Distro Tracker

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 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 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.

My Free Software Activities in July 2014

August 1, 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 (548.59 €, 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

Now that tracker.debian.org is live, people reported bugs (on the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package that I requested) faster than I could fix them. Still I spent many, many hours on this project, reviewing submitted patches (thanks to Christophe Siraut, Joseph Herlant, Dimitri John Ledkov, Vincent Bernat, James McCoy, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio who all submitted some patches!), fixing bugs, making sure the code works with Django 1.7, and started the same with Python 3.

I added a tox.ini so that I can easily run the test suite in all 4 supported environments (created by tox as virtualenv with the combinations of Django 1.6/1.7 and Python 2.7/3.4).

Over the month, the git repository has seen 73 commits, we fixed 16 bugs and other issues that were only reported over IRC in #debian-qa. With the help of Enrico Zini and Martin Zobel, we enabled the possibility to login via sso.debian.org (Debian’s official SSO) so that Debian developers don’t even have to explicitly create their account.

As usual more help is needed and I’ll gladly answer your questions and review your patches.

Misc packaging work

Publican. I pushed a new upstream release of publican and dropped a useless build-dependency that was plagued by a difficult to fix RC bug (#749357 for the curious, I tried to investigate but it needs major work for make 4.x compatibility).

GNOME 3.12. With gnome-shell 3.12 hitting unstable, I had to update gnome-shell-timer (and filed an upstream ticket at the same time), a GNOME Shell extension to start some run-down counters.

Django 1.7. I packaged python-django 1.7 release candidate 1 in experimental (found a small bug, submitted a ticket with a patch that got quickly merged) and filed 85 bugs against all the reverse dependencies to ask their maintainers to test their package with Django 1.7 (that we want to upload before the freeze obviously). We identified a pain point in upgrade for packages using South and tried to discuss it with upstream, but after closer investigation, none of the packages are really affected. But the problem can hit administrators of non-packaged Django applications.

Misc stuff. I filed a few bugs (#754282 against git-import-orig –uscan, #756319 against wnpp to see if someone would be willing to package loomio), reviewed an updated package for django-ratelimit in #755611, made a non-maintainer upload of mairix (without prior notice) to update the package to a new upstream release and bring it to modern packaging norms (Mako failed to make an upload in 4 years so I just went ahead and did what I would have done if it were mine).

Kali work resulting in Debian contributions

Kali wants to switch from being based on stable to being based on testing so I did try to setup britney to manage a new kali-rolling repository and encountered some problems that I reported to debian-release. Niels Thykier has been very helpful and even managed to improve britney thanks to the very specific problem that the kali setup triggered.

Since we use reprepro, I did write some Python wrapper to transform the HeidiResult file in a set of reprepro commands but at the same time I filed #756399 to request proper support of heidi files in reprepro. While analyzing britney’s excuses file, I also noticed that the Kali mirrors contains many source packages that are useless because they only concern architectures that we don’t host (and I filed #756523 against reprepro). While trying to build a live image of kali-rolling, I noticed that libdb5.1 and db5.1-util were still marked as priority standard when in fact Debian already switched to db5.3 and thus should only be optional (I filed #756623 against ftp.debian.org).

When doing some upgrade tests from kali (wheezy based) to kali-rolling (jessie based) I noticed some problems that were also affecting Debian Jessie. I filed #756629 against libfile-fcntllock-perl (with a patch), and also #756618 against texlive-base (missing Replaces header). I also pinged Colin Watson on #734946 because I got a spurious base-passwd prompt during upgrade (that was triggered because schroot copied my unstable’s /etc/passwd file in the kali chroot and the package noticed a difference on the shell of all system users).

Thanks

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

Packaging work

Debian LTS

Distro Tracker

Thanks

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

Distro Tracker

Misc packaging work

Kali work resulting in Debian contributions

Thanks

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