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My Free Software Activities in April 2017

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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.

Debian LTS

I was allocated 10 hours to work on security updates for Debian 7 Wheezy and had 1.5 hours remaining from March. During this time I did the following:

  • I released DLA-905-1 on ghostscript fixing 3 CVE. I also triaged two other ghostscript CVE that were not relevant to the version in wheezy.
  • I started to look into CVE-2016-10209 for libarchive but was not able to reproduce the segfault and marked it as not worth an update (same decision as security team).
  • After many tries to get more details from upstream of libxml-twig-perl on CVE-2016-9180, I decided that the low severity of the issue was not worth spending more time on it (same decision as RedHat and Debian security team).
  • I released DLA-921-1 on slurm-llnl fixing 1 high-severity CVE.
  • I investigated CVE-2016-8686 on potrace and marked it as not requiring an update because the impact is very low. I documented the fact that it’s fixed in unstable and asked the upstream author for the specific patch (no answer yet though).

Kali and pkg-security

I updated the britney instance that we are using in Kali and spotted two small documentation mistakes that I fixed.

We had a long-standing bug in Kali where extensions would stay visible on the lock screen. It was hard to reproduce and this month we finally managed to nail down the conditions required to reproduce it. It turns out that EasyScreenCast was the culprit. We paid Emilio Pozuelo Monfort to work on a patch and he fixed the problem in EasyScreenCast and also in gnome-shell, as a buggy extension should not have resulted in this behavior.

I responded to multiple queries of new contributors in the pkg-security team. The team is rather active and it would be great if we could have a few more Debian developers to help review and sponsor the work our enthusiastic new members.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities. Hopefully, I will be more active again… between kids’ vacations, French elections and Zelda Breadth of the Wild, I got very much distracted from Debian last month. 🙂

My Free Software Activities in August 2016

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.

This months is rather light since I was away in vacation for two weeks.

Kali related work

The new pkg-security team is working full steam and I reviewed/sponsored many packages during the month: polenum, accheck, braa, t50, ncrack, websploit.

I filed bug #834515 against sbuild since sbuild-createchroot was no longer usable for kali-rolling due to the embedded dash. That misfeature has been reverted and implemented through an explicit option.

I brought the attention of ftpmasters on #832163 since we had unexpected packages in the standard section (they have been discovered in the Kali live ISO while we did not want them).

I uploaded two fontconfig NMU to finally push to Debian a somewhat cleaner fix for the problem of various captions being displayed as squares after a font upgrade (see #828037 and #835142).

I tested (twice) a live-build patch from Adrian Gibanel Lopez implementing EFI boot with grub and merged it into the official git repository (see #731709).

I filed bug #835983 on python-pypdf2 since it has an invalid dependency forbidding co-installation with python-pypdf.

I orphaned splint since its maintainer was missing in action (MIA) and immediately made a QA upload to fix the RC bug which kicked it out of testing (this package is a build dependency of a Kali package).

django-jsonfield

I wrote a patch to make python-django-jsonfield compatible with Django 1.10 (#828668) and I committed that patch in the upstream repository.

Distro Tracker

I made some changes to make the codebase compatible with Django 1.10 (and added Django 1.10 to the tox test matrix). I added a “Debian Maintainer Dashboard” link next to people’s name on request of Lucas Nussbaum (#830548).

I made a preliminary review of Paul Wise’s patch to add multiarch hints (#833623) and improved the handling of the mailbot when it gets MIME Headers referencing an unknown charset (like “cp-850”, Python only knows of “cp850”)

I also helped Peter Palfrader to enabled a .onion address for tracker.debian.org, see onion.debian.org for the full list of services available over Tor.

Misc stuff

I updated my letsencrypt.sh salt formula to work with the latest version of letsencrypt.sh (0.2.0)

I merged updated translations for the Debian Administrator’s Handbook from weblate.org and uploaded a new version to Debian.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in July 2016

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.

DebConf 16

I was in South Africa for the whole week of DebConf 16 and gave 3 talks/BoF. You can find the slides and the videos in the links of their corresponding page:

I was a bit nervous about the third BoF (on using Debian money to fund Debian projects) but discussed with many persons during the week and it looks like the project evolved quite a bit in the last 10 years and while it’s still a sensitive topic (and rightfully so given the possible impacts) people are willing to discuss the issues and to experiment. You can have a look at the gobby notes that resulted from the live discussion.

I spent most of the time discussing with people and I did not do much technical work besides trying (and failing) to fix accessibility issues with tracker.debian.org (help from knowledgeable people is welcome, see #830213).

Debian Packaging

I uploaded a new version of zim to fix a reproducibility issue (and forwarded the patch upstream).

I uploaded Django 1.8.14 to jessie-backports and had to fix a failing test (pull request).

I uploaded python-django-jsonfield 1.0.1 a new upstream version integrating the patches I prepared in June.

I managed the (small) ftplib library transition. I prepared the new version in experimental, ensured reverse build dependencies do still build and coordinated the transition with the release team. This was all triggered by a reproducible build bug that I got and that made me look at the package… last time upstream had disappeared (upstream URL was even gone) but it looks like he became active again and he pushed a new release.

I filed wishlist bug #832053 to request a new deblog command in devscripts. It should make it easier to display current and former build logs.

Kali related Debian work

I worked on many issues that were affecting Kali (and Debian Testing) users:

  • I made an open-vm-tools NMU to get the package back into testing.
  • I filed #830795 on nautilus and #831737 on pbnj to forward Kali bugs to Debian.
  • I wrote a fontconfig patch to make it ignore .dpkg-tmp files. I also forwarded that patch upstream and filed a related bug in gnome-settings-daemon which is actually causing the problem by running fc-cache at the wrong times.
  • I started a discussion to see how we could fix the synaptics touchpad problem in GNOME 3.20. In the end, we have a new version of xserver-xorg-input-all which only depends on xserver-xorg-input-libinput and not on xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (no longer supported by GNOME). This is after upstream refused to reintroduce synaptics support.
  • I filed #831730 on desktop-base because KDE’s plasma-desktop is no longer using the Debian background by default. I had to seek upstream help to find out a possible solution (deployed in Kali only for now).
  • I filed #832503 because the way dpkg and APT manages foo:any dependencies when foo is not marked “Multi-Arch: allowed” is counter-productive… I discovered this while trying to use a firefox-esr:any dependency. And I filed #832501 to get the desired “Multi-Arch: allowed” marker on firefox-esr.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in June 2016

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 packaging

Django and Python. I uploaded Django 1.9.7 and filed an upstream ticket (#26755) for a failure seen in its DEP-8 tests.

I packaged/sponsored python-django-modeltranslation and python-paypal. I opened a pull request on model-translation to fix failing tests in the Debian package build.

I packaged a new python-django-jsonfield (1.0.0), filed a bug and discovered some regression in its PostgreSQL support. I helped on the upstream ticket and I have been granted commit rights. I used this opportunity to do some bug triage and push a few fixes. I also discussed the future of the module and ended up starting a discussion on Django’s developer list about the possibility to add a JSONField to the core.

CppUTest. I uploaded a new upstream version (3.8) with more than a year of work. I found out that make install does not install a required header so I opened a ticket with a patch. The package ended up not compiling on quite a few architectures so I opened a ticket and prepared a fix for some of those failures with the help of the upstream developers. I also added a DEP-8 tests after having uploaded a broken (untested) package…

systemd support in net-snmp and postfix. I worked on adding native systemd service units to net-snmp (#782243) and postfix (#715188). In both cases, the maintainers have not been very reactive so far so I uploaded my changes as delayed NMU.

pkg-security team. The team that I started quietly a few months ago is now growing, both with new members and new packages. I created the required Teams/pkg-security wiki page. I sponsored xprobe, hydra, made an upload of medusa to merge Kali changes into Debian (and at the same time submitting the patch to upstream).

fontconfig. After having read Jonathan McDowell’s analysis of a bug that I experienced multiple times (and that many Kali users had too), I opened bug #828037 to get it fixed once for all. Unfortunately, nothing happened yet.

DebConf 16

I spent some time to prepare the 2 talks and the BoF that I will give/manage in Cape Town next week:

  • Kali Linux’s Experience https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/39/
  • 2 Years of Work of Paid Contributors in the Debian LTS Project https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/40/
  • Using Debian Money to Fund Debian Projects https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/41/

Distro Tracker

I continued to mentor Vladimir Likic who managed to finish his first patch. He is now working on documentation for new contributors based on his recent experience.

I enhanced the tox configuration to run tests with Django 1.8 LTS with fatal warnings (python -Werror) so as to ensure that I’m not relying on any deprecated feature and so that I can be sure that the codebase will work on the next Django LTS release (1.11). Thanks to this, I did discover quite a few places where I have been using deprecated API and I fixed them all (the JSONField update to 1.0.0 I mentionned above was precisely to fix such a warning).

I also fixed a few more issues with folded mail headers that you can’t inject back in a new Message object and with messages lacking the subject field. All those have been caught through real (spam) email generating exceptions wich are then mailed to me.

Kali related work

I uploaded a new live-boot (5.20160608) to Debian to fix a bug where the boot process was blocking on some timeout.

I forwarded a Kali bug against libatk-wrapper-java (#827741) which turned out to be an OpenJDK bug.

I filed #827749 against reprepro to request a way to remove selected internal file references. This is required if you want to be able to make a file disappear and if that file is part of a snapshot that you want to keep despite this. But in truth, my real need is to be able to replace the .orig.tar.gz used by Kali by the orig.tar.gz used by Debian… those conflicts break the mirroring/import script.

Salt

I have been using salt to deploy a new service, and I developed patches for a few issues in salt formulas. I also created a new letsencrypt-sh formula to manage TLS certificates with the letsencrypt.sh ACME client.

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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