS sponsors and that are thus not in our priority list.
  • DLA 87: dbus update fixing 3 CVE
  • DLA 93: libgcrypt11 update fixing 1 CVE
  • DLA 96: openjdk-6 security update fixing 21 CVE
  • Worked on preparing a security update to linux. It’s not released yet.

Updating the linux source package took a good half of the allocated time. We opted to update the kernel to the upstream version 2.6.32.64. I integrated the upstream patches and identified about 130 patches that we had to disable (because they were already integrated upstream). Then I updated our “openvz flavor” patch to apply on top of the new kernel. This required quite a bit of manual conflict resolution and there are even parts where I was not sure that I took the correct decision. I was not able to find an upstream openvz git tree on this kernel version to to double check.

Instead I asked Ben Hutchings to review my patch. He told me that he did not volunteer to work on LTS, but that he would be open to contribute to it for money. Following this remark, as the coordinator of Freexian’s offer, I offered him to join to the set of paid LTS contributors to take care of the kernel and he accepted.

So hopefully we will be able to wrap this linux upload in the first week of december. We had no uploads of the kernel in Squeeze since July so it’s good to know that we now have someone who will be able to handle it in priority.

Distro Tracker

No new developments this month. Instead I spent some time to import old historic news so that when you lookup removed packages you have some actual content instead of a 404 error. For example you can look at python2.1.

Another thing that I did is to tag some bugs with the newly-announced tag “newcomer”. Those are easy bugs that are ideal targets for new contributors who’d like to get started: here’s the list. It’s up to you now! 😉

DEP-14: Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories

I have drafted an initial version of a document called Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories and submitted it for discussion on debian-devel.

The discussion has been interesting and constructive (yes this is still possible in Debian!). I have a bunch of improvements in my local copy and needs to process a few more feedback before submitting an updated draft. It’s not a revolution but it’s a good step to try to standardize tags and branches naming conventions.

Systemd, the tech-ctte and our mailing lists

As an old-timer, I care a lot about the governance of Debian and it’s annoying to see how the systemd debate brought back some of our old daemons in terms of hostile atmosphere on our mailing lists.

We can disagree on a lot of things, but we must respect each other and we are here to work together on solutions for everybody. As such I wrote to the persons who cross the line to invite them to behave better. And I’m glad that our listmasters are backing up our calls with bans when appropriate. I believe we must go further in that direction and I shared an idea (on a debian-private thread that should have never existed, much like most of the traffic on that list) that I shall formalize and share on debian-project@l.d.o at some point.

At the same time, we also had another governance-related discussion with the idea to impose some turnover in the technical committee. I’m glad to see that we will soon vote on this topic. This is a good thing in general even though we just had 3 tech-ctte members who retired.

Misc stuff

I sponsored an upload of galette and of 3 of its plugins. I reviewed jitsi-videobridge and jitsi-meet on mentors.debian.net.

I filed a few bugs:

  • #768256 about huge vim icons in the GNOME contextual menus
  • #768540: cdebootstrap: fails to bootstrap old releases with dpkg not supporting data.tar.xz
  • #770011: lynx -dump badly converting …

Thanks

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

Freexian’s third report about Debian Long Term Support

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

Individual reports

In October 2014, we affected 13.75h works hours to 3 contributors:

  • Thorsten Alteholz
  • Raphaël Hertzog worked only 10 hours. The remaining hours will be done over November.
  • Holger Levsen did nothing (for unexpected personal reasons), he will catch up in November.

Obviously, only the hours done have been paid. Should the backlog grow further, we will seek for more paid contributors (to share the workload) and to make it easier to redispatch work hours once a contributor knows that he won’t be able to handle the hours that were affected to him/her.

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we gained two new sponsors (Daevel and FOSSter, thanks to them!) and we have now 45.5 hours of paid LTS work to “spend” each month. That’s great but we are still far from our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit worse than last month: while the dla-needed.txt file only lists 33 packages awaiting an update (6 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total. This differences has two explanations: CVE triaging for squeeze has not been done in the last days, and the POODLE issue(s) with SSLv3 affects a very large number of packages where it’s not always clear what the proper action is.

In any case, it’s never too late to join the growing list of sponsors and help us do a better job, please check with your company managers. If not possible for this year, consider including it in the budget for next year.

Thanks to our sponsors

Let me thank our main sponsors:

My Free Software Activities in October 2014

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.

Packaging work

With the Jessie freeze approaching, I took care of packaging some new upstream releases that I wanted to get in. I started with zim 0.62, I had skipped 0.61 due to some annoying regressions. Since I had two bugs to forward, I took the opportunity to reach out to the upstream author to see if he had some important fixes to get into Jessie. This resulted in me pushing another update with 3 commits cherry picked from the upstream VCS. I also sponsored a wheezy-backports of the new version.

I pushed two new bugfixes releases of Publican (4.2.3 and 4.2.6) but I had to include a work-around for a bug that I reported earlier on docbook-xml (#763598: the XML catalog doesn’t allow libxml2/xmllint to identify the local copy of some entities files) and that is unlikely to be fixed in time for Jessie.

Last but not least, I pushed the first point release of Django 1.7, aka version 1.7.1 to unstable and asked release managers to ensure it migrates to testing before the real freeze. This is important because the closer we are to upstream, the easier it is to apply security patches during the lifetime of Jessie (which will hopefully be 5 years, thanks to Debian LTS!). I also released a backport of python-django 1.7 to wheezy-backports.

I sponsored galette 0.7.8+dfsg-1 fixing an RC bug so that it can get back to testing (it got removed from testing due to the bug).

Debian LTS

See my dedicated report for the paid work I did on that area. Apart from that, I took some time to get in touch with all the Debian consultants and see if they knew some companies to reach out. There are a few new sponsors in the pipe thanks to this, but given the large set of people that it represents, I was expecting more. I used this opportunity to report all bogus entries (i.e bouncing email, broken URL) to the maintainer of the said webpage.

Distro Tracker

Only 30 commits this month, with almost no external contribution, I’m a bit saddened by this situation because it’s not very difficult to contribute to this project and we have plenty of easy bugs to get you started.

That said I’m still happy with the work done. Most of the changes have been made for Kali but will be useful for all derivatives: it’s now possible to add external repositories in the tracker and not display them in the list of available versions, and not generate automatic news about those repositories. There’s a new “derivative” application which is only in its infancy but can already provide a useful comparison of a derivative with its parent. See it in action on the Kali Package Tracker: http://pkg.kali.org/derivative/ Thanks to Offensive Security which is sponsoring this work!

Since I have pushed Django 1.7 to wheezy-backports, all distro tracker instances that I manage are now running that version of Django and I opted to make that version mandatory. This made it possible to add initial Django migrations and rely on this new feature for future database schema upgrade (I have voluntarily avoided schema change up to now to avoid problems migrating from South to Django migrations).

Thanks

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

My Debian LTS report for October 2014

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During October, I spent 10 hours on paid LTS work. I should have worked 4 hours more, but for various reasons this did not happen. Instead I’ll spend 4 more hours in November.

During this time, I did the following:

  • CVE triage: this month I pushed 23 commits to the security tracker SVN repository, and filed #765352 against wpa.
  • I released a mysql-5.1 update (DLA-75-1) fixing 3 CVE.
  • I sponsored the upload of ppp 2.4.5-4+deb6u1 for DLA-74-1 which had been prepared by Andrew Bartlett.
  • I uploaded a new version of apache2 (DLA-71-1) fixing 2 CVE.
  • I filed a few bugs against debian-security-support to request that some packages be marked as unsupported in squeeze: #765374 for axis2c and
    rampart, #765452 for a new feature allowing binary packages to be marked as unsupported so that glassfish-appserv can be marked as such (this is #765454).

After a few months of work on LTS, I’m starting to have a better grasp on the worflow and on what can be done or not. But I’m still astonished that we have so few squeeze users on the mailing list. If you’re using Squeeze, please subscribe to the list and test the packages that contributors are submitting for tests/validation. It really helps to have some feedback from real users before releasing an update, in particular when the Debian contributor who prepared the update is not a user of said package… not everybody has the skills required to prepare security updates, but everybody can help test packages, you have no excuses. 😉

And we still need more organizations joining the LTS project, either by providing help (like Catalyst did by letting Andrew Bartlett work on LTS, thanks to them!) or by sponsoring the
project and letting others do the work.

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