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Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2015

December 14, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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

Individual reports

In November, 114.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Ben Hutchings did 5 hours only (out of 15 hours allocated + 5 extra hours remaining, meaning that he has 15 extra hours to do over December).
  • Chris Lamb did 13 hours (12h allocated + 1h remaining).
  • Guido Günther did 10 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 4 remaining, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
  • Mike Gabriel did 6.5 hours only (out of 8 hours allocated + 8 hours remaining, the 9.5 unused extra hours have been dispatched to others for December).
  • Raphaël Hertzog did 21.25 hours.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 19 hours (out of 21h allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
  • Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 21.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

We lost one hour of funding for December due to a sponsor not renewing, and we don’t have any new sponsor lined up right now. There’s another sponsor who will reduce his sponsorship starting with 2016.

While the situation is relatively healthy right now, we should continue the efforts to find new sponsors, both to ensure we can cover more software in wheezy and to better share the costs: having many small sponsors is more resilient than relying on a few big ones. And we still haven’t reached our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full-time position.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 19 packages awaiting an update (2 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (1 less than last month).

Thanks to our sponsors

The new sponsors are in bold.

  • Platinum sponsors:
    • TOSHIBA
  • Gold sponsors:
    • The Positive Internet (for 18 months already)
    • Blablacar (for 17 months already)
    • Linode LLC (for 7 months already)
  • Silver sponsors:
    • David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 18 months already)
    • Domeneshop AS (for 17 months already)
    • Université Lille 3 (for 17 months already)
    • Trollweb Solutions (for 15 months already)
    • Gandi SAS (for 12 months already)
    • University of Luxembourg (for 9 months already)
    • Rentabiliweb Group (for 7 months already)
    • Univention GmbH (for 3 months already)
    • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 3 months already)
  • Bronze sponsors:
    • Offensive Security (for 18 months already)
    • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 18 months already)
    • Evolix (for 17 months already)
    • Freeside Internet Service (for 17 months already)
    • MyTux (for 17 months already)
    • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 15 months already)
    • Intevation GmbH (for 14 months already)
    • Daevel SARL (for 13 months already)
    • Bitfolk LTD (for 12 months already)
    • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 12 months already)
    • Gree, Inc. (for 11 months already)
    • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 11 months already)
    • NUMLOG (for 11 months already)
    • WinGo AG (for 10 months already)
    • Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 6 months already)
    • Sig-I/O (for 4 months already)
    • Entr’ouvert

My Free Software Activities in November 2015

December 1, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 21.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

  • From November 2nd to November 8th, I was handling the LTS frontdesk, triaging new CVE, filing bugs, and ensuring timely answers on the mailing list. I pushed 26 commits to the security tracker. While investigating CVE-2015-7183 I discovered more embedded copies of nspr (which resulted in #804058). I also commented on the upstream fix for CVE-2015-5602 which looked like insufficient.
  • Prepared and released DLA-339-1 on libhtml-scrubber-perl fixing one CVE.
  • Prepared and released DLA-350-1 on eglibc with a non-trivial backport fixing one CVE.
  • Prepared and released DLA-353-1 on imagemagick fixing two security issues without CVE yet (and marking one as not-affecting squeeze).
  • Added a third patch after review by the upstream author on my still pending bouncycastle update. The upstream author asked me to further defer the update as they have some related fixes coming up.
  • I did preparatory work for DLA-352-1 by identifying the upstream commits that fixed the security issue.
  • I spent some time checking issues that have been assigned for a long time without any visible progress being made in the hope to unblock them (libvncserver, pound, quassel).

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Now that the English version has been finalized for Debian 8 Jessie (I uploaded the package to Debian Unstable), I concentrated my efforts on the French version. The book has been fully translated and we’re now finalizing the print version that Eyrolles will again edit.

Paris Open Source Summit

On November 18th and 19th, I was in Paris for the Paris Open Source Summit. I helped to hold a booth for Debian France during two days (with the help of François-Régis and several others).

François Vuillemin, Juliette Belin and Raphaël Hertzog
François-Régis Vuillemin, Juliette Belin and Raphaël Hertzog

On the booth, we had the visit of Juliette Belin who created the theme and the artwork of Debian 8 Jessie. We lacked goodies but we organized a lottery to win 12 copies of my French book.

Debian packaging work

Django. After two weeks of preparation for revers dependencies, I uploaded Django 1.8 to unstable and raised the severity of remaining bugs. Later I uploaded a new upstream point release (1.8.6). I also handled a release critical bug first by opening a ticket upstream and then by writing a patch and submitting it upstream. I uploaded 1.8.7-2 to Debian with my patch.

I also submittted another small fix which has been rejected because the manual page is generated via Sphinx and I thus had to file a bug against Sphinx (which I did). A work-around has been found in the mean time.

apt-xapian-index NMU. A long time ago, I filed a release critical bug against that package (#793681) but the maintainer did not handle it. Fortunately Sven Joachim prepared an NMU and I just uploaded his work. This resulted in another problem due bash-completion changes that Sven promptly fixed and I uploaded a second NMU a few days later.

Gnome-shell-timer. I forwarded #805347 to gnome-shell-timer issue #29 but gnome-shell-timer is abandoned upstream. On a suggestion of Paul Wise, I tried to get this nice extension integrated into gnome-shell-extensions but the request has been turned down. Is there anyone with javascript skills who would like to adopt this project as an upstream developer? It’s a low maintenance project with a decent and loyal user base.

Misc. I fixed bug #804763 in zim which was the result of a bad Debian-specific patch.
I sponsored pylint-plugin-utils_0.2.3-2.dsc for Joseph Herlant to fix a release critical bug. I filed 806237 against lintian. I filed more tickets upstream, related to my Kali packaging work: one against sddm, one against john

Other Debian-related work

Distro-Tracker. I finally merged the work of Orestis Ioannou on bug #756766 which added the possibility to browse old news of each package.

Debian Installer. I implemented two small features that we wanted in Kali: I fixed #647405 to have a way to disable “deb-src” lines in generated sources.list files. I also filed #805291 to see how to allow kernel command line preseeding to override initrd preseeding… the fix is trivial and it works in Kali. I just have to commit it in Debian, I was hoping to get an ack from someone in charge before doing it.

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2015

November 13, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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

Individual reports

In September, 85.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (13.5h allocated, thus only catching up 0.5 hours out of the 5.5 extra hours he had left from former month).
  • Chris Lamb did 11 hours (12h allocated, he will catch up later).
  • Guido Günther did 4 hours (out of 8 hours allocated, thus keeping 4 extra hours for November).
  • Mike Gabriel did nothing (out of 8 hours allocated, he will catch up in November).
  • Raphaël Hertzog did 13.25 hours.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 13.5 hours.
  • Scott Kitterman did 8 hours (4 hours allocated and 4 hours remaining from September)
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 13.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

November crossed a new record with 114.5 hours funded. This is mainly thanks to our first Platinum sponsor: TOSHIBA (through Toshiba Software Development Vietnam). They don’t know yet if they can sponsor us in the long term (they hope so), but it’s still a nice news as we jumped from 50% to 65% of the objective of the equivalent of a full-time position with a single new sponsor.

Currently no change is expected for next month as we don’t have any other new sponsor in the process of joining us.

We still need more support to be able to support all the packages we could not afford to support during the squeeze cycle. We are currently discussing which package we can or cannot support on the LTS list, see the thread Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS for the current situation.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 21 packages awaiting an update (6 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (exactly like last month).

Thanks to our sponsors

The new sponsors are in bold.

  • Platinum sponsors:
    • TOSHIBA
  • Gold sponsors:
    • The Positive Internet (for 17 months already)
    • Blablacar (for 16 months already)
    • Linode LLC (for 6 months already)
  • Silver sponsors:
    • David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 17 months already)
    • Domeneshop AS (for 16 months already)
    • Université Lille 3 (for 16 months already)
    • Trollweb Solutions (for 14 months already)
    • Gandi SAS (for 11 months already)
    • University of Luxembourg (for 8 months already)
    • Rentabiliweb Group (for 6 months already)
    • Univention GmbH
    • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne
  • Bronze sponsors:
    • Offensive Security (for 17 months already)
    • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 17 months already)
    • Evolix (for 16 months already)
    • Freeside Internet Service (for 16 months already)
    • MyTux (for 16 months already)
    • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 14 months already)
    • Intevation GmbH (for 13 months already)
    • Daevel SARL (for 12 months already)
    • Bitfolk LTD (for 11 months already)
    • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 11 months already)
    • Gree, Inc. (for 10 months already)
    • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 10 months already)
    • NUMLOG (for 10 months already)
    • WinGo AG (for 9 months already)
    • Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 5 months already)
    • Sig-I/O (for 3 months already)
    • Entr’ouvert

My Free Software Activities in October 2015

November 4, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 13.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

  • I prepared and released DLA 330-1 fixing two CVE on unzip.
  • I prepared a bouncycastle update fixing CVE-2015-7940 (after having requested that CVE assignment since nobody had done it yet) but I have not yet released the corresponding DLA yet since I’m waiting for a review by the upstream author. This is hairy cryptographic Java code that was non-trivial to backport and I’d rather make sure that I do not mess anything. The patches are available in the bug report #802671 that I opened.
  • I tested the update to MySQL 5.5 with multiple packages and sent back my findings to the debian-lts mailing list.

I also started a conversation about what paid contributors could work on if they have some spare cycle as the current funding level might allow us to invest some time on work outside of just plain security updates.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

I spent quite some time finalizing the Jessie book update, both for the content and for the layout of the printed book.

Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie edition

Misc Debian work

GNOME 3.18. I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer working with GNOME Shell 3.18 and I filed bugs #800660 and #802480 about an annoying gnome-keyring regression… I did multiple test rounds with the Debian maintainers (Dmitry Shachnev, kudos to him!) and the upstream developers (see here and here). Apart from those regressions, I like GNOME 3.18!

Python-modules team migration to Git. After the Git migration, and since the team policy now imposes usage of git-dpm on all members, I made some tries with it on the python-django package while pushing version 1.8.5 to experimental. And the least I can say is that I’m not pleased with the result. I thus filed 3 bugs summarizing the problems I have with git-dpm: #801666 (no way to set the upstream branch names from within the repository), #801667 (no clean way to merge between packaging branches), #801668 (does not create upstream tag immediately on tarball import). That is on top of other randomly stupid bugs that were already reported like #801548 (does not work with perfectly valid pre-existing upstream tags).

Django packaging. I filed bugs on all packages build-depending on python-django that fail to build with Django 1.8 and informed them that I would upload Django 1.8 to unstable in early November (it’s done already). Then I fixed python-django-jsonfield myself since Distro Tracker relies on this package.

Following this small mass-bug filing, I filed a wishlist bug on devscripts to improve the “mass-bug” helper script (see #801926). And since I used “ratt” to rebuild the packages, I filed a wishlist issue on this new tool as well.

Tryton 3.6 upgrade. I upgraded my own Tryton installation to version 3.6 and filed bug #803066 because the SysV init script was not working properly. That also reminded me that the DD process of Matthias Behrle (the tryton package maintainer) was stalled due to a bug in the NM infrastructure so I pinged the NM team and we sorted out a way for me to advocate him and get his process going…

Distro Tracker. I continued my work to refactor the way we handle incoming mail processing (branch people/hertzog/mailprocessing). It’s now mostly finished and I need to deploy it in a test environment before being able to roll it out on tracker.debian.org.

Thanks

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

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