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My Debian Activities in August 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (88.41 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

This month has again been a short one since I have mostly been in vacation during the last 2 weeks.

Dpkg

Things are relatively quiet during the freeze. I only took care of fixing 3 bugs: a regression of “3.0 (quilt)” (#683547), a segfault of “dpkg-query -W -f ”” (commit) and a bad auto-completion for French users (#685863).

Testing the upgrade to wheezy

We got several reports of wheezy upgrade that failed because dpkg ran the trigger while the dependencies of the package with pending triggers are not satisfied. Unfortunately fixing this in dpkg is not without problems (see #671711 for details)… so Guillem decided to defer this fix for Jessie. My suggestion of an intermediary solution has fallen in limbo. Instead we now have to find solutions for each case where this can fail (example of failure: 680626).

Another way to avoid those errors is to ensure that triggers are run as late as possible. We can improve this in multiple ways.

The first way is to modify most triggers so that they use the “interest-noawait” directive. In that case, the packages activating the trigger will be immediately marked as configured (instead of “triggers-awaited”) and the trigger will thus not need to be run as part of further dependency solving logic. But as of today, there’s no package using this new feature yet despite a nudge on debian-devel-announce. 🙁

The second way is to modify APT to use dpkg –no-triggers, and to let the trigger processing for the end (with a last “dpkg –configure -a” call). I requested this early in the wheezy timeframe but for various reasons, the APT maintainers did not act on it. I pinged them again in #626599 but it’s now too late for wheezy. I find this a bit sad because I have been using those options for the entire wheezy cycle and it worked fine for me (and I used them for a dist-upgrade on my wife’s laptop too).

It would have been good to have all this in place for wheezy so that we don’t have to suffer from the same problems during the jessie upgrade, but unless someone steps up to steer those changes, it seems unlikely to happen.

Instead, we’re back to finding klumsy work-arounds in individual packages.

Packaging

I prepared security updates for python-django (1.4.1 for unstable,
1.2.3-3+squeeze3 for stable). I packaged a new upstream version for cpputest (3.2-1). I reviewed ledgersmb 1.3.21-1 prepared by Robert James Clay and asked him to prepare another version with further fixes.

I released nautilus-dropbox 1.4.0-2 with supplementary changes of my own to support https_proxy and to display better diagnostic information when the download fails.

With the help of Paul van der Vlis and Michael Ziegler, we did what was required to be able to migrate python-django-registration 0.8 to Wheezy even though it’s a new upstream version with backwards incompatible changes. Thanks to Adam D. Barratt who unblocked the package, we now have the right version in Wheezy despite the fact that I missed the freeze deadline.

Debian France

Julien Cristau reminded the board of Debian France that we have to elect officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer) as the current officers have withdrawn. I was somewhat afraid that nobody would take over so I pinged each member to try to get new volunteers. We now have volunteers (me, Julien Danjou and Sylvestre Ledru) and we’re waiting until Julien finds some time to run the election.

Misc

With the help of DSA, I setup antispam rules for the owner@packages.qa.debian.org alias because I was getting tired by the amount of spam. In the process, they asked me to write a wiki page for dsa.debian.org to document everything so that they can refer to it for future queries. I did it but it looks like that they did not apply my patch yet.

I also tested an upstream patch for gnome-keyring (see bugzilla #681081) that reintroduces the support of forgetting GPG passphrases after a specified amount of time.

Thanks

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

My Debian Activities in July 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (72.65 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

This month has been a short one since I have been away for 2 weeks of vacation.

Dpkg

My dpkg work encompasses a bunch of small tasks:

  • I uploaded dpkg 1.16.7 with an important bugfix for a regression.
  • I initiated a new round of discussions about how we were going to solve the problem that source packages with “Multi-Arch: same” binary packages can’t be individually bin-nmued.
  • Following that discussion, I opened a bunch of bugs to plan/discuss the transition of changelog/copyright files within the package metadata (#681289 on debian-policy, #681293 on apt-listchanges, #681295 on www.debian.org for packages.debian.org).
  • I also filed #681292 on sbuild to get it to use dpkg’s new syntax for bin-nmus. It will allow us to do binary-only rebuilds with arbitrary versions (instead of only “+b1” suffixes). Ubuntu could use this for their +rebuild1, we could use this to build backports which do not require source changes (and share the common source package instead of duplicating it). It can also be useful if we ever get to the situation where transitions are prepared in external repositories and where we want bin-nmus in those repositories to have unique versions (even though the same package might be bin-nmued in multiple repositories in case of concurrent transitions).
  • I filed an unblock request for dpkg once it was almost 10 days old.
  • I did reconsider the bug #316521 where dpkg looses track of some shared directories with manually created files and proposed an updated patch. No words from Guillem on the patch yet. Fixing this would help to fix a bunch of piuparts issues.
  • And just before my vacation, I filed many bugs against dpkg itself, effectively moving some of the items that accumulated in my TODO in a public place where others can help (I’ll be happy to mentor anyone who wants to tackle one of these):
    • #681443: dpkg-source –commit should be able to merge changes in an existing patch
    • #681470: dpkg-shlibdeps: should also scan Build-Depends-Arch for minimal versions
    • #681474: Dpkg::Vendor: should support /etc/os-release and /etc/os-release.d/*
    • #681477: dpkg-vendor: implement –select-closest command
    • #681480: base-files: Provide HOME_URL, SUPPORT_URL and BUG_REPORT_URL in /etc/os-release
    • #681489: base-files: Add /etc/os-release.d/debian and make it easy to provide supplementary /etc/os-release.d/* files
  • In #595112 we discussed the specifics of a new dpkg-mainstscript-helper feature to move a conffile from one package to another.

Packaging

I updated nautilus-dropbox to version 1.4.0 and python-django-registration to version 0.8. Both have been uploaded to unstable and I initially wanted to request an unblock for the latter, but it turns out it has gained reverse dependencies and version 0.8 introduces API changes so it’s not an option at this point of the freeze.

QA work

I investigated and fixed #678356 where it had been reported that the PTS static news were no longer working as expected.

At the start of the month, I also unblocked the mostly-unknown but important “mole” service… it was out of date of several weeks and several people were annoyed that the information about new upstream versions was no longer up-to-date.

Vacation

Almost no Debian work during my vacation but the lack of Wifi nearby made me look for solutions to connect my computer through my Nokia N900 3G/GPRS connection. I discovered the “Mobile Hotspot” application (homepage) and it worked like a charm (although it required Maemo’s non-default devel repository to be able to install the alternative kernel “for power users”).

The Debian Handbook

Michal Čihař proposed us to host a Weblate instance to help translate the book with a web interface. He kindly agreed to implement some improvements to better suit my requirements. Those have been completed and the weblate instance is now live at debian.weblate.org.

There’s no requirement to use Weblate for translations teams but for those that do, it sure makes it easier to recruit volunteers who have no prior knowledge of Git and PO files. If you want to help, please checkout this page first though, you should not start using Weblate without getting in touch with the respective translations teams.

Apart from translations, I also had the pleasure to merge some patches from Philipp Kern who improved the section covering IPv6 and a few other parts. We can make the book even better if more people share their expertise in the part of the book where they know better than me and Roland. 🙂

Thanks

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

My Debian Activities in June 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (168.12 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

This month, I resumed my work on dpkg. I concentrated my efforts on some “polishing” of the “3.0 (quilt)” format. With the latest version (1.16.6 — which was uploaded to unstable shortly before the freeze), dpkg-source restores the source tree in a clean state after a failed patch application (#652970), doesn’t overwrite the patch header from the pre-existing automatic patch, updates automatically debian/source/include-binaries during dpkg-source –commit, and supports a new –no-unapply-patches option for those who dislike the auto-unapplication at the end of the process when the patches were not applied at the start.

I wanted to go further and offer a new feature that could insert the automatic patch at the bottom of the quilt series but I have been short on time to complete this feature. I just managed to factorize all the quilt handling in a dedicated Perl module (Dpkg::Source::Quilt) to have cleaner code in the module handling the source format (Dpkg::Source::Package::V3::quilt).

For those who wonder, this feature is meant primarily for the X Strike Force team which maintains packages in Git and are doings lots of upstream cherry-picks (to fix regressions, etc.). But they also use quilt on top of that tree to keep some lasting Debian specific changes. With the 1.0 format, the “automatic diff” is a bit messy but at least it gets smaller automatically when a new upstream release gets out, there’s nothing to clean out. I’d like them to be able to use “3.0 (quilt)” while keeping their workflow. I’m leaning towards allowing “--auto-commit=first:cherry-picks” that would name the automatic patch “cherry-picks” and put it in the first position in the quilt series. (Opinions welcome on that feature, BTW)

Packaging

There’s been quite some packaging in this last month before the freeze:

  • I packaged CppUTest (a test framework for C/C++), and I wrote an article about it.
  • I prepared a stable update of Publican to fix a missing dependency. I also updated the unstable version to include a backport of a fix that some user requested me to include.
  • I updated dh-linktree to improve its documentation (following a discussion that happened on debian-devel) and to deal properly with trailing slashes in its input (#673408).
  • I sponsored dblatex 0.3.4-1 and ledgersmb 1.3.18-1.
  • I updated gnome-shell-timer to a new upstream snapshot that was tagged as compatible with GNOME 3.4 (#6776516).
  • I packaged wordpress 3.4 and spent a whole day triaging the old bugs that accumulated. A few days later I developed a new infrastructure to properly manage plugins/themes/language files. The canonical directory where the user is expected to drop his custom plugins/themes is now in /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/ and the official plugins/themes are “installed” there with symlinks pointing back to /srv/data/web/vhosts/wp.freexian.com/htdocs/wp-content/ where they actually reside.
  • I wanted to commit 2 patches for the developers-reference but then I noticed that some translations were complete and were waiting for an upload. So I cleaned the packaging (switch to dh) and I uploaded version 3.4.8 before committing the patches for #678710 and #678712.

While doing all this packaging work, I found 2 possible improvements that I filed as bug reports:

  • #676606: debcommit should be able to identify alone that a new release is prepared (when the distribution field of the changelog changes from UNRELEASED to something else).
  • #679132: lintian outputs false positives for the tag package-uses-local-diversion when neither –local nor –package is given on the dpkg-divert command line.

Debian France Booth at Solutions Linux

From June 19th to June 21th, I manned the Debian France booth at Solutions Linux together with Carl Chenet, Tanguy Ortolo and other members of the association. We answered lots of questions, sold all t-shirts and umbrellas that Carl imported from Germany and Switzerland (we really need to get our own merchandising stuff produced in France!), got people to join the association. We also presented a printed copy of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook and of the corresponding French book.

You can see Carl, me and Tanguy on this picture (click on it to see a bigger picture, thanks to Sébastien Dubois of Evolix for this one!):

I know lots of people are preparing for Debconf but I decided to not attend this year, the price of the air plane ticket was a bit too hefty for me and it was also in partial conflict with our family vacations. I thought about attending the Libre Software Meeting instead but alas I won’t go there either (but Roland Mas will be there!), I have too much work to complete before my own vacation in 2 weeks.

Thanks

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

My Debian activities in May 2011

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

I have been…

Doing some work towards Debian Rolling

At the start of the month, the discussions about Debian rolling were still very active on debian-devel. Declaring that testing would be rolling did not make it (as I hoped), the argument that some RC bugs last for far too long in that distribution carried the discussion and thus the most consensual proposition ended up being the one of Josselin Mouette were rolling would be testing plus a few selected cherry-picked packages from unstable.

I believe it’s a workable solution if we only care about a subset of architectures. Otherwise the same reasons that keep the fixed packages out of testing would probably also apply for rolling.

Given this, I did setup britney (the software that controls testing) on my laptop to investigate how we can create rolling. It turns out britney is a very specialized software with very few configuration knobs.

At the same time Joachim Breitner made a proposition that immediately grabbed my attention. He suggests to use SAT solvers to find out the set of packages that should migrate from unstable to testing. I thought that rolling would be a good testbed for this new implementation of britney (which he calls SAT-britney) so I jumped right in this project.

I was not at all familiar with this science field, so I looked up quite some documentation: I learned that all SAT solvers expect the problem to be presented in CNF form, and that DIMACS was the file format of choice to represent those boolean constraints. Several SAT solvers are available in Debian and picosat appears to be one of the best.

Then I started some early coding/prototyping to play with the concept. You can find the result in this git repository, you can grab a copy with git clone git://git.debian.org/~hertzog/sat-britney.git.

There’s not much yet, except some Python code to generate a SAT problem that can be fed to a SAT solver. But I really look forward to this project.

Representing Debian during Solutions Linux

During the second week, I spent 3 days in Paris to help manage the Debian booth at Solutions Linux.

We have responded to lots of queries but most visitors already knew Debian, and many of them use it at work and/or at home. We tried to recruit those people as new members for Debian France, the local association. We also sold all our remaining goodies.

The Ubuntu people were interviewed by France 3 (an important TV channel) and we took this opportunity (with the consent of the Ubuntu guys) to show our Debian t-shirts in the background: you can watch the video here (in French), you can see me with Carl Chenet at 1:21.

We have also been interviewed by Intelli’n TV: here and here (both in French). I’m not very good at this exercise. 🙂

Improving dpkg triggers

The third week was a vacation week, in theory I should have stayed away from my computer but I really wanted to take this opportunity to improve the state of dpkg triggers in Debian.

I already covered my work in another article: Trying to make dpkg triggers more useful and less painful.

The result is not merged yet, I just asked a question to all package maintainers who are using triggers to be able to decide whether I’ll merge it as is, or if I can make the new behavior the default one.

Supporting users after Alioth’s migration

When I came back from my vacation, many services provided by Alioth.debian.org were non-functional after a migration to a new setup that involves two machines instead of one. Given that I used to be an Alioth admin, I know that in those periods you tend to be get bogged down on many user support requests. So I re-joined #alioth on IRC and tried to help a bit.

I did investigate some of the reported problems and prepared fixes (updated scripts, configuration files, etc.) for some of the issues. I also created a list of remaining issues that should have lasted only a few days but that’s still active because there are still regressions left.

The most important things still missing are:

  • proper support for delegation of rights. We used ACL setup by the admins in the past. With the new FusionForge, each project admin should be able to delegate rights to external “roles”. There’s a Debian Developer role already but trying to grant him right fails…
  • access to the Ultimate Debian Database. Many tools rely on this database to work.
  • anonymous FTP access to download project files.
  • clear guidelines on how we’re supposed to deal with websites that are updated by VCS hooks.
  • clear guidelines on how we’re supposed to deal with personal git repositories

Improving the “3.0 (quilt)” source format

I have made some proposals to change the way the new source format would work. The goals are to be less painful for packagers who are using a VCS, and to avoid unexpected changes slipping through a new patch generated by dpkg-source.

It seems that the proposals are relatively consensual so I’ll implement them at some point.

Missing in action on my blog

I did a lots of stuff for Debian between travel and vacation, and in the remaining time, I did not manage to write many articles for my blog.

In fact, besides the article on my triggers work mentioned above I only published one interview: People behind Debian: Steve Langasek, release wizard.

I’ll try to do better this month!

Thanks

Many thanks to the people who gave me 151.61 € in May.

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

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3.0 (quilt) Activity summary APT aptitude Blog Book Cleanup conffile Contributing CUT d-i Debconf Debian Debian France Debian Handbook Debian Live Distro Tracker dpkg dpkg-source Flattr Flattr FOSS Freexian Funding Git GNOME GSOC HOWTO Interview LTS Me Multiarch nautilus-dropbox News Packaging pkg-security Programming PTS publican python-django Reference release rolling synaptic Ubuntu WordPress

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