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:

• Debian Long Term Support: Past Present and Future (slides)
• Preparing for Wheezy LTS

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.