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My Free Software Activities in August 2015

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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 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

This month I have been paid to work 6.5 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

  • Prepared and released DLA-301-1 fixing 2 CVE in python-django.
  • Did one week of “LTS Frontdesk” with CVE triaging. I pushed 11 commits to the security tracker.

Apart from that, I also gave a talk about Debian LTS at DebConf 15 in Heidelberg and also coordinated a work session to discuss our plans for Wheezy. Have a look at the video recordings:

DebConf 15

I attended DebConf 15 with great pleasure after having missed DebConf 14 last year. While I did not do lots of work there, I participated in many discussions and I certainly came back with a renewed motivation to work on Debian. That’s always good. 🙂

For the concrete work I did during DebConf, I can only claim two schroot uploads to fix the lack of support of the new “overlay” filesystem that replaces “aufs” in the official Debian kernel, and some Distro Tracker work (fixing an issue that some people had when they were logged in via Debian’s SSO).

While the numerous discussions I had during DebConf can’t be qualified as “work”, they certainly contribute to build up work plans for the future:

As a Kali developer, I attended multiple sessions related to derivatives (notably the Debian Derivatives Panel).

I was also interested by the “Debian in the corporate IT” BoF led by Michael Meskes (Credativ’s CEO). He pointed out a number of problems that corporate users might have when they first consider using Debian and we will try to do something about this. Expect further news and discussions on the topic.

Martin Kraff, Luca Filipozzi, and me had a discussion with the Debian Project Leader (Neil) about how to revive/transform the Debian’s Partner program. Nothing is fleshed out yet, but at least the process initiated by the former DPL (Lucas) is again moving forward.

Other Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored an NMU of pep8 by Daniel Stender as it was a requirement for prospector… which I also sponsored since all the required dependencies are now available in Debian. \o/

Packaging. I NMUed libxml2 2.9.2+really2.9.1+dfsg1-0.1 fixing 3 security issues and a RC bug that was breaking publican. Since there’s no upstream fix for more than 8 months, I went back to the former version 2.9.1. It’s in line with the new requirement of release managers… a package in unstable should migrate to testing reasonably quickly, it’s not acceptable to keep it unfixed for months. With this annoying bug fixed, I could again upload a new upstream release of publican… so I prepared and uploaded 4.3.2-1. It was my first source only upload. This release was more work than I expected and I filed no less than 3 bug to upstream (new bash-completion install path, request to provide sources of a minified javascript file, drop a .po file for an invalid language code).

GPG issues with smartcard. Back from DebConf, when I wanted to sign some key, I stumbled again upon the problem which makes it impossible for me to use my two smartcards one after the other without first deleting the stubs for the private key. It’s not a new issue but I decided that it was time to report it upstream, so I did it: #2079 on bugs.gnupg.org. Some research helped me to find a way to work-around the problem. Later in the month, after a dist-upgrade and a reboot, I was no longer able to use my smartcard as a SSH authentication key… again it was already reported but there was no clear analysis, so I tried to do my own one and added the results of my investigation in #795368. It looks like the culprit is pinentry-gnome3 not working when started by the gpg-agent which is started before the DBUS session. Simple fix is to restart the gpg-agent in the session… but I have no idea yet of what the proper fix should be (letting systemd manage the graphical user session and start gpg-agent would be my first answer, but that doesn’t solve the issue for users of other init systems so it’s not satisfying).

Distro Tracker. I merged two patches from Orestis Ioannou fixing some bugs tagged newcomer. There are more such bugs (I even filed two: #797096 and #797223), go grab them and do a first contribution to Distro Tracker like Orestis just did! I also merged a change from Christophe Siraut who presented Distro Tracker at DebConf.

I implemented in Distro Tracker the new authentication based on SSL client certificates that was recently announced by Enrico Zini. It’s working nice, and this authentication scheme is far easier to support. Good job, Enrico!

tracker.debian.org broke during DebConf, it stopped being updated with new data. I tracked this down to a problem in the archive (see #796892). Apparently Ansgar Burchardt changed the set of compression tools used on some jessie repositorie, replacing bz2 by xz. He dropped the old Packages.bz2 but missed some Sources.bz2 which were thus stale… and APT reported “Hashsum mismatch” on the uncompressed content.

Misc. I pushed some small improvement to my Salt formulas: schroot-formula and sbuild-formula. They will now auto-detect which overlay filesystem is available with the current kernel (previously “aufs” was hardcoded).

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2015

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

Individual reports

In July, 79.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Evolution of the situation

August has seen a small decrease in terms of sponsored hours (71.50 hours per month) because two sponsors did not pay their renewal invoice on time. That said they reconfirmed their willingness to support us and things should be fixed after the summer. And we should be able to reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position, in particular since a new platinum sponsor might join the project.

DebConf 15 happened this month and Debian LTS was featured in a talk and in a work session. Have a look at the video recordings:

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 20 packages awaiting an update (4 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (11 less than last month). The new LTS frontdesk ensures regular triage of CVE reports and the difference between both counts dropped significantly. That’s good!

Thanks to our sponsors

Thanks to Sig-I/O, a new bronze sponsor, which joins our 35 other sponsors.

My Free Software Activities in July 2015

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 LTS

This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

  • Finished the work on tracker.debian.org to make it display detailed security status on each supported release (example).
  • Prepared and released DLA-261-2 fixing a regression in the aptdaemon security update (happening only when you have python 2.5 installed).
  • Prepared and released DLA-272-1 fixing 3 CVE in python-django.
  • Prepared and released DLA-286-1 fixing 1 CVE in squid3. The patch was rather hard to backport. Thankfully upstream was very helpful, he reviewed and tested my patch.
  • Did one week of “LTS Frontdesk” with CVE triaging. I pushed 19 commits to the security tracker.

Kali Linux / Debian Stretch work

kaliKali Linux wants to experiment something close to Debian Constantly Usable Testing: we have a kali-rolling release that is based on Debian Testing and we want to take a new snapshot every 4 months (in order to have 3 releases per year).

More specifically we have a kali-dev repository which is exactly Debian Stretch + our own Kali packages (the kali package take precedence) updated 4 times a day, just like testing is. And we have a britney2 setup that generates kali-rolling out of kali-dev (without any requirement in terms of delay/RC bugs, it just ensures that dependencies are not broken), also 4 times a day.

We have jenkins job that ensures that our metapackages are installable in kali-dev (and kali-rolling) and that we can build our ISO images. When things break, I have to fix them and I try to fix them on the Debian side first. So here are some examples of stuff I did in response to various failures:

  • Reported #791588 on texinfo. It was missing a versioned dependency on tex-common and migrated too early. The package was uninstallable in testing for a few days.
  • Reported #791591 on pinba-engine-mysql-5.5: package was uninstallable (had to be rebuilt). It appeared on output files of our britney instance.
  • I made a non-maintainer upload (NMU) of chkrootkit to fix two RC bugs so that the package can go back to testing. The package is installed by our metapackages.
  • Reported #791647: debtags no longer supports “debtags update –local” (a feature that went away but that is used by Kali).
  • I made a NMU of debtags to fix a release critical bug (#791561 debtags: Missing dependency on python3-apt and python3-debian). kali-debtags was uninstallable because it calls debtags in its postinst.
  • Reported #791874 on python-guess-language: Please add a python 2 library package. We have that package in Kali and when I tried to sync it from Debian I broke something else in Kali which depends on the Python 2 version of the package.
  • I made a NMU of tcpick to fix a build failure with GCC5 so that the package could go back to testing (it’s part of our metapackages).
  • I requested a bin-NMU of jemalloc and a give-back of hiredis on powerpc in #792246 to fix #788591 (hiredis build failure on powerpc). I also downgraded the severity of #784768 to important so that the package could go back to testing. Hiredis is a dependency of OpenVAS and we need the package in testing.

If you analyze this list, you will see that a large part of the issues we had come down to package getting removed from testing due to RC bugs. We should be able to anticipate those issues and monitor the packages that have an impact on Kali. We will probably add new jenkins job that installs all the metapackages and then run how-can-i-help -s testing-autorm --old… I just submitted #794238 as a wishlist against how-can-i-help.

At the same time, there are bugs that make it into testing and that I fix / work around on the Kali side. But those fixes / work around might be more useful if they were pushed to testing via testing-proposed-updates. I tried to see whether other derivatives had similar needs to see if derivatives could join their efforts at this level but it does not look like so for now.

Last but not least, bugs reported on the Kali side also resulted in Debian improvements:

  • I reported #793360 on apt: APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections not working as advertised. And I submitted a patch.
  • I orphaned dnswalk and made a QA upload to fix its only bug.
  • We wanted a newer version of the nvidia drivers. I filed #793079 requesting the new upstream release and the maintainer quickly uploaded it to experimental. I imported it on the Kali side but discovered that it was not working on i386 so I submitted #793160 with a patch.
  • I noticed that Kali build daemons tend to accumulate many /dev/shm mounts and tracked this down to schroot. I reported it as #793081.

Other Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored multiple packages for Daniel Stender who is packaging prospector, a software that I requested earlier (through RFP bug). So I reviewed and uploaded python-requirements-detector, python-setoptconf, pylint-celery and pylint-common. During a review I also discovered a nice bug in dh-python (#793609a comment in the middle of a Build-Depends could break a package). I also sponsored an upload of notmuch-addrlookup (new package requested by a Freexian customer).

Packaging. I uploaded python-django 1.7.9 in unstable and 1.8.3 in experimental to fix security issues. I uploaded a new upstream release of ditaa through a non-maintainer upload (again at the request of a Freexian customer).

Distro Tracker. Beside the work to integrate detailed security status, I fixed the code to be compatible with Django 1.8 and modified the tox configuration to ensure that the test suite is regularly run against Django 1.8. I also merged multiple patches of Christophe Siraut (cf #784151 and #754413).

Thanks

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

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2015

by

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

Individual reports

In June, 73.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Evolution of the situation

July has seen a nice increase in terms of sponsored hours (79.50 hours per month) but the trend is unlikely to continue for the next month, worse it might be negative. While most sponsors who joined us last year in July will renew their support, there are a few where I have no confirmation yet. Many thanks to those who confirmed early: Université Lille 3, MyTux.

Our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position is unlikely to be reached before DebConf or even this summer. If you want to prove me wrong, it’s time to get in touch with your management and convince your company to contribute a small amount.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is similar to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 24 packages awaiting an update (5 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 33 affected packages in total (3 less than last month).

Thanks to our sponsors

There are no new sponsors this month. But I decided to include the number of months that the sponsor has been with us. Since we value long-lasting relations, it seemed quite natural to add this.

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