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Freexian’s third report about Debian Long Term Support

November 12, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

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

Individual reports

In October 2014, we affected 13.75h works hours to 3 contributors:

Thorsten Alteholz
Raphaël Hertzog worked only 10 hours. The remaining hours will be done over November.
Holger Levsen did nothing (for unexpected personal reasons), he will catch up in November.

Obviously, only the hours done have been paid. Should the backlog grow further, we will seek for more paid contributors (to share the workload) and to make it easier to redispatch work hours once a contributor knows that he won’t be able to handle the hours that were affected to him/her.

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we gained two new sponsors (Daevel and FOSSter, thanks to them!) and we have now 45.5 hours of paid LTS work to “spend” each month. That’s great but we are still far from our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit worse than last month: while the dla-needed.txt file only lists 33 packages awaiting an update (6 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total. This differences has two explanations: CVE triaging for squeeze has not been done in the last days, and the POODLE issue(s) with SSLv3 affects a very large number of packages where it’s not always clear what the proper action is.

In any case, it’s never too late to join the growing list of sponsors and help us do a better job, please check with your company managers. If not possible for this year, consider including it in the budget for next year.

Thanks to our sponsors

Let me thank our main sponsors:

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet

Silver sponsors:

Bronze sponsors:

My Free Software Activities in October 2014

November 5, 2014 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.

Packaging work

With the Jessie freeze approaching, I took care of packaging some new upstream releases that I wanted to get in. I started with zim 0.62, I had skipped 0.61 due to some annoying regressions. Since I had two bugs to forward, I took the opportunity to reach out to the upstream author to see if he had some important fixes to get into Jessie. This resulted in me pushing another update with 3 commits cherry picked from the upstream VCS. I also sponsored a wheezy-backports of the new version.

I pushed two new bugfixes releases of Publican (4.2.3 and 4.2.6) but I had to include a work-around for a bug that I reported earlier on docbook-xml (#763598: the XML catalog doesn’t allow libxml2/xmllint to identify the local copy of some entities files) and that is unlikely to be fixed in time for Jessie.

Last but not least, I pushed the first point release of Django 1.7, aka version 1.7.1 to unstable and asked release managers to ensure it migrates to testing before the real freeze. This is important because the closer we are to upstream, the easier it is to apply security patches during the lifetime of Jessie (which will hopefully be 5 years, thanks to Debian LTS!). I also released a backport of python-django 1.7 to wheezy-backports.

I sponsored galette 0.7.8+dfsg-1 fixing an RC bug so that it can get back to testing (it got removed from testing due to the bug).

Debian LTS

See my dedicated report for the paid work I did on that area. Apart from that, I took some time to get in touch with all the Debian consultants and see if they knew some companies to reach out. There are a few new sponsors in the pipe thanks to this, but given the large set of people that it represents, I was expecting more. I used this opportunity to report all bogus entries (i.e bouncing email, broken URL) to the maintainer of the said webpage.

Distro Tracker

Only 30 commits this month, with almost no external contribution, I’m a bit saddened by this situation because it’s not very difficult to contribute to this project and we have plenty of easy bugs to get you started.

That said I’m still happy with the work done. Most of the changes have been made for Kali but will be useful for all derivatives: it’s now possible to add external repositories in the tracker and not display them in the list of available versions, and not generate automatic news about those repositories. There’s a new “derivative” application which is only in its infancy but can already provide a useful comparison of a derivative with its parent. See it in action on the Kali Package Tracker: http://pkg.kali.org/derivative/ Thanks to Offensive Security which is sponsoring this work!

Since I have pushed Django 1.7 to wheezy-backports, all distro tracker instances that I manage are now running that version of Django and I opted to make that version mandatory. This made it possible to add initial Django migrations and rely on this new feature for future database schema upgrade (I have voluntarily avoided schema change up to now to avoid problems migrating from South to Django migrations).

Thanks

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

My Debian LTS report for October 2014

November 4, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

During October, I spent 10 hours on paid LTS work. I should have worked 4 hours more, but for various reasons this did not happen. Instead I’ll spend 4 more hours in November.

During this time, I did the following:

CVE triage: this month I pushed 23 commits to the security tracker SVN repository, and filed #765352 against wpa.
I released a mysql-5.1 update (DLA-75-1) fixing 3 CVE.
I sponsored the upload of ppp 2.4.5-4+deb6u1 for DLA-74-1 which had been prepared by Andrew Bartlett.
I uploaded a new version of apache2 (DLA-71-1) fixing 2 CVE.
I filed a few bugs against debian-security-support to request that some packages be marked as unsupported in squeeze: #765374 for axis2c and
rampart, #765452 for a new feature allowing binary packages to be marked as unsupported so that glassfish-appserv can be marked as such (this is #765454).

After a few months of work on LTS, I’m starting to have a better grasp on the worflow and on what can be done or not. But I’m still astonished that we have so few squeeze users on the mailing list. If you’re using Squeeze, please subscribe to the list and test the packages that contributors are submitting for tests/validation. It really helps to have some feedback from real users before releasing an update, in particular when the Debian contributor who prepared the update is not a user of said package… not everybody has the skills required to prepare security updates, but everybody can help test packages, you have no excuses. 😉

And we still need more organizations joining the LTS project, either by providing help (like Catalyst did by letting Andrew Bartlett work on LTS, thanks to them!) or by sponsoring the
project and letting others do the work.

Freexian’s second report about Debian Long Term Support

October 15, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

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

Individual reports

In September 2014, 3 contributors have been paid for 11h each. Here are their individual reports:

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we have gained 5 new sponsors, that’s great. We’re now at almost 25% of a full-time position. But we’re not done yet. We believe that we would need at least twice as many sponsored hours to do a reasonable work with at least the most used packages, and possibly four times as much to be able to cover the full archive.

We’re now at 39 packages that need an update in Squeeze (+9 compared to last month), and the contributors paid by Freexian did handle 11 during last month (this gives an approximate rate of 3 hours per update, CVE triage included).

Open questions

Dear readers, what can we do to convince more companies to join the effort?

The list of sponsors contains almost exclusively companies from Europe. It’s true that Freexian’s offer is in Euro but the economy is world-wide and it’s common to have international invoices. When Ivan Kohler asked if having an offer in dollar would help convince other companies, we got zero feedback.

What are the main obstacles that you face when you try to convince your managers to get the company to contribute?

By the way, we prefer that companies take small sponsorship commitments that they can afford over multiple years over granting lots of money now and then not being able to afford it for another year.

Thanks to our sponsors

Let me thank our main sponsors:

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet

Silver sponsors:

Bronze sponsors:

Individual reports

Evolution of the situation

Thanks to our sponsors

Packaging work

Debian LTS

Distro Tracker

Thanks

Individual reports

Evolution of the situation

Open questions

Thanks to our sponsors

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