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

A lot of things happened in the last two months. First of all there was a Google summer of code project adding new synoptic views for Debian teams (example here). I reviewed and merged many merge requests (31, 40, 42, 43). While investigating how to improve the performances, I discovered an annoying limitation the database-backed Django cache backend which I reported to the upstream developers (Django ticket #29584).

With the many incremental changes made over the last months, the documentation was really lacking. I used this opportunity to entirely restructure it with one big section for each kind of readers: simple users, administrators, developers/contributors. Have a look at it. When I did this, I merged the part of the documentation which was in the developers-reference and left there only a pointer to the new documentation.

I then made an announce to debian-devel-announce to let people know of the new features (and of the corresponding documentation).

I went away two weeks in vacation (around DebConf) and used this free time to start a big refactoring that I had planned for a long time (see Task redesign). I submitted the result in a merge request to get some feedback and put this into production when I came back home. I had to deal with a few regressions but I’m pleased with the result since it already helped me to fix a few longstanding issues (run tasks more often, better handling of standards-version see #895393 and #904694, catch up with extraction of some files that failed to be extracted and were never retried, etc.).

Finally, I did some bug triage and fixed a couple of issues along the way:

• Fix the WNPP task to know about “RFS” tags
• Fixed issue with custom auth backend
• Dropped files that were incorrectly extracted twice (#784164)
• Fix the management of keywords in subscription page (#906963), add functional tests for this
• Fix regression in autopkgtest action item due to “neutral” status (#907062)
• Improve distro-tracker vcswatch output (#906663)
• I forbid users to login with their old Alioth SSL certificate, as the associated emails are no longer working.

And I also filed some tickets for things to improve in the future:

• Improve the extract_source_files plugin by recording the absence of files and by making checkpoints of the progress
• Replace ActionItem model with PackageData
• Make UserEmail entirely separate from data imported from package repositories.

pkg-security

I sponsored many uploads (patator, wifite, hashcat, masscan, brutespray, curvedns, ledger-wallets-udev, ccrypt) and made many uploads by myself as we have to upload all our packages to fix the Maintainer field. I asked other team members to join and step in.

I noticed the IRC notifications were broken and I helped Alexander Wirt to fix them for all projects hosted on salsa. I also submitted a pull request to invite the BTS bot on our channel (to announce uploads and bugs).

After having investigated the RC bug file against acccheck, I requested its removal in #904200. And I also requested a bin-nmu for wcc due to changes in binutils (#904073).

Last but not least, I advocated Philippe Thierry (a team member) for his process to become a Debian developer!

Misc Debian work

Sponsorship. I sponsored asciidoc for Joseph Herlant and asked him to apply to the Debian Developer status. He did so a bit later and I advocated him. Yay for saving time for the future!

Pyside2 packaging. After lots of work, at Freexian, we were able to finish the pyside2 package and upload it to the archive. Along the way we filed a few issues to upstream: #740 (segfault in shiboken), #741 (python3.7 compatibility issue), #758 (small license problem), #759 (better compat with usual setup.py parameters), #764 (armel/armhf build failure), #765 (ppc* build failure).

Misc bug reports. I filed #907246 on git-buildpackage: gbp import-dsc should warn users when changes will be lost. And I also filed #903483 on dropbear with a patch to set a PATH for root that includes /usr/sbin and /sbin.

Other stuff. I submitted a pull request on pysimplesoap. I uploaded easy-rsa 3.0.4-2 adding the missing make-cadir command and adding autopkgtest (problem discovered while working on my book).

Thanks

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