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You are here: Home / Archives for Extended LTS

My Free Software Activities in May 2018

June 4, 2018 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 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

With the disappearance of many alioth mailing lists, I took the time to finish proper support of a team email in distro-tracker. There’s no official documentation yet but it’s already used by a bunch of team. If you look at the pkg-security team on tracker.debian.org it has used “pkg-security” as its unique identifier and it has thus inherited from team+pkg-security@tracker.debian.org as an email address that can be used in the Maintainer field (and it can be used to communicate between all team subscribers that have the contact keyword enabled on their team subscription).

I also dealt with a few merge requests:

  • Reviewed new appstream hints feature;
  • Merged a fix related to information displayed by the testing migration panel;
  • Provided early feedback on the new “team packages” view developed as part of a Google Summer of Code.

I also filed ticket #7283 on rt.debian.org to have local_part_suffix = “+” for tracker.debian.org’s exim config. This will let us bounce emails sent to invalid email addresses. Right now all emails are delivered in a Maildir, valid messages are processed and the rest is silently discarded. At the time of processing, it’s too late to send bounces back to the sender.

pkg-security team

This month my activity is limited to sponsorship of new packages:

  • grokevt_0.5.0-2.dsc fixing one RC bug (missing build-dep on python3-distutils)
  • dnsrecon_0.8.13-1.dsc (new upstream release)
  • recon-ng_4.9.3-1.dsc (new upstream release)
  • wifite_2.1.0-1.dsc (new upstream release)
  • aircrack-ng (add patch from upstream git)

I also interacted multiple times with Samuel Henrique who started to work on the Google Summer of Code porting Kali packages to Debian. He mainly worked on getting some overview of the work to do.

Misc Debian work

I reviewed multiple changes submitted by Hideki Yamane on debootstrap (on the debian-boot mailing list, and also in MR 2 and MR 3). I reviewed and merged some changes on live-boot too.

Extended LTS

I spent a good part of the month dealing with the setup of the Wheezy Extended LTS program. Given the lack of interest of the various Debian teams, it’s hosted on a Freexian server and not on any debian.org infrastructure. But the principle is basically the same as Debian LTS except that the package list is reduced to the set of packages used by Extended LTS sponsors. But the updates prepared in this project are freely available for all.

It’s not too late to join the program, you can always contact me at deblts@freexian.com with a source package list that you’d like to see supported and I’ll send you back an estimation of the cost.

Thanks to an initial contribution from Credativ, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has prepared a merge request making it easy for third parties to host their own security tracker that piggy-back on Debian’s one. For Extended LTS, we thus have our own tracker.

Thanks

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

Time to Join Extended Long Term Support for Debian 7 Wheezy

February 20, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog

Debian 7 Wheezy LTS period ends on May 31st and some companies asked Freexian if they could get security support past this date. Since about half of the current team of paid LTS contributors is willing to continue to provide security updates for Wheezy, I have started to work on making this possible.

I just initiated a discussion on debian-devel with multiple Debian teams to see whether it is possible to continue to use debian.org infrastructure to host the wheezy security updates that would be prepared in this extended LTS period.

From the sponsor side, this extended LTS will not work like the regular LTS. It is unrealistic to continue to support all packages and all architectures so only the packages/architectures requested by sponsors will be supported. The amount invoiced to each sponsor will be directly related to the package list that they ask us to support. We made an estimation (based on history) of how much it costs to support each package and we split that cost between all the sponsors that are requesting support for this package. That cost is re-evaluated quarterly and will likely increase over time as sponsors are stopping their support (when they finished to migrate all their machines for example).

This extended LTS will also have some restrictions in terms of packages that we can support. For instance, we will no longer support the linux kernel from wheezy, you will have to switch to the kernel used in jessie (or maybe we will maintain a backport ourselves in wheezy). It is also not yet clear whether we can support OpenJDK since upstream support of version 7 stops at the end of June. And switching to OpenJDK 8 is likely non-trivial. There are likely other unsupportable packages too.

Anyway, if your company needs wheezy security support past end of May, now is the time to worry about it. Please send us a mail with the list of source packages that you would like to see supported. The more companies get involved, the less it will cost to each of them. Our plans are to gather the required data from interested companies in the next few weeks and make a first estimation of the price they will have to pay for the first quarter by mid-march. Then they confirm that they are OK with the offer and we will emit invoices in April so that they can be paid before end of May.

Note however that we decided that it would not be possible to sponsor extended wheezy support (and thus influence which packages are supported) if you are not among the regular LTS sponsors (at bronze level at least). Extended LTS would not be possible without the regular LTS so if you need the former, you have to support the latter too.

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