Like 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.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 7 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 23 months)
• Blablacar (for 22 months)
• Linode LLC (for 12 months)
• Babiel GmbH
• Plat’Home
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 22 months)
• Université Lille 3 (for 22 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 20 months)
• Nantes Métropole (for 16 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 14 months)
• Dalenys (for 13 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 8 months)
• Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 8 months)
• Sonus Networks
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 23 months)
• Evolix (for 23 months)
• Offensive Security (for 23 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 23 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 22 months)
• MyTux (for 22 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 20 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 19 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 18 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 17 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 17 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 16 months)
• NUMLOG (for 16 months)
• WinGo AG (for 15 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 12 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 9 months)
• Entr’ouvert (for 7 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 4 months)

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

Individual reports

In February, 111.75 work hours have been dispatched among 10 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupré did 8h.
• Ben Hutchings did 12.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 7.25 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 5.50 extra hours to do over April).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 7 hours (instead of the 14.25 hours he was allocated +, compensating the extra hours he did last month).
• Damyan Ivanov did nothing out of the 7.25 remaining hours he had, he opted to give them back and come back to LTS work later.
• Guido Günther did 13 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 4.25 remaining hours, leaving 3.25 extra hours for April).
• Markus Koschany did 14.25 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did nothing and opted to give back the 8 hours allocated. He will stop LTS work for now as he has other projects taking all his time.
• Santiago Ruano Rincón did 10 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.50 remaining, thus keeping 3.50 extra hours for April).
• Scott Kitterman did a few hours but was not able to provide his report in time due to sickness. His next report will cover two months.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours started to increase for April (116.75 hours, thanks to Sonus Networks) and should increase even further for May (with a new Gold sponsor currently joining us, Babiel GmbH). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position.

At the end of the month the LTS team will be fully responsible of all Debian 7 Wheezy updates. For now paid contributors are still helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy.

They are also looking for ways to ensure that some of the most complicated packages can be supported over the wheezy LTS timeframe. It is likely that we will seek external help (possibly from credativ which is already handling support of PostgreSQL) for the maintenance of Xen and that some other packages (like libav, vlc, maybe qemu?) will be upgraded to newer versions which are still maintained (either upstream or in Debian Jessie by the Debian maintainers).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 6 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 22 months)
• Blablacar (for 21 months)
• Linode LLC (for 11 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 21 months)
• Université Lille 3 (for 21 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 19 months)
• Nantes Métropole (for 15 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 13 months)
• Dalenys (for 11 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 7 months)
• Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 7 months)
• Sonus Networks
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 22 months)
• Offensive Security (for 22 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 22 months)
• Evolix (for 21 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 21 months)
• MyTux (for 21 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 19 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 18 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 17 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 16 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 16 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 15 months)
• NUMLOG (for 15 months)
• WinGo AG (for 14 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 11 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 8 months)
• Entr’ouvert (for 6 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 3 months)

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

Individual reports

In February, 112.50 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupré did 8h.
• Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 7.25 extra hours to do over March).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours (instead of the 11.25 hours he was allocated, he will work less in March).
• Damyan Ivanov did 4 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 7.25 extra hours for March).
• Guido Günther did 7 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 4.25 extra hours for March).
• Markus Koschany did 11.25 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rincón did 12 hours (out of 11h allocated + 2.50 remaining, thus keeping 1.50 extra hours for March).
• Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours continued to decrease a little bit. It’s not worrisome yet but we should try to get back to a positive slope if we want to be able to do an outstanding job for wheezy LTS. On the positive side, TOSHIBA renewed their platinum sponsorship for another 6 months at least and we have some contacts for new sponsors, though they are far from being concluded yet.

We are now in transition between squeeze LTS and wheezy LTS. The paid contributors are helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also taking generic measures to prepare wheezy LTS (for example to ensure all packages work with OpenJDK 7.x since support for 6.x will be dropped in the LTS period).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold (none this month).

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 21 months)
• Blablacar (for 20 months)
• Linode LLC (for 10 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 20 months)
• Université Lille 3 (for 20 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 18 months)
• Nantes Métropole (for 14 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 12 months)
• Dalenys (for 10 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 6 months)
• Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 6 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 21 months)
• Offensive Security (for 21 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 21 months)
• Evolix (for 20 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 20 months)
• MyTux (for 20 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 18 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 17 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 16 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 15 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 15 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 14 months)
• NUMLOG (for 14 months)
• WinGo AG (for 13 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 9 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 7 months)
• Entr’ouvert (for 5 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG

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

Individual reports

In December, 113.50 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupré did 11.5h.
• Ben Hutchings did 15 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 10 extra hours to do over February).
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
• Guido Günther did 13 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 1 remaining).
• Mike Gabriel did 16 hours (8 hours allocated + 8h remaining).
• Santiago Ruano Rincón did 18 hours (out of 12h allocated + 8.50 remaining, thus keeping 2.50 extra hours for February).
• Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 30 hours.

Evolution of the situation

As expected, we had a small drop in the amount of hours sponsored. New sponsors (re-)joined but others stopped too (Gree this time)… mostly balancing the result. We only lost 2 hours of sponsored work.

It would be nice if we could invert that curve and actually start again to get closer to our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. Let’s hope that the switch to wheezy as the version supported by the LTS team will motivate many companies relying on Debian 7 in their IT system.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month(17 packages in dla-needed.txt, 27 in the list of CVE). It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can’t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 4 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 20 months)
• Blablacar (for 19 months)
• Linode LLC (for 9 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 19 months)
• Université Lille 3 (for 19 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 17 months)
• Nantes Métropole (for 13 months, renewal after a small break)
• University of Luxembourg (for 11 months)
• Dalenys (for 9 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 5 months)
• Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 5 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 20 months)
• Offensive Security (for 20 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 20 months)
• Evolix (for 19 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 19 months)
• MyTux (for 19 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 17 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 16 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 15 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 14 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 14 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 13 months)
• NUMLOG (for 13 months)
• WinGo AG (for 12 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 8 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 6 months)
• Entr’ouvert (for 4 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG