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My Free Software Activities in January 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 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 did not ask for any paid hours this month and won’t be requesting paid hours for the next 5 months as I have a big project to handle with a deadline in June. That said I still did a few LTS related tasks:

  • I uploaded a new version of debian-security-support (2016.01.07) to officialize that virtualbox-ose is no longer supported in Squeeze and that redmine was not really supportable ever since we dropped support for rails.
  • Made a summary of the discussion about what to support in wheezy and started a new round of discussions with some open questions. I invited contributors to try to pickup one topic, study it and bring the discussion to some conclusion.
  • I wrote a blog post to recruit new paid contributors. Brian May, Markus Koschany and Damyan Ivanov candidated and will do their first paid hours over February.

Distro Tracker

Due to many nights spent on playing Splatoon (I’m at level 33, rank B+, anyone else playing it?), I did not do much work on Distro Tracker.

After having received the bug report #809211, I investigated the reasons why SQLite was no longer working satisfactorily in Django 1.9 and I opened the upstream ticket 26063 and I had a long discussion with two upstream developers to find out the best fix. The next point release (1.9.2) will fix that annoying regression.

I also merged a couple of contributions (two patches from Christophe Siraut, one adding descriptions to keywords, cf #754413, one making it more obvious that chevrons in action items are actionable to show more data, a patch from Balasankar C in #810226 fixing a bad URL in an action item).

I fixed a small bug in the “unsubscribe” command of the mail bot, it was not properly recognizing source packages.

I updated the task notifying of new upstream versions to use the data generated by UDD (instead of the data generated by Christoph Berg’s mole-based implementation which was suffering from a few bugs). 

Debian Packaging

Testing experimental sbuild. While following the work of Johannes Schauer on sbuild, I installed the version from experimental to support his work and give him some feedback. In the process I uncovered #810248.

Python sponsorship. I reviewed and uploaded many packages for Daniel Stender who keeps doing great work maintaining prospector and all its recursive dependencies: pylint-common, python-requirements-detector, sphinx-argparse, pylint-django, prospector. He also prepared an upload of python-bcrypt which I requested last month for Django.

Django packaging. I uploaded Django 1.8.8 to jessie-backports.
My stable updates for Django 1.7.11 was not handled before the release of Debian 8.3 even though it was filed more than 1.5 months before.

Misc stuff. My stable update for debian-handbook has been accepted fairly shortly after my last monthly report (thank you Adam!) so I uploaded the package once acked by a release manager. I also sponsor a backports upload of zim prepared by Joerg Desch.

Kali related work

Kernel work. The switch to Linux 4.3 in Kali resulted in a few bug reports that I investigated with the help of #debian-kernel and where I reported my findings back so that the Debian kernel could also benefit from the fixes I uploaded to Kali: first we included a patch for a regression in the vmwgfx video driver used by VMWare virtual machines (which broke the gdm login screen), then we fixed the input-modules udeb to fix support of some Logitech keyboards in debian-installer (see #796096).

Misc work. I made a non-maintainer upload of python-maxminddb to fix #805689 which had been removed from stretch and that we needed in Kali. I also had to NMU libmaxminddb since it was no longer available on armel and we actually support armel in Kali. During that NMU, it occurred to me that dh-exec could offer a feature of “optional install”, that is installing a file that exists but not failing if it doesn’t exist. I filed this as #811064 and it stirred up quite some debate.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in December 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 21.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

  • Sent a first patch and later an updated patch to modify DAK so that it can send the accept/reject mails to the signer of the upload instead of the maintainer. Details in #796784.
  • Uploaded MySQL 5.5 compabitility fixes for phpmyadmin and postfix-policyd so that we could release MySQL 5.5 as an upgrade option MySQL 5.1 (see DLA 359-1).
  • Released DLA 361-1 on bouncycastle after having gotten the green light from upstream.
  • Released DLA 362-1 on dhcpd fixing three CVE.
  • Released DLA 366-1 on arts fixing one CVE.
  • Released DLA 367-1 on kdelibs fixing one CVE.
  • Handled the LTS frontdesk for a whole week.
  • Sponsored the upload of foomatic-filters for DLA 371-1.
  • Filed #808256 and #808257 to get libnsbmp/libnsgif removed. Both packages had recent CVE and were sitting unused in Debian since their introduction 6 years ago…
  • Released DLA 372-1 announcing the end of support of virtualbox-ose.
  • Updated git repository of debian-security-support to account for the former change and also took care of a few pending issues.
  • Released DLA 376-1 on mono to fix one CVE.
  • Added some initial DEP-8 tests to python-django that will help to ensure that a security update doesn’t break the package.

Distro Tracker

I put a big focus on tracker.debian.org work this month. I completed the switch of the mail interface from packages.qa.debian.org to tracker.debian.org and I announced the change on debian-devel-announce.

The changes resulted in a few problems that I quickly fixed (like #807073) and some other failures seen only by me and that were generated by weird spam messages (did you know that a subject can’t have a newline character but that it can be encoded and folded over multiple lines?).

Related to that I fixed some services so that they send their mails to tracker.debian.org directly instead of relying on the old emails (they get forwarded for now but it would be nice to be able to get rid of that forward). I updated (with the help of Lucas Nussbaum) the service that forwards the Launchpad bugs to the tracker, I sent a patch to update the @packages.debian.org aliases (not yet applied), I updated the configuration of all git commit notice scripts in the Alioth collab-maint and python-modules project (many remain to be done). I asked Ubuntu’s Merge-O-Matic to use the new emails as well (see LP 1525497). DAK and the Debian BTS still have to be updated, as of yet nobody reacted to my announce… last but not least I updated many wiki pages which duplicated the instructions to setup the commit notice sent to the PTS.

While on a good track I opted to tackle the long-standing RC bug that was plaguing tracker.debian.org (#789183), so I updated the codebase to rely on Twitter’s bootstrap v4 instead of v2. I had to switch to something else for the icons since glyphicons is no longer provided as part of bootstrap and the actual license for the standalone version was not suitable for use. I opted for Github’s Octicons. I made numerous little improvements while doing that (closing some bugs in the process) and I believe that the result is more pleasant to use.

I also did a lot of bug triage and fixed a few small issues like the incomplete architecture list (#793547), or fixing a page used only by people with javascript disabled that was not working. Or the invalid links for packages still using CVS (ugh, see #561228).

Misc packaging

Django. After having added DEP-8 tests (as part of my LTS work, see above), I discovered that the current version in unstable did not pass its test suite… so I filed the issue upstream (ticket 26016) and added the corresponding patch. And I encouraged others to update python-bcrypt in Debian to a newer version that would have worked with Django 1.9 (see #803096). I also fixed another small issue in Django (see ticket 26017 with my pull request that got accepted).

I asked the release managers to consider accepting the latest 1.7.x version in jessie (see #807654) but I have gotten zero answer so far. And I’m not the only one waiting an answer. It’s a bit of a sad situation… we still have a few weeks until the next point release but for once I do it in advance and I would love to have timely feedback.

Last but not least, I started the maintaining the current LTS release (1.8.x) in jessie-backports.

Tryton. I upgraded to Tryton 3.8 and discovered an issue that I filed in #806781. I sponsored 5 new tryton modules for Matthias Behrle (who is DM) as well as one security upload (for CVE-2015-0861).

Debian Handbook. I uploaded a new version to Debian Unstable and requested (to the release managers) the permission to upload a backport of it to jessie so that jessie has a version of the package that documents jessie and not wheezy… contrary to my other Django request, this one should be non-controversial but I also have had zero answer so far, see #807515.

Misc. I filed #808583 when sbuild stopped working with Perl 5.22. I handled #807860 on publican, I found the corresponding upstream ticket and discovered a work around with the help of upstream (see here).

Kali related work

I reported a bug to #debian-apt about apt miscalculating download size (ending up with 18 EB!) which resulted in a fix here in version 1.1.4. Installing a meta-package that needed more than 2GB was no longer possible without this fix and we have a kali-linux-all metapackage in that situation that gets regularly installed in a Jenkins test.

I added captcha support to Distro Tracker and enabled this feature on pkg.kali.org.

I filed #808863 against uhd-host because it was not possible to install the package in a systemd-nspawn’s managed chroot where /proc is read-only. And we started using this to test dist-upgrade from one version of Kali to the next…

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in November 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 21.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

  • From November 2nd to November 8th, I was handling the LTS frontdesk, triaging new CVE, filing bugs, and ensuring timely answers on the mailing list. I pushed 26 commits to the security tracker. While investigating CVE-2015-7183 I discovered more embedded copies of nspr (which resulted in #804058). I also commented on the upstream fix for CVE-2015-5602 which looked like insufficient.
  • Prepared and released DLA-339-1 on libhtml-scrubber-perl fixing one CVE.
  • Prepared and released DLA-350-1 on eglibc with a non-trivial backport fixing one CVE.
  • Prepared and released DLA-353-1 on imagemagick fixing two security issues without CVE yet (and marking one as not-affecting squeeze).
  • Added a third patch after review by the upstream author on my still pending bouncycastle update. The upstream author asked me to further defer the update as they have some related fixes coming up.
  • I did preparatory work for DLA-352-1 by identifying the upstream commits that fixed the security issue.
  • I spent some time checking issues that have been assigned for a long time without any visible progress being made in the hope to unblock them (libvncserver, pound, quassel).

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Now that the English version has been finalized for Debian 8 Jessie (I uploaded the package to Debian Unstable), I concentrated my efforts on the French version. The book has been fully translated and we’re now finalizing the print version that Eyrolles will again edit.

Paris Open Source Summit

On November 18th and 19th, I was in Paris for the Paris Open Source Summit. I helped to hold a booth for Debian France during two days (with the help of François-Régis and several others).

François Vuillemin, Juliette Belin and Raphaël Hertzog
François-Régis Vuillemin, Juliette Belin and Raphaël Hertzog

On the booth, we had the visit of Juliette Belin who created the theme and the artwork of Debian 8 Jessie. We lacked goodies but we organized a lottery to win 12 copies of my French book.

Debian packaging work

Django. After two weeks of preparation for revers dependencies, I uploaded Django 1.8 to unstable and raised the severity of remaining bugs. Later I uploaded a new upstream point release (1.8.6). I also handled a release critical bug first by opening a ticket upstream and then by writing a patch and submitting it upstream. I uploaded 1.8.7-2 to Debian with my patch.

I also submittted another small fix which has been rejected because the manual page is generated via Sphinx and I thus had to file a bug against Sphinx (which I did). A work-around has been found in the mean time.

apt-xapian-index NMU. A long time ago, I filed a release critical bug against that package (#793681) but the maintainer did not handle it. Fortunately Sven Joachim prepared an NMU and I just uploaded his work. This resulted in another problem due bash-completion changes that Sven promptly fixed and I uploaded a second NMU a few days later.

Gnome-shell-timer. I forwarded #805347 to gnome-shell-timer issue #29 but gnome-shell-timer is abandoned upstream. On a suggestion of Paul Wise, I tried to get this nice extension integrated into gnome-shell-extensions but the request has been turned down. Is there anyone with javascript skills who would like to adopt this project as an upstream developer? It’s a low maintenance project with a decent and loyal user base.

Misc. I fixed bug #804763 in zim which was the result of a bad Debian-specific patch.
I sponsored pylint-plugin-utils_0.2.3-2.dsc for Joseph Herlant to fix a release critical bug. I filed 806237 against lintian. I filed more tickets upstream, related to my Kali packaging work: one against sddm, one against john

Other Debian-related work

Distro-Tracker. I finally merged the work of Orestis Ioannou on bug #756766 which added the possibility to browse old news of each package.

Debian Installer. I implemented two small features that we wanted in Kali: I fixed #647405 to have a way to disable “deb-src” lines in generated sources.list files. I also filed #805291 to see how to allow kernel command line preseeding to override initrd preseeding… the fix is trivial and it works in Kali. I just have to commit it in Debian, I was hoping to get an ack from someone in charge before doing it.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in October 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 13.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

  • I prepared and released DLA 330-1 fixing two CVE on unzip.
  • I prepared a bouncycastle update fixing CVE-2015-7940 (after having requested that CVE assignment since nobody had done it yet) but I have not yet released the corresponding DLA yet since I’m waiting for a review by the upstream author. This is hairy cryptographic Java code that was non-trivial to backport and I’d rather make sure that I do not mess anything. The patches are available in the bug report #802671 that I opened.
  • I tested the update to MySQL 5.5 with multiple packages and sent back my findings to the debian-lts mailing list.

I also started a conversation about what paid contributors could work on if they have some spare cycle as the current funding level might allow us to invest some time on work outside of just plain security updates.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

I spent quite some time finalizing the Jessie book update, both for the content and for the layout of the printed book.

Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie edition

Misc Debian work

GNOME 3.18. I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer working with GNOME Shell 3.18 and I filed bugs #800660 and #802480 about an annoying gnome-keyring regression… I did multiple test rounds with the Debian maintainers (Dmitry Shachnev, kudos to him!) and the upstream developers (see here and here). Apart from those regressions, I like GNOME 3.18!

Python-modules team migration to Git. After the Git migration, and since the team policy now imposes usage of git-dpm on all members, I made some tries with it on the python-django package while pushing version 1.8.5 to experimental. And the least I can say is that I’m not pleased with the result. I thus filed 3 bugs summarizing the problems I have with git-dpm: #801666 (no way to set the upstream branch names from within the repository), #801667 (no clean way to merge between packaging branches), #801668 (does not create upstream tag immediately on tarball import). That is on top of other randomly stupid bugs that were already reported like #801548 (does not work with perfectly valid pre-existing upstream tags).

Django packaging. I filed bugs on all packages build-depending on python-django that fail to build with Django 1.8 and informed them that I would upload Django 1.8 to unstable in early November (it’s done already). Then I fixed python-django-jsonfield myself since Distro Tracker relies on this package.

Following this small mass-bug filing, I filed a wishlist bug on devscripts to improve the “mass-bug” helper script (see #801926). And since I used “ratt” to rebuild the packages, I filed a wishlist issue on this new tool as well.

Tryton 3.6 upgrade. I upgraded my own Tryton installation to version 3.6 and filed bug #803066 because the SysV init script was not working properly. That also reminded me that the DD process of Matthias Behrle (the tryton package maintainer) was stalled due to a bug in the NM infrastructure so I pinged the NM team and we sorted out a way for me to advocate him and get his process going…

Distro Tracker. I continued my work to refactor the way we handle incoming mail processing (branch people/hertzog/mailprocessing). It’s now mostly finished and I need to deploy it in a test environment before being able to roll it out on tracker.debian.org.

Thanks

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

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