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My Free Software Activities in March 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

I reviewed and merged 14 merge requests from multiple contributors:

On top of this, I updated the Salsa/AliothMigration wiki page with information about how to best leverage tracker.debian.org when you migrate to salsa.

I also filed a few issues for bugs or things that I’d like to see improved:

I also gave my feedback about multiple mockups prepared by Chirath R in preparation of his Google Summer of Code project proposal.

Security Tools Packaging Team

Following the departure of alioth, the new list that we requested on lists.debian.org has been created: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-tools/

I updated (in the git repositories) all the Vcs-* and all the Maintainer fields of the packages maintained by the team.

I prepared and uploaded afflib 3.7.16-3 to fix RC bug #892599. I sponsored rhash 1.3.6 for Aleksey Kravchenko, ccrypt 1.10-5 for Alexander Kulak and ledger-wallets-udev 0.1 for Stephne Neveu.

Debian Live

This project also saw an unexpected resurgence of activity and I had to review and merge many merge requests:

It’s nice to see two derivatives being so active in upstreaming their changes.

Misc stuff

Hamster time tracker. I was regularly hit a by a bug leading to a gnome-shell crash (leading to a graphical session crash due to the design of wayland) and this time I decided that enough was enough so I started to dig in the code and did my best to fix the issues I encountered. During the month, I tested multiple versions and submitted three pull requests. Right now, the version in git is working fine for me. Still, it really smells of a bad design that mistakes in shell extensions can have such dramatic consequences.

Packaging. I forwarded #892063 to upstream in a new ticket. I updated zim to version 0.68 (final release replacing release candidate that I had already packaged). I filed #893083 suggesting that the hello source package should be a model for other packages and as such it should have a git repository hosted on salsa.debian.org.

Sponsorship. I sponsored pylint-django 0.9.4-1 for Joseph Herlant. I also sponsored urwid 2.0.1-1 (new upstream version), xlwt 1.3.0-1 (new version with python 3 support), elastalert 0.1.29-1 (new upstream release and RC bug fix) which have been updated for Freexian customers.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in February 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.

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.

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.

My Free Software Activities in December 2017

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

This month I was allocated 12h and I had two hours left but I only spent 13h. During this time, I managed the LTS frontdesk during one week, reviewing new security issues and classifying the associated CVE (18 commits to the security tracker).

I also released DLA-1205-1 on simplesamlphp fixing 6 CVE. I prepared and released DLA-1207-1 on erlang with the help of the maintainer who tested the patch that I backported. I handled tkabber but it turned out that the CVE report was wrong, I reported this to MITRE who marked the CVE as DISPUTED (see CVE-2017-17533).

During my CVE triaging work, I decided to mark mp3gain and libnet-ping-external-perl as unsupported (the latter has been removed everywhere already). I re-classified the suricata CVE as not worth an update (following the decision of the security team). I also dropped global from dla-needed as the issue was marked unimportant but I still filed #884912 about it so that it gets tracked in the BTS.

I filed #884911 on ohcount requesting new upstream (fixing CVE) and update of homepage field (that is misleading in current package). I dropped jasperreports from dla-needed.txt as issues are undetermined and upstream is uncooperative, instead I suggested to mark the package as unsupported (see #884907).

Misc Debian Work

Debian Installer. I suggested to switch to isenkram instead of discover for automatic package installation based on recognized hardware. I also filed a bug on isenkram (#883470) and asked debian-cloud for help to complete the missing mappings.

Packaging. I sponsored asciidoc 8.6.10-2 for Joseph Herlant. I uplodaded new versions of live-tools and live-build fixing multiple bugs that had been reported (many with patches ready to merge). Only #882769 required a bit more work to track down and fix. I also uploaded dh-linktree 0.5 with a new feature contributed by Paul Gevers. By the way, I no longer use this package so I will happily give it over to anyone who needs it.

QA team. When I got my account on salsa.debian.org (a bit before the announce of the beta phase), I created the group for the QA team and setup a project for distro-tracker.

Bug reports. I filed #884713 on approx, requesting that systemd’s approx.socket be configured to not have any trigger limit.

Package Tracker

Following the switch to Python 3 by default, I updated the packaging provided in the git repository. I’m now also providing a systemd unit to run gunicorn3 for the website.

I merged multiple patches of Pierre-Elliott Bécue fixing bugs and adding a new feature (vcswatch support!). I fixed a bug related to the lack of a link to the experimental build logs and a bit of bug triaging.

I also filed two bugs against DAK related to bad interactions with the package tracker: #884930 because it does still use packages.qa.debian.org to send emails instead of tracker.debian.org. And #884931 because it sends removal mails to too many email addresses. And I filed a bug against the tracker (#884933) because the last issue also revealed a problem in the way the tracker handles removal mails.

Thanks

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

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