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My Free Software Activities in December 2015

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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 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:

  • Sent a first patch and later an updated patch to modify DAK so that it can send the accept/reject mails to the signer of the upload instead of the maintainer. Details in #796784.
  • Uploaded MySQL 5.5 compabitility fixes for phpmyadmin and postfix-policyd so that we could release MySQL 5.5 as an upgrade option MySQL 5.1 (see DLA 359-1).
  • Released DLA 361-1 on bouncycastle after having gotten the green light from upstream.
  • Released DLA 362-1 on dhcpd fixing three CVE.
  • Released DLA 366-1 on arts fixing one CVE.
  • Released DLA 367-1 on kdelibs fixing one CVE.
  • Handled the LTS frontdesk for a whole week.
  • Sponsored the upload of foomatic-filters for DLA 371-1.
  • Filed #808256 and #808257 to get libnsbmp/libnsgif removed. Both packages had recent CVE and were sitting unused in Debian since their introduction 6 years ago…
  • Released DLA 372-1 announcing the end of support of virtualbox-ose.
  • Updated git repository of debian-security-support to account for the former change and also took care of a few pending issues.
  • Released DLA 376-1 on mono to fix one CVE.
  • Added some initial DEP-8 tests to python-django that will help to ensure that a security update doesn’t break the package.

Distro Tracker

I put a big focus on tracker.debian.org work this month. I completed the switch of the mail interface from packages.qa.debian.org to tracker.debian.org and I announced the change on debian-devel-announce.

The changes resulted in a few problems that I quickly fixed (like #807073) and some other failures seen only by me and that were generated by weird spam messages (did you know that a subject can’t have a newline character but that it can be encoded and folded over multiple lines?).

Related to that I fixed some services so that they send their mails to tracker.debian.org directly instead of relying on the old emails (they get forwarded for now but it would be nice to be able to get rid of that forward). I updated (with the help of Lucas Nussbaum) the service that forwards the Launchpad bugs to the tracker, I sent a patch to update the @packages.debian.org aliases (not yet applied), I updated the configuration of all git commit notice scripts in the Alioth collab-maint and python-modules project (many remain to be done). I asked Ubuntu’s Merge-O-Matic to use the new emails as well (see LP 1525497). DAK and the Debian BTS still have to be updated, as of yet nobody reacted to my announce… last but not least I updated many wiki pages which duplicated the instructions to setup the commit notice sent to the PTS.

While on a good track I opted to tackle the long-standing RC bug that was plaguing tracker.debian.org (#789183), so I updated the codebase to rely on Twitter’s bootstrap v4 instead of v2. I had to switch to something else for the icons since glyphicons is no longer provided as part of bootstrap and the actual license for the standalone version was not suitable for use. I opted for Github’s Octicons. I made numerous little improvements while doing that (closing some bugs in the process) and I believe that the result is more pleasant to use.

I also did a lot of bug triage and fixed a few small issues like the incomplete architecture list (#793547), or fixing a page used only by people with javascript disabled that was not working. Or the invalid links for packages still using CVS (ugh, see #561228).

Misc packaging

Django. After having added DEP-8 tests (as part of my LTS work, see above), I discovered that the current version in unstable did not pass its test suite… so I filed the issue upstream (ticket 26016) and added the corresponding patch. And I encouraged others to update python-bcrypt in Debian to a newer version that would have worked with Django 1.9 (see #803096). I also fixed another small issue in Django (see ticket 26017 with my pull request that got accepted).

I asked the release managers to consider accepting the latest 1.7.x version in jessie (see #807654) but I have gotten zero answer so far. And I’m not the only one waiting an answer. It’s a bit of a sad situation… we still have a few weeks until the next point release but for once I do it in advance and I would love to have timely feedback.

Last but not least, I started the maintaining the current LTS release (1.8.x) in jessie-backports.

Tryton. I upgraded to Tryton 3.8 and discovered an issue that I filed in #806781. I sponsored 5 new tryton modules for Matthias Behrle (who is DM) as well as one security upload (for CVE-2015-0861).

Debian Handbook. I uploaded a new version to Debian Unstable and requested (to the release managers) the permission to upload a backport of it to jessie so that jessie has a version of the package that documents jessie and not wheezy… contrary to my other Django request, this one should be non-controversial but I also have had zero answer so far, see #807515.

Misc. I filed #808583 when sbuild stopped working with Perl 5.22. I handled #807860 on publican, I found the corresponding upstream ticket and discovered a work around with the help of upstream (see here).

Kali related work

I reported a bug to #debian-apt about apt miscalculating download size (ending up with 18 EB!) which resulted in a fix here in version 1.1.4. Installing a meta-package that needed more than 2GB was no longer possible without this fix and we have a kali-linux-all metapackage in that situation that gets regularly installed in a Jenkins test.

I added captcha support to Distro Tracker and enabled this feature on pkg.kali.org.

I filed #808863 against uhd-host because it was not possible to install the package in a systemd-nspawn’s managed chroot where /proc is read-only. And we started using this to test dist-upgrade from one version of Kali to the next…

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in November 2015

by

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.

My Free Software Activities in September 2015

by

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 8 hours on Debian LTS. In that time, I mostly did CVE triaging (in the last 3 days since I’m of LTS frontdesk duty this week). I pushed 14 commits to the security tracker. There were multiple CVE without any initial investigation so I checked the status of the CVE not only in squeeze but also in wheezy/jessie.

On unpaid time, I wrote and sent the summary of the work session held during DebConf. And I tried to initiate a discussion about offering mysql-5.5 in squeeze-lts. We also have setup lts-security@debian.org so that we can better handle embargoed security updates.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie editionI spent a lot of time on my book, the content update has been done but now we’re reviewing it before preparing the paperback. I also started updating its French translation. You can help review it too.

While working on the book I noticed that snort got removed from jessie and the SE linux reference policy as well. I mailed their maintainers to recommend that they provide them in jessie-backports at least… those packages are relatively important/popular and it’s a pity that they are missing in jessie.

I hope to finish the book update in the next two weeks!

Distro Tracker

I spent a lot of time to revamp the mail part of Distro Tracker. But as it’s not finished yet, I don’t have anything to show yet. That said I pushed an important fix concerning the mail subscriptions (see #798555), basically all subscriptions of packages containing a dash were broken. It just shows that the new tracker is not yet widely used for mail subscription…

I also merged a patch from Andrew Starr-Bochicchio (#797633) to improve the description of the WNPP action items. And I reviewed another patch submitted by Orestis Ioannou to allow browsing of old news (see #756766).

And I filed #798011 against bugs.debian.org to request that a new X-Debian-PR-Severity header field be added to outgoing BTS mail so that Distro Tracker can filter mails by severity and offer people to subscribe to RC bugs only.

Misc Debian work

I filed many bugs this month and almost all of them are related to my Kali work:

  • 3 on debootstrap: #798560 (request for –suite-config option), #798562 (allow sharing bootstrap scripts), #7985604 (request to add kali related bootstrap scripts).
  • 3 requests of new upstream versions: for gpsd (#797899), for valgrind (#800013) and for puppet (#798636).
  • #797783: sbuild fails without any error message when /var/lib/sbuild is not writable in the chroot
  • #798181: gnuradio: Some files take way too long to compile (I had to request a give-back on another build daemon to ensure gnuradio migrated back to testing, and Julien Cristau suggested that it would be better to fix the package so that a single file doesn’t take more than 5 hours to build…)
  • #799550: libuhd003v5 lost its v5 suffix…

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in June 2015

by

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 14.5 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 24 commits to the security tracker. I also setup a rotation with other paid contributors. That way this task doesn’t rely on me exclusively.
  • Reviewed a libapache-mod-jk update and sent DLA-240-1.
  • Prepared and released DLA-257-1 on libwmf fixing one CVE.
  • Reviewed a shibboleth-sp2 update and sent DLA-259-1. Lacking a proper test setup, the tests done were minimal.
  • Prepared and released DLA-260-1 on hostapd fixing one CVE.
  • Prepared and released DLA-261-1 on aptdaemon fixing one CVE.
  • I started to work on a wishlist bug for tracker.debian.org: displaying open security issues in stable releases is important to catch the attention of package maintainers. Right now it only displays something when security issues are open in unstable.

Other Debian work

Distro Tracker. I fixed a few issues that were affecting the tracker: SSL access to the BTS soap interface was not working due to changes in the way SSL certificates are managed on Debian machines (see #787410 for details of a similar problem), and the bugs panel disappeared for a while (see #787163). I also merged some minor changes from Christophe Siraut and James McCoy.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook. After some exchanges with Osamu Osuaki of the debian-doc team, we agreed to host a copy of my (DFSG-free) book on debian.org so that it can be better promoted to newcomers who are discovering Debian. It’s over there. I made some changes to the official package (notably integrating all available translations) to make this possible.

Packaging. I uploaded two new release of publican to unstable (4.3.0 and 4.3.1), although I had to cheat by building them in stretch due to a build failure in unstable caused by a libxml2 regression (see #766884). I fixed two small bug reported against the package: a badly documented license (#787993) and a request to replace the dependency on perlmagick to libimage-magick-perl (#789223).

I uploaded zim 0.63 and a new gnome-shell-timer for GNOME 3.16 compatibility.
And I sponsored python-requirements-detector (#789497) as a prerequisite for prospector (a package that I requested some time ago in #781165). I also took care of a stable update of python-reportlab (#787806) at the request of a customer.

Kali related contributions. In Kali, we rely heavily on reprepro to manage our archive. It works rather well for us but over time we identified some annoying issues. I just reported some of them:

  • It should be able to keep unreferenced files for a few days before deleting theme (#788105).
  • It should be possible to clone a distribution in a single command (#788843).
  • It should be possible to rename a distribution in a single command (#788846).

live-build is another important tool for us and when we started using new codenames for our releases, we re-discovered some problems and this time we submitted a bug report with some suggestion to make it more generic (#789800) and committed a small fix to avoid a stupid failure when the release is unknown to live-build.

Misc stuff

Hardware support issue. I have some problems to get some USB disks detected during boot of my Intel NUC, so I sent a bug report to the linux USB developers. It’s a weird issue and rather annoying as it means that my private NAS stops working after each reboot (until I powercycle the external disk enclosure).

My websites. You might have noticed some changes on raphaelhertzog.com and raphaelhertzog.fr. I have deployed new themes that should be mobile-friendly and I also deployed proper https support with free certificates from wosign.com (until letsencrypt.org is ready for general usage). Same goes for the freexian.com webpage hosting our Debian LTS sponsorship offer.

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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