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My Free Software Activities in February 2018

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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 donors (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.

Distro Tracker

Since we switched to salsa, and with the arrival of prospective GSOC students interested to work on distro-tracker this summer, I have been rather active on this project as can be seen in the project’s activity summary. Among the most important changes we can note:

  • The documentation and code coverage analysis is updated on each push.
  • Unit tests, functional tests and style checks (flake8) are run on each push but also on merge requests, allowing contributors to have quick feedback on their code. Implemented with this Gitlab CI configuration.
  • Multiple bug fixes (more of it). Update code to use python3-gpg instead of deprecated python3-gpgme (I had to coordinate with DSA to get the new package installed).
  • More unit tests for team related code. Still a work in progress but I made multiple reviews already.

Debian Live

I created the live-team on salsa.debian.org to prepare for the move of the various Debian live repositories. The move itself has been done by Steve McIntyre. In the discussion, we also concluded that the live-images source package can go away. I thus filed its removal request.

Then I spent a whole day reviewing all the pending patches. I merged most of them and left comments on the remaining ones:

  • Merged #885453 cleaning up double slashes in some paths.
  • Merged #885466 allowing to set upperdir tmpfs mount point size.
  • Merged #885455 switching back the live-boot initrd to use busybox’s wget as it supports https now.
  • Merged #886328 simplifying the mount points handling by using /run/live instead of /lib/live/mount.
  • Merged #886337 adding options to build smaller initrd by disabling some features.
  • Merged #866009 fixing a race condition between live-config and systemd-tmpfiles-setup.
  • Reviewed #884355 implementing new hooks in live-boot’s initrd. Not ready for merge yet.
  • Reviewed #884553 implementing cross-architecture linux flavour selection. Not ready for merge yet.
  • Merged #891206 fixing a regression with local mirrors.
  • Merged #867539 lowering the process priority of mksquasfs to avoid rendering the machine completely unresponsive during this step.
  • Merged #885692 adding UEFI support for ARM64.
  • Merged #847919 simplifying the bootstrap of foreign architectures.
  • Merged #868559 fixing fuse mounts by switching back to klibc’s mount.
  • Wrote a patch to fix verify-checksums option in live-boot (see #856482).

    • I released a new version of live-config but wanted some external testing before releasing the new live-boot. This did not happen yet unfortunately.

Debian LTS

I started a discussion on debian-devel about how we could handle the extension of the LTS program that some LTS sponsors are asking us to do.

The response have been rather mixed so far. It is unlikely that wheezy will be kept on the official mirror after its official EOL date but it’s not clear whether it would be possible to host the wheezy updates on some other debian.org server for longer.

Debian Handbook

I moved the git repository of the book to salsa and released a new version in unstable to fix two recent bugs: #888575 asking us to implement some parallel building to speed the build and #888578 informing us that a recent debhelper update broke the build process due to the presence of a build directory in the source package.

Debian Packaging

I moved all my remaining packages to salsa.debian.org and used the opportunity to clean them up:

  • dh-linktree, ftplib, gnome-shell-timer (fixed #891305 later), logidee-tools, publican, publican-debian, vboot-utils, rozofs
  • Some also got a new upstream release for the same price: tcpdf, lpctools, elastalert, notmuch-addrlookup.
  • I orphaned tcpdf in #889731 and I asked for the removal of feed2omb in #742601.
  • I updated django-modeltranslation to 0.12.2 to fix FTBFS bug #834667 (I submitted an upstream pull request at the same time).

Dolibarr. As a sponsor of dolibarr I filed its removal request and then I started a debian-devel discussion because we should be able to provide such applications to our users even though its development practice does not conform to some of our policies.

Bash. I uploaded a bash NMU (4.4.18-1.1) to fix a regression introduced by the PIE-enabled build (see #889869). I filed an upstream bug against bash but it turns out it’s actually a bug in qemu-user that really ought to be fixed. I reported the bug to qemu upstream but it hasn’t gotten much traction.

pkg-security team. I sponsored many updates over the month: rhash 1.3.5-1, medusa 2.2-5, hashcat, dnsrecon, btscanner, wfuzz 2.2.9, pixiewps 1.4.2-1, inetsim (new from kali). I also made a new upload of sslsniff with the OpenSSL 1.1 patch contributed by Hilko Bengen.

Debian bug reports

I filed a few bug reports:

  • #889814: lintian: Improve long description of epoch-change-without-comment
  • #889816: lintian: Complain when epoch has been bumped but upstream version did not go backwards
  • #890594: devscripts: Implement a salsa-configure script to configure salsa.debian.org project repositories
  • #890700 and #890701 about missing Vcs-Git fields to siridb-server and libcleri
  • #891301: lintian: privacy-breach-generic should not complain about <link rel=”generator”> and others

Misc contributions

Saltstack formulas. I pushed misc fixes to the munin-formula, the samba-formula and the openssh-formula. I submitted two other pull requests: on samba-formula and on users-formula.

QA’s carnivore database. I fixed a bug in a carnivore script that was spewing error messages about duplicate uids. This database links together multiple identifiers (emails, GPG key ids, LDAP entry, etc.) for the same Debian contributor.

Thanks

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

Time to Join Extended Long Term Support for Debian 7 Wheezy

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Debian 7 Wheezy LTS period ends on May 31st and some companies asked Freexian if they could get security support past this date. Since about half of the current team of paid LTS contributors is willing to continue to provide security updates for Wheezy, I have started to work on making this possible.

I just initiated a discussion on debian-devel with multiple Debian teams to see whether it is possible to continue to use debian.org infrastructure to host the wheezy security updates that would be prepared in this extended LTS period.

From the sponsor side, this extended LTS will not work like the regular LTS. It is unrealistic to continue to support all packages and all architectures so only the packages/architectures requested by sponsors will be supported. The amount invoiced to each sponsor will be directly related to the package list that they ask us to support. We made an estimation (based on history) of how much it costs to support each package and we split that cost between all the sponsors that are requesting support for this package. That cost is re-evaluated quarterly and will likely increase over time as sponsors are stopping their support (when they finished to migrate all their machines for example).

This extended LTS will also have some restrictions in terms of packages that we can support. For instance, we will no longer support the linux kernel from wheezy, you will have to switch to the kernel used in jessie (or maybe we will maintain a backport ourselves in wheezy). It is also not yet clear whether we can support OpenJDK since upstream support of version 7 stops at the end of June. And switching to OpenJDK 8 is likely non-trivial. There are likely other unsupportable packages too.

Anyway, if your company needs wheezy security support past end of May, now is the time to worry about it. Please send us a mail with the list of source packages that you would like to see supported. The more companies get involved, the less it will cost to each of them. Our plans are to gather the required data from interested companies in the next few weeks and make a first estimation of the price they will have to pay for the first quarter by mid-march. Then they confirm that they are OK with the offer and we will emit invoices in April so that they can be paid before end of May.

Note however that we decided that it would not be possible to sponsor extended wheezy support (and thus influence which packages are supported) if you are not among the regular LTS sponsors (at bronze level at least). Extended LTS would not be possible without the regular LTS so if you need the former, you have to support the latter too.

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2018

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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 January, about 160 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours increased slightly at 187 hours per month. It would be nice if the slow growth could continue as the amount of work seems to be slowly growing too.

The security tracker currently lists 23 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 23 too. The number of open issues seems to be stable compared to last month which is a good sign.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

My Free Software Activities in January 2018

by

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (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

While I continue to manage the administrative side of Debian LTS, I’m taking a break of the technical work (i.e. preparing and releasing security updates). The hope is that it will help me focus more on my book which (still) needs to be updated for stretch. In truth, this did not happen in January but I hope to do better in the upcoming months.

Salsa and related

The switch to salsa.debian.org is a major event in our community. Last month I started with the QA team and the distro-tracker repository as an experiment. This month I took this opportunity to bring to fruition a merge between the pkg-security team and the forensics team that I already proposed in the past and that we postponed because it was deemed busy work for no gains. Now that both teams had to migrate anyway, it was easier to migrate everything at once under a single project.

All our repositories are now managed under the same team in salsa: https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-security-team/ But for the mailing list we are still waiting for the new list to be created on lists.debian.org (#888136).

As part of this work, I contributed some fixes to the scripts maintained by Mehdi Dogguy. I also filed a wishlist request for a new script to make it easy to share repositories with the Debian group.

With the expected demise of alioth mailing lists, there’s some interest in getting the Debian package tracker to host the official maintainer email. As the central hub for most emails related to packages, it seems natural indeed. We made some progress lately on making it possible to use @packages.debian.org emails (with the downside of receiving duplicate emails currently) but that’s not an really an option when you maintain many packages and want to see them grouped under the same maintainer email. Furthermore it doesn’t allow for automatic association of a package to its maintainer team. So I implemented a team+slug@tracker.debian.org email that works for each team registered on the package tracker and that will automatically associate the package to its team. The email is just a black hole for now (not really a problem as most automatic emails are already received through another email) but I expect to forward non-automatic mails to team members to make it useful as a way to discuss between team members.

The package tracker also learned to recognize commit mails generated by GitLab and it will now forward them to the source package whose name is matching the name of the GitLab project that generated them (see #886114).

Misc Debian stuff

Distro Tracker. I got my two first merge requests which I reviewed and merged. One adds native HTML support to toggle action items (i.e. without javascript on recent browsers) and the other improves some of the messages shown by the vcswatch integration. In #886450, we discussed how to better filter build failure mails sent by the build daemons. New headers have been added.

Bug reports and patches. I forwarded and/or got moving a couple of bugs that we encountered in Kali (glibc: new data brought to #820826, raspi3-firmware: #887062, glibc: tracking down #886506 to a glibc regression affecting busybox, gr-fcdproplus: #888853 new watch file, gjs: upstream bug #33). I also needed a new feature in live-build so I filed #888507 which I implemented almost immediately (but released only in Kali because it’s not documented yet and can possibly be improved a bit further).

While doing my yearly accounting, I opened an issue on tryton and pushed a fix after approval. While running unit tests on distro-tracker, I got an unexpected warning that seems to be caused by virtualenv (see upstream issue #1120).

Debian Packaging. I uploaded zim 0.68~rc1-1 to experimental.

Thanks

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

Tags

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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