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My Free Software Activities in October 2016

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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

Last month I started to work on tiff3 but had not enough time to complete an update, it turns out the issues were hairy enough that nobody else picked up the package. So this month I started again with tiff3 and tiff and I ended up spending my 13h on those two packages.

I filed bugs for issues that were not yet reported to the BTS (#842361 for CVE-2016-5652, #842046 for CVE-2016-5319/CVE-2016-3633/CVE-2015-8668). I marked many CVE as not affecting tiff3 as this source package does not ship the tools (the “tiff” source package does).

Since upstream decided to drop many tools instead of fixing the corresponding security issues, I opted to remove the tools as well. Before doing this, I looked up reverse dependencies of libtiff-tools to ensure that none of the tools removed are used by other packages (the maintainer seems to agree too).

I backported upstream patches for CVE-2016-6223 and CVE-2016-5652.

But the bulk of the time, I spent on CVE-2014-8128, CVE-2015-7554 and CVE-2016-5318. I believe they are all variants of the same problem and upstream seems to agree since he opened a sort of meta-bug to track them. I took inspiration from a patch suggested in ticket #2499 and generalized it a bit by trying to add the tag data for all tags manipulated by the various tools. It was a tiresome process as there are many tags used in multiple places. But in the end, it works as expected. I can no longer reproduce any of the segfaults with the problematic files.

I asked for review/test on the mailing list but did not get much feedback. I’m going to upload the updated packages soon.

Distro Tracker

I noticed a sudden raise in the number of email addresses being automatically unsubscribed from the Debian Package Tracker and I got a few request of bounces. It turns out the BTS has been relaying lots of spam with executables files and those are bounced by Google (and not silently discarded). This is all very unfortunate… the spam flood is unlikely to stop soon and I can’t expect Google to change either, so I had little choice except trying to make the bounce handler smarter. That’s what I did: I have a list of regular expression that will discard a bounce. In other words, once matched the bounce won’t count towards the limit that triggers the automatic unsubscription.

Misc Debian work

Bugs filed. In #839403, I suggest the possibility to set the default pin priority for a source in the sources.list file directly. In #840436 I ask the selenium-firefoxdriver maintainer to do what is required to get this non-free package auto-built.

Packaging. I sponsored puppet-lint 2.0.2-0.1 and I reviewed the rozofs package (wihch I just sponsored into experimental for a start).

Publicity. I’m maintaining the Debian account on Twitter and Facebook. I have been using twitterfeed.com up to now but it’s closing down. I followed their recommendations and switched to dlvr.it to automatically post entries out of the micronews.debian.org feed. In #841165, I reported that the chroots created by sbuild-createchroot are lacking the usual IPv6 entries created by netbase. In #841503, I report a very common cryptsetup upgrade failure that I saw multiple times (both in Debian and in Kali).

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in September 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 LTS

With the increasing number of paid contributors, easy fixes (CVE with patches available) tend to be processed rather quickly. All the package I worked on had issues that were open for a long time because they were hard to handle.

I prepared DLA-613-1 fixing 3 CVE on roundcube. The fix required to manually backport the CRSF handling code which was not available in the wheezy version. I spent almost 8 hours on roundcube.

Then I started to work on tiff3. I reviewed many CVE: CVE-2016-3658, CVE-2015-7313, CVE-2015-7554, CVE-2015-8668, CVE-2016-5318, CVE-2016-3625, CVE-2016-5319. I updated their status for tiff3 in wheezy, requested reproducer files to people who reported the CVE when the files were not publicly available and made sure that everything was recorded in the upstream bug tracker. The 4.25 hours I spent on the package were not enough to work on patches, so I put the package back in the work queue.

GNOME 3.22 transition

I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer that would work with GNOME 3.21 that had been uploaded to sid.

Unfortunately, that new GNOME (and GTK+) version caused many regressions that affected Debian Testing (and thus Kali) users in particular in gnome-control-center. I uploaded a new version fixing some of those issues and I reported a bunch of them to upstream too (#771515, #771517, #771696).

Kali

I worked on #836211 creating a dpkg patch to work-around the overlayfs limitation (we use it in Kali because persistence of live system relies on overlayfs) and I contacted the upstream overlayfs maintainer to hopefully get a proper fix on the overlayfs side instead.

I uploaded radcli 1.2.6-2.1 to fix RC bug #825121 as the package was removed from testing and openvas depends on it in Kali.

As part of the pkg-security team, I sponsored/uploaded acccheck and arp-scan for Marcos Fouces, and p0f 3.09b as well.

Misc Debian work

Distro Tracker. I tested, fixed and merged Paul Wise’s patch integrating multiarch hints into tracker.debian.org (#833623).

Debian Handbook. I enabled the new Vietnamese translation on debian-handbook.info and updated all translations with Weblate updates.

systemd units for apache2. I prepared systemd units for apache2 which I submitted in #798430. With approval of Stefan Fritsch, I committed my work to the git repository and then uploaded the result in version 2.4.23-5.

Hindsight packaging. I first packaged lua-sandbox (#838969) — which is a dependency of Hindsight — and then Hindsight itself (#838968). In this process, I opened a couple of upstream tickets.

PIE by default. I uploaded a new version of cpputest compiled with -fPIC so shat executable linking to its static library can be compiled with -fPIE (#837363, forwarded upstream here).

Bugs filed. Bad homepage link in haskell-dice-entropy-conduit. Inconsistent options --onlyscripts and --noscripts in debhelper. pidgin entry in security-support-limited is out of date in debian-security-support. New upstream version (2.0.2) in puppet-lint.

Thanks

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

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.

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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