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Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2016

May 17, 2016 by Raphaël Hertzog

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In April, 116.75 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 16h.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.25 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 5.50 extra hours remaining, he returned the remaining 8.25h to the pool).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did nothing (instead of the 16 hours he was allocated, his hours have been redispatched to other contributors over May).
  • Guido Günther did 2 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 3.25 remaining hours, leaving 9.25 extra hours for May).
  • Markus Koschany did 16 hours.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 7.50 hours (out of 12h allocated + 3.50 remaining, thus keeping 8 extra hours for May).
  • Scott Kitterman posted a report for 6 hours made in March but did nothing in April. His 18 remaining hours have been returned to the pool. He decided to stop doing LTS work for now.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.75 hours.

Many contributors did not use all their allocated hours. This is partly explained by the fact that in April Wheezy was still under the responsibility of the security team and they were not able to drive updates from start to finish.

In any case, this means that they have more hours available over May and since the LTS period started, they should hopefully be able to make a good dent in the backlog of security updates.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours reached a new record with 132 hours per month, thanks to two new gold sponsors (Babiel GmbH and Plat’Home). Plat’Home’s sponsorship was aimed to help us maintain Debian 7 Wheezy on armel and armhf (on top of already supported amd64 and i386). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position.

The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 44 packages awaiting an update.

This is a bit more than the 15-20 open entries that we used to have at the end of the Debian 6 LTS period.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

  • Platinum sponsors:
    • TOSHIBA (for 7 months)
  • Gold sponsors:
    • The Positive Internet (for 23 months)
    • Blablacar (for 22 months)
    • Linode LLC (for 12 months)
    • Babiel GmbH
    • Plat’Home
  • Silver sponsors:
    • Domeneshop AS (for 22 months)
    • Université Lille 3 (for 22 months)
    • Trollweb Solutions (for 20 months)
    • Nantes Métropole (for 16 months)
    • University of Luxembourg (for 14 months)
    • Dalenys (for 13 months)
    • Univention GmbH (for 8 months)
    • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 8 months)
    • Sonus Networks
  • Bronze sponsors:
    • David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 23 months)
    • Evolix (for 23 months)
    • Offensive Security (for 23 months)
    • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 23 months)
    • Freeside Internet Service (for 22 months)
    • MyTux (for 22 months)
    • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 20 months)
    • Intevation GmbH (for 19 months)
    • Daevel SARL (for 18 months)
    • Bitfolk LTD (for 17 months)
    • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 17 months)
    • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 16 months)
    • NUMLOG (for 16 months)
    • WinGo AG (for 15 months)
    • Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 12 months)
    • Sig-I/O (for 9 months)
    • Entr’ouvert (for 7 months)
    • Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 4 months)

My Free Software Activities in April 2016

May 3, 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

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.

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2016

April 15, 2016 by Raphaël Hertzog

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In February, 111.75 work hours have been dispatched among 10 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 8h.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 7.25 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 5.50 extra hours to do over April).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 7 hours (instead of the 14.25 hours he was allocated +, compensating the extra hours he did last month).
  • Damyan Ivanov did nothing out of the 7.25 remaining hours he had, he opted to give them back and come back to LTS work later.
  • Guido Günther did 13 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 4.25 remaining hours, leaving 3.25 extra hours for April).
  • Markus Koschany did 14.25 hours.
  • Mike Gabriel did nothing and opted to give back the 8 hours allocated. He will stop LTS work for now as he has other projects taking all his time.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 10 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.50 remaining, thus keeping 3.50 extra hours for April).
  • Scott Kitterman did a few hours but was not able to provide his report in time due to sickness. His next report will cover two months.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours started to increase for April (116.75 hours, thanks to Sonus Networks) and should increase even further for May (with a new Gold sponsor currently joining us, Babiel GmbH). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position.

At the end of the month the LTS team will be fully responsible of all Debian 7 Wheezy updates. For now paid contributors are still helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy.

They are also looking for ways to ensure that some of the most complicated packages can be supported over the wheezy LTS timeframe. It is likely that we will seek external help (possibly from credativ which is already handling support of PostgreSQL) for the maintenance of Xen and that some other packages (like libav, vlc, maybe qemu?) will be upgraded to newer versions which are still maintained (either upstream or in Debian Jessie by the Debian maintainers).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

  • Platinum sponsors:
    • TOSHIBA (for 6 months)
  • Gold sponsors:
    • The Positive Internet (for 22 months)
    • Blablacar (for 21 months)
    • Linode LLC (for 11 months)
  • Silver sponsors:
    • Domeneshop AS (for 21 months)
    • Université Lille 3 (for 21 months)
    • Trollweb Solutions (for 19 months)
    • Nantes Métropole (for 15 months)
    • University of Luxembourg (for 13 months)
    • Dalenys (for 11 months)
    • Univention GmbH (for 7 months)
    • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 7 months)
    • Sonus Networks
  • Bronze sponsors:
    • David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 22 months)
    • Offensive Security (for 22 months)
    • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 22 months)
    • Evolix (for 21 months)
    • Freeside Internet Service (for 21 months)
    • MyTux (for 21 months)
    • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 19 months)
    • Intevation GmbH (for 18 months)
    • Daevel SARL (for 17 months)
    • Bitfolk LTD (for 16 months)
    • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 16 months)
    • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 15 months)
    • NUMLOG (for 15 months)
    • WinGo AG (for 14 months)
    • Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 11 months)
    • Sig-I/O (for 8 months)
    • Entr’ouvert (for 6 months)
    • Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 3 months)

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2016

March 11, 2016 by Raphaël Hertzog

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In February, 112.50 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

  • Antoine Beaupré did 8h.
  • Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 7.25 extra hours to do over March).
  • Brian May did 10 hours.
  • Chris Lamb did 18 hours (instead of the 11.25 hours he was allocated, he will work less in March).
  • Damyan Ivanov did 4 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 7.25 extra hours for March).
  • Guido Günther did 7 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 4.25 extra hours for March).
  • Markus Koschany did 11.25 hours.
  • Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
  • Santiago Ruano Rincón did 12 hours (out of 11h allocated + 2.50 remaining, thus keeping 1.50 extra hours for March).
  • Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours continued to decrease a little bit. It’s not worrisome yet but we should try to get back to a positive slope if we want to be able to do an outstanding job for wheezy LTS. On the positive side, TOSHIBA renewed their platinum sponsorship for another 6 months at least and we have some contacts for new sponsors, though they are far from being concluded yet.

We are now in transition between squeeze LTS and wheezy LTS. The paid contributors are helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also taking generic measures to prepare wheezy LTS (for example to ensure all packages work with OpenJDK 7.x since support for 6.x will be dropped in the LTS period).

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold (none this month).

  • Platinum sponsors:
    • TOSHIBA (for 5 months)
  • Gold sponsors:
    • The Positive Internet (for 21 months)
    • Blablacar (for 20 months)
    • Linode LLC (for 10 months)
  • Silver sponsors:
    • Domeneshop AS (for 20 months)
    • Université Lille 3 (for 20 months)
    • Trollweb Solutions (for 18 months)
    • Nantes Métropole (for 14 months)
    • University of Luxembourg (for 12 months)
    • Dalenys (for 10 months)
    • Univention GmbH (for 6 months)
    • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 6 months)
  • Bronze sponsors:
    • David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 21 months)
    • Offensive Security (for 21 months)
    • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 21 months)
    • Evolix (for 20 months)
    • Freeside Internet Service (for 20 months)
    • MyTux (for 20 months)
    • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 18 months)
    • Intevation GmbH (for 17 months)
    • Daevel SARL (for 16 months)
    • Bitfolk LTD (for 15 months)
    • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 15 months)
    • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 14 months)
    • NUMLOG (for 14 months)
    • WinGo AG (for 13 months)
    • Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 9 months)
    • Sig-I/O (for 7 months)
    • Entr’ouvert (for 5 months)
    • Adfinis SyGroup AG
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