Me

Freexian is looking to expand its team with more Debian contributors

March 29, 2024 by Raphaël Hertzog

It’s been a while that I haven’t posted anything on my blog, the truth is that Freexian has been doing very well in the last years and that I have a hard time to allocate time to write articles or even to contribute to my usual Debian projects… the exception being debusine since that’s part of the Freexian work (have a look at our most recent announce!).

That being said, given Freexian’s growth and in the hope to reduce my workload, we are looking to extend our team with Debian members of more varied backgrounds and skills, so they can help us in areas like sales / marketing / project management. Have a look at our announce on debian-jobs@lists.debian.org.

As a mission-oriented company, we are looking to work with persons already involved in Debian (or persons who were waiting the right opportunity to get involved). All our collaborators can spend 20% of their paid work time on the Debian projects they care about.

My Free Software Activities in July & August 2018

September 3, 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

A lot of things happened in the last two months. First of all there was a Google summer of code project adding new synoptic views for Debian teams (example here). I reviewed and merged many merge requests (31, 40, 42, 43). While investigating how to improve the performances, I discovered an annoying limitation the database-backed Django cache backend which I reported to the upstream developers (Django ticket #29584).

With the many incremental changes made over the last months, the documentation was really lacking. I used this opportunity to entirely restructure it with one big section for each kind of readers: simple users, administrators, developers/contributors. Have a look at it. When I did this, I merged the part of the documentation which was in the developers-reference and left there only a pointer to the new documentation.

I then made an announce to debian-devel-announce to let people know of the new features (and of the corresponding documentation).

I went away two weeks in vacation (around DebConf) and used this free time to start a big refactoring that I had planned for a long time (see Task redesign). I submitted the result in a merge request to get some feedback and put this into production when I came back home. I had to deal with a few regressions but I’m pleased with the result since it already helped me to fix a few longstanding issues (run tasks more often, better handling of standards-version see #895393 and #904694, catch up with extraction of some files that failed to be extracted and were never retried, etc.).

Finally, I did some bug triage and fixed a couple of issues along the way:

Fix the WNPP task to know about “RFS” tags
Fixed issue with custom auth backend
Dropped files that were incorrectly extracted twice (#784164)
Fix the management of keywords in subscription page (#906963), add functional tests for this
Fix regression in autopkgtest action item due to “neutral” status (#907062)
Improve distro-tracker vcswatch output (#906663)
I forbid users to login with their old Alioth SSL certificate, as the associated emails are no longer working.

And I also filed some tickets for things to improve in the future:

Improve the extract_source_files plugin by recording the absence of files and by making checkpoints of the progress
Replace ActionItem model with PackageData
Make UserEmail entirely separate from data imported from package repositories.

pkg-security

I sponsored many uploads (patator, wifite, hashcat, masscan, brutespray, curvedns, ledger-wallets-udev, ccrypt) and made many uploads by myself as we have to upload all our packages to fix the Maintainer field. I asked other team members to join and step in.

I noticed the IRC notifications were broken and I helped Alexander Wirt to fix them for all projects hosted on salsa. I also submitted a pull request to invite the BTS bot on our channel (to announce uploads and bugs).

After having investigated the RC bug file against acccheck, I requested its removal in #904200. And I also requested a bin-nmu for wcc due to changes in binutils (#904073).

Last but not least, I advocated Philippe Thierry (a team member) for his process to become a Debian developer!

Misc Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored asciidoc for Joseph Herlant and asked him to apply to the Debian Developer status. He did so a bit later and I advocated him. Yay for saving time for the future!

Pyside2 packaging. After lots of work, at Freexian, we were able to finish the pyside2 package and upload it to the archive. Along the way we filed a few issues to upstream: #740 (segfault in shiboken), #741 (python3.7 compatibility issue), #758 (small license problem), #759 (better compat with usual setup.py parameters), #764 (armel/armhf build failure), #765 (ppc* build failure).

Misc bug reports. I filed #907246 on git-buildpackage: gbp import-dsc should warn users when changes will be lost. And I also filed #903483 on dropbear with a patch to set a PATH for root that includes /usr/sbin and /sbin.

Other stuff. I submitted a pull request on pysimplesoap. I uploaded easy-rsa 3.0.4-2 adding the missing make-cadir command and adding autopkgtest (problem discovered while working on my book).

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in June 2018

July 4, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog

Distro Tracker

I merged a branch adding appstream related data (thanks to Matthias Klumpp). I merged multiple small contributions from a new contributor: Lev Lazinskiy submitted a fix to have the correct version string in the documentation and ensured that we could not use the login page if we are already identified (see MR 36).

Arthur Del Esposte continued his summer of code project and submitted multiple merge requests that I reviewed multiple times before they were ready to be merged. He implemented a team search feature, created a small framework to display an overview of all packages of a team.

On a more administrative level, I had to deal with many subscriptions that became immediately invalid when alioth.debian.org shut down. So I tried to replace all email subscriptions using *@users.alioth.debian.org with alternate emails linked to the same account. When no fallback was possible, I simply deleted the subscription.

pkg-security work

I sponsored cewl 5.4.3-1 (new upstream release) and wfuzz_2.2.11-1.dsc (new upstream release), masscan 1.0.5+ds1-1 (taken over by the team, new upstream release) and wafw00f 0.9.5-1 (new upstream release). I sponsored wifite2, made the unittests run during the build and added some autopkgtest. I submitted a pull request to skip tests when some tools are unavailable.

I filed #901595 on reaver to get a fixed watch file.

Misc Debian work

I reviewed multiple merge requests on live-build (about its handling of archive keys and the associated documentation). I uploaded a new version of live-boot (20180603) with the pending changes.

I sponsored pylint-django 0.11-1 for Joseph Herlant, xlwt 1.3.0-2 (bug fix) and python-num2words_0.5.6-1~bpo9+1 (backport requested by a user).

I uploaded a new version of ftplib fixing a release critical bug (#901224: ftplib FTCBFS: uses the build architecture compiler).

I submitted two patches to git (fixing french l10n in git bisect and marking two strings for translation).

I reviewed multiple merge requests on debootstrap: --components not carried over with --foreign/--second-stage and enabling --merged-usr by default.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in May 2018

June 4, 2018 by Raphaël Hertzog

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.

Distro Tracker

pkg-security

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Distro Tracker

pkg-security work

Misc Debian work

Thanks

distro-tracker

pkg-security team

Misc Debian work

Extended LTS

Thanks

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