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
While I continue to manage the administrative side of Debian LTS, I’m taking a break of the technical work (i.e. preparing and releasing security updates). The hope is that it will help me focus more on my book which (still) needs to be updated for stretch. In truth, this did not happen in January but I hope to do better in the upcoming months.
Salsa and related
The switch to salsa.debian.org is a major event in our community. Last month I started with the QA team and the distro-tracker repository as an experiment. This month I took this opportunity to bring to fruition a merge between the pkg-security team and the forensics team that I already proposed in the past and that we postponed because it was deemed busy work for no gains. Now that both teams had to migrate anyway, it was easier to migrate everything at once under a single project.
All our repositories are now managed under the same team in salsa: https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-security-team/ But for the mailing list we are still waiting for the new list to be created on lists.debian.org (#888136).
As part of this work, I contributed some fixes to the scripts maintained by Mehdi Dogguy. I also filed a wishlist request for a new script to make it easy to share repositories with the Debian group.
With the expected demise of alioth mailing lists, there’s some interest in getting the Debian package tracker to host the official maintainer email. As the central hub for most emails related to packages, it seems natural indeed. We made some progress lately on making it possible to use @packages.debian.org emails (with the downside of receiving duplicate emails currently) but that’s not an really an option when you maintain many packages and want to see them grouped under the same maintainer email. Furthermore it doesn’t allow for automatic association of a package to its maintainer team. So I implemented a team+slug@tracker.debian.org email that works for each team registered on the package tracker and that will automatically associate the package to its team. The email is just a black hole for now (not really a problem as most automatic emails are already received through another email) but I expect to forward non-automatic mails to team members to make it useful as a way to discuss between team members.
The package tracker also learned to recognize commit mails generated by GitLab and it will now forward them to the source package whose name is matching the name of the GitLab project that generated them (see #886114).
Misc Debian stuff
Distro Tracker. I got my two first merge requests which I reviewed and merged. One adds native HTML support to toggle action items (i.e. without javascript on recent browsers) and the other improves some of the messages shown by the vcswatch integration. In #886450, we discussed how to better filter build failure mails sent by the build daemons. New headers have been added.
Bug reports and patches. I forwarded and/or got moving a couple of bugs that we encountered in Kali (glibc: new data brought to #820826, raspi3-firmware: #887062, glibc: tracking down #886506 to a glibc regression affecting busybox, gr-fcdproplus: #888853 new watch file, gjs: upstream bug #33). I also needed a new feature in live-build so I filed #888507 which I implemented almost immediately (but released only in Kali because it’s not documented yet and can possibly be improved a bit further).
While doing my yearly accounting, I opened an issue on tryton and pushed a fix after approval. While running unit tests on distro-tracker, I got an unexpected warning that seems to be caused by virtualenv (see upstream issue #1120).
Debian Packaging. I uploaded zim 0.68~rc1-1 to experimental.
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
