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My Free Software Activities for December 2014

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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 20 hours on Debian LTS. I did the following tasks:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 47 commits to the security tracker this month. Due to this, I submitted two wishlist bugs against the security tracker: #772927 and #772961.
  • I released DLA-106-1 which had been prepared by Osamu Aoki.
  • I released DLA-111-1 fixing one CVE on cpio.
  • I released DLA-113-1 and DLA-114-1 on bsd-mailx/heirloom-mailx fixing one CVE for the former and two CVE for the latter.
  • I released DLA-120-1 on xorg-server. This update alone took more than 6h to backport all the patches, fixing a massive set of 12 CVE.

Not in the paid hours, but still related to Debian LTS, I kindly asked Linux Weekly News to cover Debian LTS in their security page and this is now live. You will see DLA on the usual security page and there’s also a dedicated page tracking this: http://lwn.net/Alerts/Debian-LTS/

I modified the LTS wiki page to have a dedicated Funding sub-page. This avoids having a direct link to Freexian’s offer on the main LTS page (which surprised a few persons) and allows to give some more background information and makes it possible for other persons/companies to also get listed in the same way (since there’s no exclusive relationship between Debian and Freexian here!).

And I also answered some questions of Nguyen Cong (a new LTS contributor, employed by Toshiba with explicit permission to contribute to LTS during work hours! \o/), on IRC, on ask.debian.net (again) and on the mailing list! It’s great to see the LTS project expanding beyond current members of the Debian project.

Distro Tracker

I want to give again some more priority to Distro Tracker at least to complete the transition from the old PTS to this new service… last month has been a bit better than November but not by much.

I reviewed a patch in #771604 (about displaying long descriptions), I merged another patch in #757443 (fixing bad markup which rendered the page unusable with Konqueror), I fixed #760382 where package gone through NEW would never lose their version in NEW.

Kali related contributions

I’m not covering my Kali work here but only some things which got contributed upstream (or to Debian).

First I ensured that we could build the Kali ISO with live-build 4.x in jessie. This resulted in multiple patches merged to the Debian live project (1 2 3 4). I also submitted a patch for a regression in the handling of conditionals in package lists, it got dropped and has been fixed differently instead. I also filed #772651 to report a problem in how live-build decided of the variant of the live-config package to install.

Kali has forked the sysvinit package to be able to disable the services by default and I was investigating how to port this feature in the new systemd world. It turns out systemd has such a feature natively: it’s called Preset files. Unfortunately it’s not usable in Debian because Debian does not call systemctl preset during package installation. I filed bug #772555 to get this fixed (in Stretch, it’s too late for Jessie :-().

Saltstack

I’m using salt to automate some administration task in Kali, at home and at work. I discovered recently that the project tries to collect “Salt Formulas”: those are ready to use instructions for as many services as possibles.

I started using this for some simple services and quickly felt the need to extend “salt-formula”, the set of states used to configure salt with salt. I submitted 5 pull requests (#73 and #74 to configure salt in standalone mode, #75 to enable the upstream package repositories, #76 to automatically download and enable the desired salt formulas, #77 for some bugfixes) and they have all been merged in less than 24 hours (that’s the kind of thing that motivates you to contribute again in the future!).

I also submitted a bug fix for samba-formula and a bug report in salt itself (#19180).

BTW I have some salt states to setup schroot and sbuild. I will try to package those as proper salt formulas in the future…

Misc stuff

Mailing list governance. In Debian, we often complain about meta-discussion on mailing lists (i.e. discussions about how we discuss together) and at the same time we need to have that kind of discussions from time to time. So I suggested to host those discussions in a new mailing list and to get this new list setup, our rules require to have other people interested in having this list. The idea had some support when we discussed it on debian-private, so I relaunched it on debian-project while filing the official request in the BTS: #772645. Unfortunately, I only got one second. So if you’re interested in pursuing this idea, speak up now…

Sponsorship. I sponsored another Galette plugin this month: galette-plugin-fullcard. Thanks to François-Régis Vuillemin for his work.

Publican. Following one of my bug report against Publican and with the help of the upstream author, we identified the problem and I submitted a patch.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in November 2014

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 18 hours on Debian LTS (14h allocated by Freexian + 4h I did not spend last month). I did the following tasks:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 19 commits to the security tracker. I also tried to encourage some maintainers to provide security updates for packages that are not in use by the current LTS sponsors and that are thus not in our priority list.
  • DLA 87: dbus update fixing 3 CVE
  • DLA 93: libgcrypt11 update fixing 1 CVE
  • DLA 96: openjdk-6 security update fixing 21 CVE
  • Worked on preparing a security update to linux. It’s not released yet.

Updating the linux source package took a good half of the allocated time. We opted to update the kernel to the upstream version 2.6.32.64. I integrated the upstream patches and identified about 130 patches that we had to disable (because they were already integrated upstream). Then I updated our “openvz flavor” patch to apply on top of the new kernel. This required quite a bit of manual conflict resolution and there are even parts where I was not sure that I took the correct decision. I was not able to find an upstream openvz git tree on this kernel version to to double check.

Instead I asked Ben Hutchings to review my patch. He told me that he did not volunteer to work on LTS, but that he would be open to contribute to it for money. Following this remark, as the coordinator of Freexian’s offer, I offered him to join to the set of paid LTS contributors to take care of the kernel and he accepted.

So hopefully we will be able to wrap this linux upload in the first week of december. We had no uploads of the kernel in Squeeze since July so it’s good to know that we now have someone who will be able to handle it in priority.

Distro Tracker

No new developments this month. Instead I spent some time to import old historic news so that when you lookup removed packages you have some actual content instead of a 404 error. For example you can look at python2.1.

Another thing that I did is to tag some bugs with the newly-announced tag “newcomer”. Those are easy bugs that are ideal targets for new contributors who’d like to get started: here’s the list. It’s up to you now! 😉

DEP-14: Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories

I have drafted an initial version of a document called Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories and submitted it for discussion on debian-devel.

The discussion has been interesting and constructive (yes this is still possible in Debian!). I have a bunch of improvements in my local copy and needs to process a few more feedback before submitting an updated draft. It’s not a revolution but it’s a good step to try to standardize tags and branches naming conventions.

Systemd, the tech-ctte and our mailing lists

As an old-timer, I care a lot about the governance of Debian and it’s annoying to see how the systemd debate brought back some of our old daemons in terms of hostile atmosphere on our mailing lists.

We can disagree on a lot of things, but we must respect each other and we are here to work together on solutions for everybody. As such I wrote to the persons who cross the line to invite them to behave better. And I’m glad that our listmasters are backing up our calls with bans when appropriate. I believe we must go further in that direction and I shared an idea (on a debian-private thread that should have never existed, much like most of the traffic on that list) that I shall formalize and share on debian-project@l.d.o at some point.

At the same time, we also had another governance-related discussion with the idea to impose some turnover in the technical committee. I’m glad to see that we will soon vote on this topic. This is a good thing in general even though we just had 3 tech-ctte members who retired.

Misc stuff

I sponsored an upload of galette and of 3 of its plugins. I reviewed jitsi-videobridge and jitsi-meet on mentors.debian.net.

I filed a few bugs:

  • #768256 about huge vim icons in the GNOME contextual menus
  • #768540: cdebootstrap: fails to bootstrap old releases with dpkg not supporting data.tar.xz
  • #770011: lynx -dump badly converting …

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in September 2014

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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.

My Free Software Activities in August 2014

by

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 (65.55 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Distro Tracker

Even though I was officially in vacation during 3 of the 4 weeks of August, I spent many nights working on Distro Tracker. I’m pleased to have managed to bring back Python 3 compatibility over all the (tested) code base. The full test suite now passes with Python 3.4 and Django 1.6 (or 1.7).

From now on, I’ll run “tox” on all code submitted to make sure that we won’t regress on this point. tox also runs flake8 for me so that I can easily detect when the submitted code doesn’t respect the PEP8 coding style. It also catches other interesting mistakes (like unused variable or too complex functions).

Getting the code to pass flake8 was also a major effort, it resulted in a huge commit (89 files changed, 1763 insertions, 1176 deletions).

Thanks to the extensive test suite, all those refactoring only resulted in two regressions that I fixed rather quickly.

Some statistics: 51 commits over the last month, 41 by me, 3 by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, 3 by Christophe Siraut, 3 by Joseph Herlant and 1 by Simon Kainz. Thanks to all of them! Their contributions ported some features that were already available on the old PTS. The new PTS is now warning of upcoming auto-removals, is displaying problems with uptream URLs, includes a short package description in the page title, and provides a link to screenshots (if they exist on screenshots.debian.net).

We still have plenty of bugs to handle, so you can help too: check out https://tracker.debian.org/docs/contributing.html. I always leave easy bugs for others to handle, so grab one and get started! I’ll review your patch with pleasure. 🙂

Tryton

After my last batch of contributions to Tryton’s French Chart of Accounts (#4108, #4109, #4110, #4111) Cédric Krier granted me commit rights to the account_fr mercurial module.

Debconf 14

I wasn’t able to attend this year but thanks to awesome work of the video team, I watched some videos (and I still have a bunch that I want to see). Some of them were put online the day after they had been recorded. Really amazing work!

Django 1.7

After the initial bug reports, I got some feedback of maintainers who feared that it would be difficult to get their packages working with Django 1.7. I helped them as best as I can by providing some patches (for horizon, for django-restricted-resource, for django-testscenarios).

Since I expected many maintainers to be not very pro-active, I rebuilt all packages with Django 1.7 to detect at least those that would fail to build. I tagged as confirmed all the corresponding bug reports.

Looking at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=python-django@packages.debian.org;tag=django17, one can see that some progress has been made with 25 packages fixed. Still there are at least 25 others that are still problematic in sid and 35 that have not been investigated at all (except for the automatic rebuild that passed). Again your help is more than welcome!

It’s easy to install python-django 1.7 from experimental and they try to use/rebuild the packages from the above list.

Dpkg translation

With the freeze approaching, I wanted to ensure that dpkg was fully translated in French. I thus pinged debian-l10n-french@lists.debian.org and merged some translations that were done by volunteers. Unfortunately it looks like nobody really stepped up to maintain it in the long run… so I did myself the required update when dpkg 1.17.12 got uploaded.

Is there anyone willing to manage dpkg’s French translation? With the latest changes in 1.17.13, we have again a few untranslated strings:
$ for i in $(find . -name fr.po); do echo $i; msgfmt -c -o /dev/null --statistics $i; done
./po/fr.po
1083 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 1 untranslated message.
./dselect/po/fr.po
268 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations.
./scripts/po/fr.po
545 translated messages.
./man/po/fr.po
2277 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 3 untranslated messages.

Misc stuff

I made an xsane QA upload (it’s currently orphaned) to drop the (build-)dependency on liblcms1 and avoid getting it removed from Debian testing (see #745524). For the record, how-can-i-help warned me of this after one dist-upgrade.

With the Django 1.7 work and the need to open up an experimental branch, I decided to switch python-django’s packaging to git even though the current team policy is to use subversion. This triggered (once more) the discussion about a possible switch to git and I was pleased to see more enthusiasm this time around. Barry Warsaw tested a few workflows, shared his feeling and pushed toward a live discussion of the switch during Debconf. It looks like it might happen for good this time. I contributed my share in the discussions on the mailing list.

Thanks

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

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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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