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My Free Software Activities in March 2018

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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.

Distro Tracker

I reviewed and merged 14 merge requests from multiple contributors:

On top of this, I updated the Salsa/AliothMigration wiki page with information about how to best leverage tracker.debian.org when you migrate to salsa.

I also filed a few issues for bugs or things that I’d like to see improved:

I also gave my feedback about multiple mockups prepared by Chirath R in preparation of his Google Summer of Code project proposal.

Security Tools Packaging Team

Following the departure of alioth, the new list that we requested on lists.debian.org has been created: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-tools/

I updated (in the git repositories) all the Vcs-* and all the Maintainer fields of the packages maintained by the team.

I prepared and uploaded afflib 3.7.16-3 to fix RC bug #892599. I sponsored rhash 1.3.6 for Aleksey Kravchenko, ccrypt 1.10-5 for Alexander Kulak and ledger-wallets-udev 0.1 for Stephne Neveu.

Debian Live

This project also saw an unexpected resurgence of activity and I had to review and merge many merge requests:

It’s nice to see two derivatives being so active in upstreaming their changes.

Misc stuff

Hamster time tracker. I was regularly hit a by a bug leading to a gnome-shell crash (leading to a graphical session crash due to the design of wayland) and this time I decided that enough was enough so I started to dig in the code and did my best to fix the issues I encountered. During the month, I tested multiple versions and submitted three pull requests. Right now, the version in git is working fine for me. Still, it really smells of a bad design that mistakes in shell extensions can have such dramatic consequences.

Packaging. I forwarded #892063 to upstream in a new ticket. I updated zim to version 0.68 (final release replacing release candidate that I had already packaged). I filed #893083 suggesting that the hello source package should be a model for other packages and as such it should have a git repository hosted on salsa.debian.org.

Sponsorship. I sponsored pylint-django 0.9.4-1 for Joseph Herlant. I also sponsored urwid 2.0.1-1 (new upstream version), xlwt 1.3.0-1 (new version with python 3 support), elastalert 0.1.29-1 (new upstream release and RC bug fix) which have been updated for Freexian customers.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in February 2018

by

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

Since we switched to salsa, and with the arrival of prospective GSOC students interested to work on distro-tracker this summer, I have been rather active on this project as can be seen in the project’s activity summary. Among the most important changes we can note:

  • The documentation and code coverage analysis is updated on each push.
  • Unit tests, functional tests and style checks (flake8) are run on each push but also on merge requests, allowing contributors to have quick feedback on their code. Implemented with this Gitlab CI configuration.
  • Multiple bug fixes (more of it). Update code to use python3-gpg instead of deprecated python3-gpgme (I had to coordinate with DSA to get the new package installed).
  • More unit tests for team related code. Still a work in progress but I made multiple reviews already.

Debian Live

I created the live-team on salsa.debian.org to prepare for the move of the various Debian live repositories. The move itself has been done by Steve McIntyre. In the discussion, we also concluded that the live-images source package can go away. I thus filed its removal request.

Then I spent a whole day reviewing all the pending patches. I merged most of them and left comments on the remaining ones:

  • Merged #885453 cleaning up double slashes in some paths.
  • Merged #885466 allowing to set upperdir tmpfs mount point size.
  • Merged #885455 switching back the live-boot initrd to use busybox’s wget as it supports https now.
  • Merged #886328 simplifying the mount points handling by using /run/live instead of /lib/live/mount.
  • Merged #886337 adding options to build smaller initrd by disabling some features.
  • Merged #866009 fixing a race condition between live-config and systemd-tmpfiles-setup.
  • Reviewed #884355 implementing new hooks in live-boot’s initrd. Not ready for merge yet.
  • Reviewed #884553 implementing cross-architecture linux flavour selection. Not ready for merge yet.
  • Merged #891206 fixing a regression with local mirrors.
  • Merged #867539 lowering the process priority of mksquasfs to avoid rendering the machine completely unresponsive during this step.
  • Merged #885692 adding UEFI support for ARM64.
  • Merged #847919 simplifying the bootstrap of foreign architectures.
  • Merged #868559 fixing fuse mounts by switching back to klibc’s mount.
  • Wrote a patch to fix verify-checksums option in live-boot (see #856482).

    • I released a new version of live-config but wanted some external testing before releasing the new live-boot. This did not happen yet unfortunately.

Debian LTS

I started a discussion on debian-devel about how we could handle the extension of the LTS program that some LTS sponsors are asking us to do.

The response have been rather mixed so far. It is unlikely that wheezy will be kept on the official mirror after its official EOL date but it’s not clear whether it would be possible to host the wheezy updates on some other debian.org server for longer.

Debian Handbook

I moved the git repository of the book to salsa and released a new version in unstable to fix two recent bugs: #888575 asking us to implement some parallel building to speed the build and #888578 informing us that a recent debhelper update broke the build process due to the presence of a build directory in the source package.

Debian Packaging

I moved all my remaining packages to salsa.debian.org and used the opportunity to clean them up:

  • dh-linktree, ftplib, gnome-shell-timer (fixed #891305 later), logidee-tools, publican, publican-debian, vboot-utils, rozofs
  • Some also got a new upstream release for the same price: tcpdf, lpctools, elastalert, notmuch-addrlookup.
  • I orphaned tcpdf in #889731 and I asked for the removal of feed2omb in #742601.
  • I updated django-modeltranslation to 0.12.2 to fix FTBFS bug #834667 (I submitted an upstream pull request at the same time).

Dolibarr. As a sponsor of dolibarr I filed its removal request and then I started a debian-devel discussion because we should be able to provide such applications to our users even though its development practice does not conform to some of our policies.

Bash. I uploaded a bash NMU (4.4.18-1.1) to fix a regression introduced by the PIE-enabled build (see #889869). I filed an upstream bug against bash but it turns out it’s actually a bug in qemu-user that really ought to be fixed. I reported the bug to qemu upstream but it hasn’t gotten much traction.

pkg-security team. I sponsored many updates over the month: rhash 1.3.5-1, medusa 2.2-5, hashcat, dnsrecon, btscanner, wfuzz 2.2.9, pixiewps 1.4.2-1, inetsim (new from kali). I also made a new upload of sslsniff with the OpenSSL 1.1 patch contributed by Hilko Bengen.

Debian bug reports

I filed a few bug reports:

  • #889814: lintian: Improve long description of epoch-change-without-comment
  • #889816: lintian: Complain when epoch has been bumped but upstream version did not go backwards
  • #890594: devscripts: Implement a salsa-configure script to configure salsa.debian.org project repositories
  • #890700 and #890701 about missing Vcs-Git fields to siridb-server and libcleri
  • #891301: lintian: privacy-breach-generic should not complain about <link rel=”generator”> and others

Misc contributions

Saltstack formulas. I pushed misc fixes to the munin-formula, the samba-formula and the openssh-formula. I submitted two other pull requests: on samba-formula and on users-formula.

QA’s carnivore database. I fixed a bug in a carnivore script that was spewing error messages about duplicate uids. This database links together multiple identifiers (emails, GPG key ids, LDAP entry, etc.) for the same Debian contributor.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in April 2017

by

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

I was allocated 10 hours to work on security updates for Debian 7 Wheezy and had 1.5 hours remaining from March. During this time I did the following:

  • I released DLA-905-1 on ghostscript fixing 3 CVE. I also triaged two other ghostscript CVE that were not relevant to the version in wheezy.
  • I started to look into CVE-2016-10209 for libarchive but was not able to reproduce the segfault and marked it as not worth an update (same decision as security team).
  • After many tries to get more details from upstream of libxml-twig-perl on CVE-2016-9180, I decided that the low severity of the issue was not worth spending more time on it (same decision as RedHat and Debian security team).
  • I released DLA-921-1 on slurm-llnl fixing 1 high-severity CVE.
  • I investigated CVE-2016-8686 on potrace and marked it as not requiring an update because the impact is very low. I documented the fact that it’s fixed in unstable and asked the upstream author for the specific patch (no answer yet though).

Kali and pkg-security

I updated the britney instance that we are using in Kali and spotted two small documentation mistakes that I fixed.

We had a long-standing bug in Kali where extensions would stay visible on the lock screen. It was hard to reproduce and this month we finally managed to nail down the conditions required to reproduce it. It turns out that EasyScreenCast was the culprit. We paid Emilio Pozuelo Monfort to work on a patch and he fixed the problem in EasyScreenCast and also in gnome-shell, as a buggy extension should not have resulted in this behavior.

I responded to multiple queries of new contributors in the pkg-security team. The team is rather active and it would be great if we could have a few more Debian developers to help review and sponsor the work our enthusiastic new members.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities. Hopefully, I will be more active again… between kids’ vacations, French elections and Zelda Breadth of the Wild, I got very much distracted from Debian last month. 🙂

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.

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