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.

I skipped my monthly report last time so this one will cover two months. I will try to list only the most important things to not make it too long. 🙂

The Debian Handbook

I worked with Ryuunosuke Ayanokouzi to prepare a paperback version of the Japanese translation of my book. Thanks to the efforts of everybody, it’s now available. Unfortunately, Lulu declined to take it in “distribution” program so it won’t be available on traditional bookstores (like Amazon, etc.). The reason is that they do not support non-latin character sets in the meta-data.

I tried to cheat a little bit by inputting the description in English (still explaining that the book was in Japanese) but they rejected it nevertheless because the English title could mislead people. So the paperback is only available on lulu.com. Fortunately, the shipping costs are reasonable if you pick the most economic offer.

Following this I invited the Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translators to complete the work (they were close will all the strings already translated, mainly missing translated screenshots and some backcover content) so that we can also release paperback versions in those languages. It’s getting close to completion for them. Hopefully we will have those available until next month.

Distro Tracker

In early February, I tweaked the configuration to send (by email) exceptions generated by incoming mails and by routine task. Before this they were logged but I did not take the time to look into them. This quickly brought a few issues into light and I fixed them as they appeared: for instance the bounce handling code was getting confused when the character case was not respected, and it appears that some emails come back to us after having been lowercased. Also the code was broken when the “References” field used more than one line on incoming control emails.

This brought into light a whole class of problems with the database storing twice the same email with only differing case. So I did further work to merge all those duplicate entries behind a single email entry.

Later, the experimental Sources files changed and I had to tweak the code to work with the removal of the Files field (relying instead on Checksums-* to find out the various files part of the entry).

At some point, I also fixed the login form to not generate an exception when the user submits an empty form.

I also decided that I no longer wanted to support Django 1.7 in distro tracker as Django 1.8 is the current LTS version. I asked the Debian system administrators to update the package on tracker.debian.org with the version in jessie-backports. This allowed me to fix a few deprecation warnings that I kept triggering because I wanted the code to work with Django 1.7.

One of those warnings was generated by django-jsonfield though and I could not fix it immediately. Instead I prepared a pull request that I submitted to the upstream author.

Oh, and a last thing, I tweaked the CSS to densify the layout on the package page. This was one of the most requested changes from the people who were still preferring packages.qa.debian.org over tracker.debian.org.

Kali and new pkg-security team

As part of my Kali work, I have been fixing RC bugs in Debian packages that we use in Kali. But in many cases, I stumbled upon packages whose maintainers were really missing in action (MIA). Up to now, we were only doing non-maintainers upload (NMU) but I want to be able to maintain those packages more effectively so we created a new pkg-security team (we’re only two right now and we have no documentation yet, but if you want to join, you’re welcome, in particular if you maintain a package which is useful in the security field).

arm64 work. The first 3 packages that we took over (ssldump, sucrack, xprobe) are actually packages that were missing arm64 builds. We just started our arm64 port on Kali and we fixed them for that architecture. Since they were no longer properly maintained, in most cases it was just a matter of using dh_autoreconf to get up-to-date config.{sub,guess} files.

We still miss a few packages on arm64: vboot-utils (that we will likely take over soon since it’s offered for adoption), ruby-libv8 and ruby-therubyracer, ntopng (we have to wait a new luajit which is only in experimental right now). We also noticed that dh-make-golang was not available on arm64, after some discussion on #debian-buildd, I filed two bugs for this: #819472 on dh-make-golang and #819473 on dh-golang.

RC bug fixing. hdparm was affected by multiple RC bugs and the release managers were trying to get rid of it from testing. This removed multiple packages that were used by Kali and its users. So I investigated the situation of that package, convinced the current maintainers to orphan it, asked for new maintainers on debian-devel, reviewed multiple updates prepared by the new volunteers and sponsored their work. Now hdparm is again RC-bug free and has the latest upstream version. We also updated jsonpickle to 0.9.3-1 to fix RC bug #812114 (that I forwarded upstream first).

Systemd presets support in init-system-helpers. I tried to find someone (to hire) to implement the system preset feature I requested in #772555 but I failed. Still Andreas Henriksson was kind enough to give it a try and sent a first patch. I tried it and found some issues so I continued to improve it and simplify it… I submitted an updated patch and pinged Martin Pitt. He pointed me to the DEP-8 test failures that my patch was creating. I quickly fixed those afterwards. This patch is in use in Kali and lets us disable network services by default. I would like to see it merged in Debian so that everybody can setup systemd preset file and have their desire respected at installation time.

Misc bug reports. I filed #813801 to request a new upstream release of kismet. Same for masscan in #816644 and for wkhtmltopdf in #816714. We packaged (before Debian) a new upstream release of ruby-msgpack and found out that it was not building on armel/armhf so we filed two upstream tickets (with a suggested fix). In #814805, we asked the pyscard maintainer to reinstate python-pyscard that was dropped (keeping only the Python3 version) as we use the Python 2 version in Kali.

And there’s more: I filed #816553 (segfault) and #816554 against cdebootstrap. I asked for dh-python to have a better behaviour after having being bitten by the fact that “dh –with python3” was not doing what I expected it to do (see #818175). And I reported #818907 against live-build since it is failing to handle a package whose name contains an upper case character (it’s not policy compliant but dpkg supports them).

Misc packaging

I uploaded Django 1.9.2 to unstable and 1.8.9 to jessie-backports. I provided the supplementary information that Julien Cristau asked me in #807654 but despite this, this jessie update has been ignored for the second point release in a row. It is now outdated until I update it to include the security fixes that have been released in the mean time but I’m not yet sure that I will do it… the lack of cooperation of the release team for that kind of request is discouraging.

I sponsored multiple uploads of dolibarr (on security update notably) and tcpdf (to fix one RC bug).

Thanks

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