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My Free Software Activities in March 2013

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (114.19 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Simple-CDD and debian-cd

I tried to use wheezy’s version of debian-cd and simple-cdd to generate an automatic installer. In this process, I filed a couple of bugs on simple-cdd (#701963: type-handling package is gone and should not be listed in default.downloads, and #701998: the --keyboard parameter is not working with wheezy’s debian-installer) and I commited fixes for a few issues in debian-cd:

  • r2518: adjust Makefile for new xorriso requirement
  • r2520: add missing depends on dosfstools
  • r2521: use --no-check-gpg when querying debootstrap
  • r2522: make debian-cd work with a mirror without sources)

Debian France

I completed the new website for Debian France and I put it online. Later I merged some supplementary enhancements prepared by Tanguy Ortolo (and I gave him commits rights at the same time).

I tried to update our Galette installation to the latest upstream version but I reverted to the former version after having encountered two problems (filed here and here). In the process, I created a Debian package for galette (you can grab it on git.debian.org).

I also suggested an idea of improvement for Galette’s paypal plugin and it has been quickly implemented. Thus I updated the plugin installed on france.debian.net.

Kali related work

It’s been a few months that I have been helping the Kali team to prepare this new Debian derivative. Now that the derivative has gone public, I can attribute some of my Debian work to my collaboration with the Kali team.

This month I contributed a few features and fixes to debian-installer and live-build:

After the launch, we registered Kali in the derivative census. Paul Wise quickly reported some misfiled bugs from early Kali users and I discovered that reportbug was not behaving properly even though we correctly updated base-files (see #703678 on reportbug and #703677 on lsb-release).

Misc packaging work

  • I sponsored a new upstream version of dnsjava because it’s required by Jitsi.
  • I prepared rebuild 0.4.1.1 and uploaded it to testing-proposed-updates for a RC bug fix.
  • I uploaded Publican 3.1.5 to experimental and filed #703514 to request a new upstream version of docbook-xsl that is needed by Publican.
  • I filed #703995 to fix apt-setup’s handling of the apt-setup/multiarch preseed option.

DPL election

I also spent quite some time to read and participate to the discussions on debian-vote since it was campaigning time for the DPL candidates…

Thanks

This was a rather active month if you take into account the fact that I got a second son — Lucas — on March 6th.

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

Kali Linux 1.0, a new Debian derivative

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Today, during Blackhat Europe, Offensive Security announced the availability of Kali Linux 1.0, which aims to be the most advanced, robust, and stable penetration testing distribution to date. It is the successor of Backtrack Linux.

kali

Kali’s choice of Debian

Kali’s release is a significant event in the security auditing and penetration testing field, and I’m proud to see that Debian was retained as the best distribution to create this new product. Here’s what Mati Aharoni of Offensive Security told me:

Debian provides a reliable base to build a new distribution and yet can easily be customized to add bleeding edge features, thanks to the unstable and experimental distributions.

Kali’s development policies

Even though Kali was prepared in secret, from now on Kali’s development happens in the open in public git repositories. There are repositories for all the packages that have been created (or forked) as well as for the ISO images creation script.

Debian packages are maintained with git-buildpackage, pristine-tar and the associated helper tools, making it easy to integrate the latest changes of Debian.

Kali packaged several hundreds tools that relate to their field and they intend to contribute those which are DFSG-free back to Debian.

Kali’s technical infrastructure

In the last year, I have been working within the Kali team to setup large parts of their infrastructure as a proper Debian derivative.

Kali’s main ISO images are built with live-build. All the bugfixes that I contributed to Debian Live were the direct result of my work for Kali.

The git repositories are managed with gitolite. The package repositories are built with reprepro. The build daemons use rebuildd and sbuild.

The (push) mirrors are synchronized with the same tools than Debian (based on rsync), but there’s also a central server which redirects to a mirror close to you (and which is used by default everywhere). This one runs mirrorbrain (and not Raphaël Geissert’s redirector).

The ARM build daemons (armel/armhf) run on machines powered by Calxeda’s Highbank (4 cores, 4 GB RAM) that work pretty well. Even better, Offensive Security is willing to dedicate one node of this “cluster” for Debian’s own usage.

The future

This first release is not an end. It’s only the start of a journey. Not all applications have been packaged yet and there’s lot of work left to integrate everything in Debian.

I’m really looking forward to continue my collaboration with the Kali team as this has been one of the most interesting project I ever had as a Debian consultant. And also one of the few where I could really contribute something back to Debian.

My Free Software Activities in February 2013

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian packaging

I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release.

I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches.

I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208).

Bug reporting and misc fixes

Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the “oversizing” of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%.

Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root.

git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with “3.0 (quilt)” source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch.

rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of Cédric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605.

Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a “noswap” kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if “quiet” was present first in the command line due to spurious “break” statements.

Debian France

Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the “Tribunal d’instance of Sarreguemines” to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the “special register” of the association, it’s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.).

Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we’re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs.

Librement

I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don’t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay.

I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they’re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of “product owner”. So I started to describe the project with “user stories” (i.e. “create the backlog” in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you’re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments.

My goal is clearly to have a “minimal viable product” with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in January 2013

by

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (84.25 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian Packaging

In one of my customer projects, I had to use libwebsockets and since it was not packaged for Debian, I filed a “Request For Package” (RFP #697671). I discovered a fork of this library on github and decided to mail the original author and the author of the fork to learn a bit more about the reason of the fork. It turns out that they miscommunicated and that the original author was interested by most of the improvements. The fork still exists but the important fixes and most of the improvements have been merged (and he released a version 1.0 after that!). Furthermore the original author setup a bug tracker to better organize the project and so that the author of the fork can submit patches and be sure that they won’t be forgotten (as it happened in the past). I spend quite some time discussing with both parties but at the end I’m pleased to see that good progress has been made (although nobody stepped up to maintain this package in Debian).

I packaged zim 0.59 (an important bugfix release) and wordpress 3.5.1 (with several security fixes). I updated the dpkg-dev squeeze backports to version 1.16.9~bpo60+1 on request of Daniel Schepler. This backport led me to file #698133 on kgb-client because the bot literally spammed the #debian-dpkg IRC channel for multiple hours by resending old commit notices that got merged in the squeeze-backports branch. BTW, they need help to get this issue fixed.

I updated python-django-registration to fix a compatibility issue with python3-sphinx (see #697721 for details).

Misc Debian Stuff

Serious bug with salt. I filed a grave bug on salt (#697747—) and prepared the upload to fix the issue on request of the maintainer. In the mean time, the maintainer orphaned the package. Franklin G. Mendoza already announced its willingness to take over but this package deserves multiple maintainers since this is a good piece of software that is getting more and more popular.

net-retriever and alternate keyrings. I filed a wishlist bug (#698618) on net-retriever to request a way for derivatives to use another keyring package (i.e. not debian-archive-keyring-udeb) without having to fork net-retriever.

Linux 3.7 on armel/armhf. I helped the kernel maintainers to fix the 3.7 kernel on armel/armhf by reporting on IRC the results of successive failing kernel rebuilds on those architectures (this kernel version is only in experimental).

Carl9170 firmware. I also pinged the kernels maintainers about a missing firmware for the carl9170 driver (already reported in #635840) and Ben Hutchings took care of re-activating its inclusion in upstream’s linux-firmware.git and then uploaded firmware-free 3.2 to Debian. Thanks Ben!

New QA team member. And to finish with the miscellaneous stuff, I helped Holger Levsen to be added to the “qa” group so that he could integrate his awesome work on automated QA checks with Jenkins.

Debian France

Preparation for Solutions Linux. The people organizing the “village of associations” in the Solutions Linux conference have asked all organizations to apply for a booth if they wanted one. Last year Carl Chenet took care of organizing this and this time we had to find someone else. I made multiple call for volunteers (on the mailing list, on my blog) without much success but I finally managed to convince Tanguy Ortolo to take care of this. Thank you Tanguy!

Get in touch with treasurer who disappeared. During the transition with the former Debian France officers, it has been said that Aurélien Gérôme — another former treasurer of Debian France — had entirely disappeared together with some papers that he never gave to his successor. I didn’t want to give up on this without at least trying to get in touch by myself… so after multiple tries (over IRC, phone, and snail mail), and some weeks without answers, he got back to me, explaining that he’s currently in a foreign country and that he will take care of that next time that he comes in France. \o/

New website in preparation. Replacing the single-page website webpage with a more comprehensive website is an important goal. Alexandre Delanoë provided a basic ikiwiki setup inspired by dsa.debian.org. I cleaned it and integrated it in a git repository on our machine. There’s thus a new test website on http://france.debian.net/test/. Tanguy Ortolo and Fernando Lagrange immeditaly made some small improvements but since then nobody stepped up to further complete the website. I’ll try to do this in February and put the new website in production.

Paypal and handling of members. We installed a paypal plugin in galette so that members can renew their membership online. I asked Christian Bayle to try it out and we found some issues that I reported upstream and that got fixed. But this is only the first step, we want to go much further and automate all the membership handling, from membership renewal mail reminders up to integration in the accounting system. To this end, I filed some new tickets in the Galette tracker and completed some that were already opened: #490, #368 and #394. We requested a quote for those tickets and Debian France is going to fund the work on those tickets so that we have a 100% free software solution for our needs.

Thanks

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

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