Debian – Page 39

My Free Software Activities in September 2014

October 2, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (26.6 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Django 1.7

Since Django 1.7 got released early September, I updated the package in experimental and continued to push for its inclusion in unstable. I sent a few more patches to multiple reverse build dependencies who had asked for help (python-django-bootstrap-form, horizon, lava-server) and then sent the package to unstable. At that time, I bumped the severity of all bug filed against packages that were no longer building with Django 1.7.

Later in the month, I made sure that the package migrated to testing, it only required a temporary removal of mumble-django (see #763087). Quite a few packages got updated since then (remaining bugs here).

Debian Long Term Support

I have worked towards keeping Debian Squeeze secure, see the dedicated article: My Debian LTS report for September 2014.

Distro Tracker

The pace of development on tracker.debian.org slowed down a bit this month, with only 30 new commits in the repository, closing 6 bugs. Some of the changes are noteworthy though: the news now contain true links on bugs, CVE and plain URLs (example here). I have also fixed a serious issue with the way users were identified when they used their Alioth account credentials to login via sso.debian.org.

On the development side, we’re now able to generate the test suite code coverage which is quite helpful to identify parts of the code that are clearly missing some tests (see bin/gen-coverage.sh in the repository).

Misc packaging

Publican. I have been behind packaging new upstream versions of Publican and with the freeze approaching, I decided to take care of it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped and found numerous issues that I have filed upstream (invalid public identifier, PDF build fails with noNumberLines function available, build of the manual requires the network). Most of those have been fixed upstream in the mean time but the last issue seems to be a problem in the way we manage our Docbook XML catalogs in Debian. I have thus filed #763598 (docbook-xml: xmllint fails to identify local copy of docbook entities file) which is still waiting an answer from the maintainer.

Package sponsorship. I have sponsored new uploads of dolibarr (RC bug fix), tcpdf (RC bug fix), tryton-server (security update) and django-ratelimit.

GNOME 3.14. With the arrival of GNOME 3.14 in unstable, I took care of updating gnome-shell-timer and also filed some tickets for extensions that I use: https://github.com/projecthamster/shell-extension/issues/79 and https://github.com/olebowle/gnome-shell-timer/issues/25

git-buildpackage. I filed multiple bugs on git-buildpackage for little issues that have been irking me since I started using this tool: #761160 (gbp pq export/switch should be smarter), #761161 (gbp pq import+export should preserve patch filenames), #761641 (gbp import-orig should be less fragile and more idempotent).

Thanks

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

My Debian LTS report for September

September 30, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

Thanks to the sponsorship of multiple companies, I have been paid to work 11 hours on Debian LTS this month.

I started by doing lots of triage in the security tracker (if you want to help, instructions are here) because I noticed that the dla-needed.txt list (which contains the list of packages that must be taken care of via an LTS security update) was missing quite a few packages that had open vulnerabilities in oldstable.

In the end, I pushed 23 commits to the security tracker. I won’t list the details each time but for once, it’s interesting to let you know the kind of things that this work entailed:

I reviewed the patches for CVE-2014-0231, CVE-2014-0226, CVE-2014-0118, CVE-2013-5704 and confirmed that they all affected the version of apache2 that we have in Squeeze. I thus added apache2 to dla-needed.txt.
I reviewed CVE-2014-6610 concerning asterisk and marked the version in Squeeze as not affected since the file with the vulnerability doesn’t exist in that version (this entails some checking that the specific feature is not implemented in some other file due to file reorganization or similar internal changes).
I reviewed CVE-2014-3596 and corrected the entry that said that is was fixed in unstable. I confirmed that the versions in squeeze was affected and added it to dla-needed.txt.
Same story for CVE-2012-6153 affecting commons-httpclient.
I reviewed CVE-2012-5351 and added a link to the upstream ticket.
I reviewed CVE-2014-4946 and CVE-2014-4945 for php-horde-imp/horde3, added links to upstream patches and marked the version in squeeze as unaffected since those concern javascript files that are not in the version in squeeze.
I reviewed CVE-2012-3155 affecting glassfish and was really annoyed by the lack of detailed information. I thus started a discussion on debian-lts to see whether this package should not be marked as unsupported security wise. It looks like we’re going to mark a single binary packages as unsupported… the one containing the application server with the vulnerabilities, the rest is still needed to build multiple java packages.
I reviewed many CVE on dbus, drupal6, eglibc, kde4libs, libplack-perl, mysql-5.1, ppp, squid and fckeditor and added those packages to dla-needed.txt.
I reviewed CVE-2011-5244 and CVE-2011-0433 concerning evince and came to the conclusion that those had already been fixed in the upload 2.30.3-2+squeeze1. I marked them as fixed.
I droppped graphicsmagick from dla-needed.txt because the only CVE affecting had been marked as no-dsa (meaning that we don’t estimate that a security updated is needed, usually because the problem is minor and/or that fixing it has more chances to introduce a regression than to help).
I filed a few bugs when those were missing: #762789 on ppp, #762444 on axis.
I marked a bunch of CVE concerning qemu-kvm and xen as end-of-life in Squeeze since those packages are not currently supported in Debian LTS.
I reviewed CVE-2012-3541 and since the whole report is not very clear I mailed the upstream author. This discussion led me to mark the bug as no-dsa as the impact seems to be limited to some information disclosure. I invited the upstream author to continue the discussion on RedHat’s bugzilla entry.

And when I say “I reviewed” it’s a simplification for this kind of process:

Look up for a clear explanation of the security issue, for a list of vulnerable versions, and for patches for the versions we have in Debian in the following places:

The Debian security tracker CVE page.
The associated Debian bug tracker entry (if any).
The description of the CVE on cve.mitre.org and the pages linked from there.
RedHat’s bugzilla entry for the CVE (which often implies downloading source RPM from CentOS to extract the patch they used).
The upstream git repository and sometimes the dedicated security pages on the upstream website.

When that was not enough to be conclusive for the version we have in Debian (and unfortunately, it’s often the case), download the Debian source package and look at the source code to verify if the problematic code (assuming that we can identify it based on the patch we have for newer versions) is also present in the old version that we are shipping.

CVE triaging is often almost half the work in the general process: once you know that you are affected and that you have a patch, the process to release an update is relatively straightforward (sometimes there’s still work to do to backport the patch).

Once I was over that first pass of triaging, I had already spent more than the 11 hours paid but I still took care of preparing the security update for python-django. Thorsten Alteholz had started the work but got stuck in the process of backporting the patches. Since I’m co-maintainer of the package, I took over and finished the work to release it as DLA-65-1.

Freexian’s first report about Debian Long Term Support

September 10, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

When we setup Freexian’s offer to bring together funding from multiple companies in order to sponsor the work of multiple developers on Debian LTS, one of the rules that I imposed is that all paid contributors must provide a public monthly report of their paid work.

While the LTS project officially started in June, the first month where contributors were actually paid has been July. Freexian sponsored Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen for 10.5 hours each in July and for 16.5 hours each in August. Here are their reports:

Thorsten Alteholz: July / August
Holger Levsen: July / August

It’s worth noting that Freexian sponsored Holger’s work to fix the security tracker to support squeeze-lts. It’s my belief that using the money of our sponsors to make it easier for everybody to contribute to Debian LTS is money well spent.

As evidenced by the progress bar on Freexian’s offer page, we have not yet reached our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. And it shows in the results, the dla-needed.txt still shows around 30 open issues. This is slightly better than the state two months ago but we can improve a lot on the average time to push out a security update…

To have an idea of the relative importance of the contributions of the paid developers, I counted the number of uploads made by Thorsten and Holger since July: of 40 updates, they took care of 19 of them, so about the half.

I also looked at the other contributors: Raphaël Geissert stands out with 9 updates (I believe that he is contracted by Électricité de France for doing this) and most of the other contributors look like regular Debian maintainers taking care of their own packages (Paul Gevers with cacti, Christoph Berg with postgresql, Peter Palfrader with tor, Didier Raboud with cups, Kurt Roeckx with openssl, Balint Reczey with wireshark) except Matt Palmer and Luciano Bello who (likely) are benevolent members of the LTS team.

There are multiple things to learn here:

Paid contributors already handle almost 70% of the updates. Counting only on volunteers would not have worked.
Quite a few companies that promised help (and got mentioned in the press release) have not delivered the promised help yet (neither through Freexian nor directly).

Last but not least, this project wouldn’t exist without the support of multiple companies and organizations. Many thanks to them:

Hopefully this list will expand over time! Any help to reach out to new companies and organizations is more than welcome.

My Free Software Activities in August 2014

September 2, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (65.55 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Distro Tracker

Even though I was officially in vacation during 3 of the 4 weeks of August, I spent many nights working on Distro Tracker. I’m pleased to have managed to bring back Python 3 compatibility over all the (tested) code base. The full test suite now passes with Python 3.4 and Django 1.6 (or 1.7).

From now on, I’ll run “tox” on all code submitted to make sure that we won’t regress on this point. tox also runs flake8 for me so that I can easily detect when the submitted code doesn’t respect the PEP8 coding style. It also catches other interesting mistakes (like unused variable or too complex functions).

Getting the code to pass flake8 was also a major effort, it resulted in a huge commit (89 files changed, 1763 insertions, 1176 deletions).

Thanks to the extensive test suite, all those refactoring only resulted in two regressions that I fixed rather quickly.

Some statistics: 51 commits over the last month, 41 by me, 3 by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, 3 by Christophe Siraut, 3 by Joseph Herlant and 1 by Simon Kainz. Thanks to all of them! Their contributions ported some features that were already available on the old PTS. The new PTS is now warning of upcoming auto-removals, is displaying problems with uptream URLs, includes a short package description in the page title, and provides a link to screenshots (if they exist on screenshots.debian.net).

We still have plenty of bugs to handle, so you can help too: check out https://tracker.debian.org/docs/contributing.html. I always leave easy bugs for others to handle, so grab one and get started! I’ll review your patch with pleasure. 🙂

Tryton

After my last batch of contributions to Tryton’s French Chart of Accounts (#4108, #4109, #4110, #4111) Cédric Krier granted me commit rights to the account_fr mercurial module.

Debconf 14

I wasn’t able to attend this year but thanks to awesome work of the video team, I watched some videos (and I still have a bunch that I want to see). Some of them were put online the day after they had been recorded. Really amazing work!

Django 1.7

After the initial bug reports, I got some feedback of maintainers who feared that it would be difficult to get their packages working with Django 1.7. I helped them as best as I can by providing some patches (for horizon, for django-restricted-resource, for django-testscenarios).

Since I expected many maintainers to be not very pro-active, I rebuilt all packages with Django 1.7 to detect at least those that would fail to build. I tagged as confirmed all the corresponding bug reports.

Looking at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=python-django@packages.debian.org;tag=django17, one can see that some progress has been made with 25 packages fixed. Still there are at least 25 others that are still problematic in sid and 35 that have not been investigated at all (except for the automatic rebuild that passed). Again your help is more than welcome!

It’s easy to install python-django 1.7 from experimental and they try to use/rebuild the packages from the above list.

Dpkg translation

With the freeze approaching, I wanted to ensure that dpkg was fully translated in French. I thus pinged debian-l10n-french@lists.debian.org and merged some translations that were done by volunteers. Unfortunately it looks like nobody really stepped up to maintain it in the long run… so I did myself the required update when dpkg 1.17.12 got uploaded.

Is there anyone willing to manage dpkg’s French translation? With the latest changes in 1.17.13, we have again a few untranslated strings:
$ for i in $(find . -name fr.po); do echo $i; msgfmt -c -o /dev/null --statistics $i; done ./po/fr.po 1083 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 1 untranslated message. ./dselect/po/fr.po 268 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations. ./scripts/po/fr.po 545 translated messages. ./man/po/fr.po 2277 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 3 untranslated messages.

Misc stuff

I made an xsane QA upload (it’s currently orphaned) to drop the (build-)dependency on liblcms1 and avoid getting it removed from Debian testing (see #745524). For the record, how-can-i-help warned me of this after one dist-upgrade.

With the Django 1.7 work and the need to open up an experimental branch, I decided to switch python-django’s packaging to git even though the current team policy is to use subversion. This triggered (once more) the discussion about a possible switch to git and I was pleased to see more enthusiasm this time around. Barry Warsaw tested a few workflows, shared his feeling and pushed toward a live discussion of the switch during Debconf. It looks like it might happen for good this time. I contributed my share in the discussions on the mailing list.

Thanks

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

Django 1.7

Debian Long Term Support

Distro Tracker

Misc packaging

Thanks

Distro Tracker

Tryton

Debconf 14

Django 1.7

Dpkg translation

Misc stuff

Thanks

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