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My Free Software Activities in September 2016

October 4, 2016 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.

Debian LTS

With the increasing number of paid contributors, easy fixes (CVE with patches available) tend to be processed rather quickly. All the package I worked on had issues that were open for a long time because they were hard to handle.

I prepared DLA-613-1 fixing 3 CVE on roundcube. The fix required to manually backport the CRSF handling code which was not available in the wheezy version. I spent almost 8 hours on roundcube.

Then I started to work on tiff3. I reviewed many CVE: CVE-2016-3658, CVE-2015-7313, CVE-2015-7554, CVE-2015-8668, CVE-2016-5318, CVE-2016-3625, CVE-2016-5319. I updated their status for tiff3 in wheezy, requested reproducer files to people who reported the CVE when the files were not publicly available and made sure that everything was recorded in the upstream bug tracker. The 4.25 hours I spent on the package were not enough to work on patches, so I put the package back in the work queue.

GNOME 3.22 transition

I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer that would work with GNOME 3.21 that had been uploaded to sid.

Unfortunately, that new GNOME (and GTK+) version caused many regressions that affected Debian Testing (and thus Kali) users in particular in gnome-control-center. I uploaded a new version fixing some of those issues and I reported a bunch of them to upstream too (#771515, #771517, #771696).

Kali

I worked on #836211 creating a dpkg patch to work-around the overlayfs limitation (we use it in Kali because persistence of live system relies on overlayfs) and I contacted the upstream overlayfs maintainer to hopefully get a proper fix on the overlayfs side instead.

I uploaded radcli 1.2.6-2.1 to fix RC bug #825121 as the package was removed from testing and openvas depends on it in Kali.

As part of the pkg-security team, I sponsored/uploaded acccheck and arp-scan for Marcos Fouces, and p0f 3.09b as well.

Misc Debian work

Distro Tracker. I tested, fixed and merged Paul Wise’s patch integrating multiarch hints into tracker.debian.org (#833623).

Debian Handbook. I enabled the new Vietnamese translation on debian-handbook.info and updated all translations with Weblate updates.

systemd units for apache2. I prepared systemd units for apache2 which I submitted in #798430. With approval of Stefan Fritsch, I committed my work to the git repository and then uploaded the result in version 2.4.23-5.

Hindsight packaging. I first packaged lua-sandbox (#838969) — which is a dependency of Hindsight — and then Hindsight itself (#838968). In this process, I opened a couple of upstream tickets.

PIE by default. I uploaded a new version of cpputest compiled with -fPIC so shat executable linking to its static library can be compiled with -fPIE (#837363, forwarded upstream here).

Bugs filed. Bad homepage link in haskell-dice-entropy-conduit. Inconsistent options --onlyscripts and --noscripts in debhelper. pidgin entry in security-support-limited is out of date in debian-security-support. New upstream version (2.0.2) in puppet-lint.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in April 2016

May 3, 2016 by Raphaël Hertzog

Debian LTS

I handled a new LTS sponsor that wanted to see wheezy keep supporting armel and armhf. This was not part of our initial plans (set during last Debconf) and I thus mailed all teams that were impacted if we were to collectively decide that it was OK to support those architectures. While I was hoping to get a clear answer rather quickly, it turns out that we never managed to get an answer to the question from all parties. Instead the discussion drifted on the more general topic of how we handle sponsorship/funding in the LTS project.

Fortunately, the buildd maintainers said they were OK with this and the ftpmasters had no objections, and they both implicitly enacted the decision: Ansgar Burchardt kept the armel/armhf architectures in the wheezy/updates suite when he handled the switch to the LTS team, and Aurélien Jarno also configured wanna-build to keep building armel/armhf for the suite. The DSA team did not confirm that this change was not interfering with one of their plans to decommission some hardware. Build daemons are a shared resource anyway and a single server is likely to handle builds for multiple releases.

DebConf 16

This month I registered for DebConf 16 and submitted multiple talk/BoF proposals:

Kali Linux’s Experience of a Debian Derivative Based on Testing (Talk)
2 Years of Work of Paid Contributors in the Debian LTS Project (Talk)
Using Debian Money to Fund Debian Projects (BoF)

I want to share the setup we use in Kali as it can be useful for other derivatives and also for Debian itself to help smooth the relationship with derivatives.

I also want to open again the debate on the usage of money within Debian. It’s a hard topic but we should really strive to take some official position on what’s possible and what’s not possible. With Debian LTS and its sponsorship we have seen that we can use money to some extent without hurting the Debian project as a whole. Can this be transposed to other teams or projects? What are the limits? Can we define a framework and clear rules? I expect the discussion to be very interesting in the BoF. Mehdi Dogguy has agreed to handle this BoF with me.

Packaging

Django. I uploaded 1.8.12 to jessie-backports and 1.9.5 to unstable. I filed two upstream bugs (26473 and 26474) for two problems spotted by lintian.

Unfortunately, when I wanted to upload it to unstable, the test suite did not ran. I pinned this down to a sqlite regression. Chris Lamb filed #820225 and I contacted the SQLite and Django upstream developers by email to point them to this issue. I helped the SQLite upstream author (Richard Hipp) to reproduce the issue and he was quick to provide a patch which landed in 3.12.1.

Later in the month I made another upload to fix an upgrade bug (#821789).

GNOME 3.20. As for each new version, I updated gnome-shell-timer to ensure it works with the new GNOME. This time I spent a bit more time to fix a regression (805347) that dates back to a while and that would never be fixed otherwise since the upstream author orphaned this extension (as he no longer uses GNOME).

I have also been bitten by display problems where accented characters would be displayed below the character that follows. With the help of members of the GNOME team, we found out that this was a problem specific to the cantarell font and was only triggered with Harfbuzz 1.2. This is tracked in Debian with #822682 on harfbuzz and #822762 in fonts-cantarell. There’s a new upstream release (with the fix) ready to be packaged but unfortunately it is blocked by the lack of a recent fontforge in Debian. I thus mailed debian-mentors in the hope to find volunteers to help the pkg-fonts team to package a newer version…

Misc Debian/Kali work

Distro Tracker. I started to mentor Vladimir Likic who contacted me because he wants to contribute to Distro Tracker. I helped him to setup his development environment and we fixed a few issues in the process.

Bug reports. I filed many bug reports, most of them due to my work on Kali:

#820288: a request to keep the wordpress package installable in older releases (due to renaming of many php packages)
#820660: request support of by-hash indices in reprepro
#820867: possibility to apply overrides on already installed packages in reprepro
#821070: jessie to stretch upgrade problem with samba-vfs-modules
#822157: python-future hides and breaks python-configparser
#822669: dh_installinit inserts useless autoscript for System V init script when package doesn’t contain any
#822670: dh-systemd should be merged into debhelper, we have systemd by default and debhelper should have proper support for it by default

I also investigated #819958 that was affecting testing since it has been reported to Kali as well. And I made an NMU of dh-make-golang to fix #819472 that I reported earlier.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in October 2015

November 4, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

I prepared and released DLA 330-1 fixing two CVE on unzip.
I prepared a bouncycastle update fixing CVE-2015-7940 (after having requested that CVE assignment since nobody had done it yet) but I have not yet released the corresponding DLA yet since I’m waiting for a review by the upstream author. This is hairy cryptographic Java code that was non-trivial to backport and I’d rather make sure that I do not mess anything. The patches are available in the bug report #802671 that I opened.
I tested the update to MySQL 5.5 with multiple packages and sent back my findings to the debian-lts mailing list.

I also started a conversation about what paid contributors could work on if they have some spare cycle as the current funding level might allow us to invest some time on work outside of just plain security updates.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

I spent quite some time finalizing the Jessie book update, both for the content and for the layout of the printed book.

Misc Debian work

GNOME 3.18. I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer working with GNOME Shell 3.18 and I filed bugs #800660 and #802480 about an annoying gnome-keyring regression… I did multiple test rounds with the Debian maintainers (Dmitry Shachnev, kudos to him!) and the upstream developers (see here and here). Apart from those regressions, I like GNOME 3.18!

Python-modules team migration to Git. After the Git migration, and since the team policy now imposes usage of git-dpm on all members, I made some tries with it on the python-django package while pushing version 1.8.5 to experimental. And the least I can say is that I’m not pleased with the result. I thus filed 3 bugs summarizing the problems I have with git-dpm: #801666 (no way to set the upstream branch names from within the repository), #801667 (no clean way to merge between packaging branches), #801668 (does not create upstream tag immediately on tarball import). That is on top of other randomly stupid bugs that were already reported like #801548 (does not work with perfectly valid pre-existing upstream tags).

Django packaging. I filed bugs on all packages build-depending on python-django that fail to build with Django 1.8 and informed them that I would upload Django 1.8 to unstable in early November (it’s done already). Then I fixed python-django-jsonfield myself since Distro Tracker relies on this package.

Following this small mass-bug filing, I filed a wishlist bug on devscripts to improve the “mass-bug” helper script (see #801926). And since I used “ratt” to rebuild the packages, I filed a wishlist issue on this new tool as well.

Tryton 3.6 upgrade. I upgraded my own Tryton installation to version 3.6 and filed bug #803066 because the SysV init script was not working properly. That also reminded me that the DD process of Matthias Behrle (the tryton package maintainer) was stalled due to a bug in the NM infrastructure so I pinged the NM team and we sorted out a way for me to advocate him and get his process going…

Distro Tracker. I continued my work to refactor the way we handle incoming mail processing (branch people/hertzog/mailprocessing). It’s now mostly finished and I need to deploy it in a test environment before being able to roll it out on tracker.debian.org.

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.

Debian LTS

GNOME 3.22 transition

Kali

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Debian LTS

DebConf 16

Packaging

Misc Debian/Kali work

Thanks

Debian LTS

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Django 1.7

Debian Long Term Support

Distro Tracker

Misc packaging

Thanks

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