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My Free Software Activities in March 2015

April 1, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 15.25 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 37 commits to the security tracker and contacted 20 maintainers about security issues affecting their packages.
  • I started a small helper script based on the new JSON output of the security tracker (see #761859 for details). It’s not ready yet but will make it easier to detect issues where the LTS team lags behind the security team, and other divergences like this and will speed up future CVE triage work (once done).
  • I sent DLA-174-1 (tcpdump update fixing 3 CVE) after having received a debdiff from the Romain Françoise.
  • I prepared DLA-175-1 on gnupg, fixing 3 CVE.
  • I prepared DLA-180-1 on gnutls26, fixing 3 CVE.

That’s it for the paid work. But still about LTS, I proposed two events for Debconf 15:

  • Inner workings of an unusual team in Debian: the Long Term Support team: a generic presentation of the team and the project;
  • Preparing for Wheezy LTS: a work session between the security team and the LTS team.

A Debian LTS logoIn my last Freexian LTS report, I mentioned briefly that it would be nice to have a logo for the LTS project. Shortly after I got a first logo prepared by Damien Escoffier and a few more followed: they are available on a wiki page (and the logo you see above is from him!). Following a suggestion of Paul Wise, I registered the logo request on another wiki page dedicated to artwork requests. That kind of collaboration is awesome! Thanks to all the artists involved in Debian.

Debian packaging

Django. This month has seen no less than 3 upstream point releases packaged for Debian (1.7.5, 1.7.6 and 1.7.7) and they have been accepted by the release team into Jessie. I’m pleased with this tolerance as I have argued the case for it multiple times in the past given the sane upstream release policy (bugfix only in a given released branch).

Python code analysis. I discovered a few months ago a tool combining the power of multiple Python code analysis tools: it’s prospector. I just filed a “Request for Package” for it (see #781165) and someone already volunteered to package it, yay \o/

update-rc.d and systemd. While working on a Kali version based on Jessie, I got hit by what boils down to a poor interaction between systemd and update-rc.d (see #746580) and after some exchanges with other affected users I raised the severity to serious as we really ought to do something about it before release. I also opened #781155 on openbsd-inetd as its usage of inetd.service instead of openbsd-inetd.service (which is only provided as a symlink to the former) leads to multiple small issues.

Misc

Debian France. The general assembly is over and the new board elected its new president: it’s now official, I’m no longer Debian France’s president. Good luck to Nicolas Dandrimont who took on this responsibility.

Salt’s openssh formula. I improved salt’s openssh formula to make it possible to manage the /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts file referencing the public SSH keys of other managed minions.

Tendenci.com. I was looking for a free software solution to handle membership management of a large NPO and I discovered Tendenci. It looked very interesting feature wise and written with a language/framework that I enjoy (Python/Django). But while it’s free software, there’s no community at all. The company that wrote it released it under a free software license and it really looks like that they did intend to build a community but they failed at it. When I looked their “development forums” were web-based and mostly empty with only initial discussion of the current developers and no reply from anybody… there’s also no mention of an IRC channel or a mailing list. I sent them a mail to see what kind of collaboration we could expect if we opted for their software and got no reply. A pity, really.

What free software membership management solution would you use when you have more than 10000 members to handle and when you want to use the underlying database to offer SSO authentication to multiple external services?

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in February 2015

March 6, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 14.5 hours on Debian LTS. I worked mostly on CVE triage (41 commits in the security tracker) and organizational issues. One maintainer complained that he had not been kept in the loop for an LTS update of his package. After some discussion, I decided to change the way I did CVE triage so that any time that I add a package to our list of packages needing an update, I also send a mail to the maintainer, thus offering him the opportunity to step in.

To make this sustainable, I wrote a small helper script that will generate a mail out of a template. And to kickstart the process I mailed all maintainers of packages that were already listed in our queue of packages to update.

To improve the email generated, I requested a JSON export of the security tracker data (see discussions in #761859). In the mean time, Holger worked on this already and after a few iterations we did converge on an output format that will be really useful both for my needs in terms of CVE triage but also for the Package Tracker to be able to display the list of security vulnerabilities affecting each release (see #761730).

Last but not least, I don’t want to be the only one doing CVE triage for our LTS release so I documented the process in our wiki page.

As a side note, I sponsored an e2fsprogs update prepared by Nguyen Cong and I sent the DLA for the embargoed samba update that had been prepared by Ivo de Decker (thanks to both of them!).

Tryton

Like last month, I invested again a copious amount of time on Tryton, fixing some bugs that were affecting me and improving the French chart of accounts to properly manage purchases and sales within the European Union. Here are some links for more details:

  • #4523: Change account 58 into a real non-view account
  • Preserve the user-supplied date on account moves when it’s valid
  • #4532: Rename some tax codes hosting base amounts to avoid having two codes with the same name
  • #4568: Fix the credit note base tax code and tax code for the sales in France (took quite some discussion to double check this with an accountant)
  • #4569: Track the amount invoiced in sales outside Europe
  • #4570: Properly handle EU-sales and EU-purchases in the VAT report (this was by far the most complicated issue I dealt with, it took several days and multiple tries to get it right).

Debian

I did some work on Distro Tracker, I fixed #777453 (password reset not working because the generated email was using an invalid From email) and #779247 (obsolete build reproducibility action items were not dropped). I also started to work on restructuring the mail handling in distro-tracker (cf #754913) but it’s not public yet.

While I have no plans to stop contributing to Debian (it’s part of my day job!), I reduced my non-work related involvement by officially recognizing that I was no longer properly assuming some of my responsibilities and that I was following too many mailing lists and RSS feeds. The most notable changes are that I removed myself from the maintenance of dpkg, developers-reference, quilt, sql-ledger, and a few perl/python modules.

Misc

Voting software. Part of the reason why I’m reducing my involvement in Debian is that I got more involved in Nouvelle Donne (a French political party) and in particular in the handling of its digital infrastructure (currently running on Ubuntu, doh!). As part of this, I was looking for free software to handle secure votes and elections (and if possible adhering to the principles of liquid democracy). There’s no perfect solution and no clear winner.

That said I started following the evolution of AgoraVoting because it seems to have a good momentum and has some interesting features (it already supports votes with ranked choices, supports good crypto, has been used for elections involving large numbers of voters in the context of Podemos in Spain). But it still has some ways to go to establish itself as a truly international and community-backed project.

GDM bug. Due to my work on Kali, I filed a bug against GDM (this one has been quickly fixed upstream, it’s still open in Debian) and another one against accountsservice to request the possibility to define the default graphical session.

Dirvish formula for Salt. I contributed another formula to manage backups with dirvish.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities for January 2015

January 30, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 12 hours on Debian LTS. I did the following tasks:

  • CVE triage. I pushed 24 commits to the securitry tracker. I spent more time on this task than usually (see details below).
  • I released DLA-143-1 on python-django (fixing 3 CVE). While I expected the update to be quick, my testing revealed that even though the patches applied mostly fine, they did not work as expected. I ended up spending almost 4 hours to properly backport the fixes and the corresponding tests (to ensure that the fixes are working properly).

I want to expand on two cases that I stumbled upon in my CVE triage work and that took quite long to investigate each. While my after-the-fact description is rather straightforward, the real process involved more iterations and data gathering that I do not mention here.

First I was investigating CVE-2012-6685 on libnokogiri-ruby and the upstream bug discussion revealed that libxml2 could also be part of the problem. Using the tests cases submitted there, I confirmed that libxml2 was also affected by an issue of its own… then I started to analyze the history of CVE of libxml2 to find out whether that issue got a CVE assigned: yes, that was CVE-2014-0191 (although the CVE description is unrelated). But this CVE was marked as fixed in all releases. Why? It turns out that the upstream fix for this CVE is just the complement of another commit that was merged way earlier (and that was used as a basis for the commit as the copy/paste of the comment shows). When the security teams integrated the upstream patch in wheezy/squeeze, they were probably not aware that a full fix required to also include something else. In the end, I thus reopened CVE-2014-0191 on our tracker (commit here).

The second problematic case was pound. Thijs Kinkhorst added pound related data on the multiple (high profile) SSL related issues. So it appeared on my radar of new vulnerable package in Squeeze because it was marked that CVE-2009-3555 was fixed in version 2.6-2 while Squeeze has 2.5-1. There was no bug reference in the security tracker and the Debian changelog for that version only mentioned an “anti_beast patch” which is yet another issue (CVE-2011-3389). I had to dig a bit deeper… in the end I discovered that the above patch also has provisions for the CVE that was of interest to me, except that Brian May recently reported in #765649 that the package was still vulnerable to this issue… I tried to understand where the above patch was failing and thus submitted my findings to the bug. And I updated the tracker data with my newly gained knowledge (commit 31751 and 31752).

Tryton

For me, January is always the month where I try to close the accounting books of Freexian. This year is no exception except that it’s the first year where I do this with Tryton. I first upgraded to Tryton 3.4 to have the latest version.

Despite this I discovered multiple problems while doing so… since I don’t want to have those problems next year, I reported them and prepared fixes for those related to the French chart of accounts:

  • #4464: CSV export on tree views is unusable
  • #4466: add missing deferral properties on accounts
  • #4468: drop abusive reconcile properties on some accounts
  • #4469: convert account 6354 into a real non-view account
  • #4479: balance non-deferral accounts is broken with non-view parent accounts

Saltstack

I mentioned this idea last month… setting up and maintaining a lot of sbuild chroots can be tiresome so I wanted to automate this as much as possible. To achieve this I created three Salt formulas and got them added to the official Saltstack repository:

  • debootstrap-formula
  • schroot-formula
  • sbuild-formula

Each one builds on top of the former. debootstrap-formula creates chroots with debootstrap or cdebootstrap. schroot-formula does the same and registers those chroots in schroot. And sbuild-formula does the same as schroot-formula but with different defaults that are more suited to sbuild chroots (and obviously ensures that sbuild is installed and that generated chroots are buildd chroots).

With the sbuild formula I can put this in pillar data:

sbuild:
  chroots:
    wheezy:
      architectures: [amd64, i386]
      extra_dists:
        - wheezy-backports
        - wheezy-security
      extra_aliases:
        - wheezy-backports
        - stable-security
        - wheezy-security
    jessie:
    [...]

And then a simple salt-call state.highstate (I’m running in standalone mode) will ensure that I have all the chroots properly setup.

Misc packaging

I packaged new upstream releases of Django in experimental and opened a pre-approval request to get the latest 1.7.x in jessie (#775892). It seems to be a difficult sell for the release team, which is a pity because we have active Debian developers, active upstream developers, and everybody is well aware of the no-new features rule to avoid regressions. Where is the risk?

I also filed an unblock request for Dolibarr (on the request of the security team which wants to see the CVE fix reach Jessie). I did small contributions to two bugs that were of special interest to some of my donators (#751339 and #774811), they were not under my responsibility but I tried to get them moving by pinging the relevant people.

I prepared a security upload for Django in Wheezy (python-django_1.4.5-1+deb7u9) and sent it to the security team. While doing this I discovered a small problem in their backported patch that I reported upstream in Django’s ticket #24239.

Debian France

With the new year, it’s again time to organize a general assembly with the election of a third of its board. So we solicited candidacies among the members and I’m pleased to see that we got 6 candidacies for the 3 seats. It’s a good sign that we still have enough persons caring about the association. One of them is even speaking of Debconf 17 in France… great plans!

On my side, I announced that I would not candidate to be president for the next year. I will stay on the board though to ensure we have a smooth transition.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities for December 2014

January 5, 2015 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 20 hours on Debian LTS. I did the following tasks:

  • CVE triage: I pushed 47 commits to the security tracker this month. Due to this, I submitted two wishlist bugs against the security tracker: #772927 and #772961.
  • I released DLA-106-1 which had been prepared by Osamu Aoki.
  • I released DLA-111-1 fixing one CVE on cpio.
  • I released DLA-113-1 and DLA-114-1 on bsd-mailx/heirloom-mailx fixing one CVE for the former and two CVE for the latter.
  • I released DLA-120-1 on xorg-server. This update alone took more than 6h to backport all the patches, fixing a massive set of 12 CVE.

Not in the paid hours, but still related to Debian LTS, I kindly asked Linux Weekly News to cover Debian LTS in their security page and this is now live. You will see DLA on the usual security page and there’s also a dedicated page tracking this: http://lwn.net/Alerts/Debian-LTS/

I modified the LTS wiki page to have a dedicated Funding sub-page. This avoids having a direct link to Freexian’s offer on the main LTS page (which surprised a few persons) and allows to give some more background information and makes it possible for other persons/companies to also get listed in the same way (since there’s no exclusive relationship between Debian and Freexian here!).

And I also answered some questions of Nguyen Cong (a new LTS contributor, employed by Toshiba with explicit permission to contribute to LTS during work hours! \o/), on IRC, on ask.debian.net (again) and on the mailing list! It’s great to see the LTS project expanding beyond current members of the Debian project.

Distro Tracker

I want to give again some more priority to Distro Tracker at least to complete the transition from the old PTS to this new service… last month has been a bit better than November but not by much.

I reviewed a patch in #771604 (about displaying long descriptions), I merged another patch in #757443 (fixing bad markup which rendered the page unusable with Konqueror), I fixed #760382 where package gone through NEW would never lose their version in NEW.

Kali related contributions

I’m not covering my Kali work here but only some things which got contributed upstream (or to Debian).

First I ensured that we could build the Kali ISO with live-build 4.x in jessie. This resulted in multiple patches merged to the Debian live project (1 2 3 4). I also submitted a patch for a regression in the handling of conditionals in package lists, it got dropped and has been fixed differently instead. I also filed #772651 to report a problem in how live-build decided of the variant of the live-config package to install.

Kali has forked the sysvinit package to be able to disable the services by default and I was investigating how to port this feature in the new systemd world. It turns out systemd has such a feature natively: it’s called Preset files. Unfortunately it’s not usable in Debian because Debian does not call systemctl preset during package installation. I filed bug #772555 to get this fixed (in Stretch, it’s too late for Jessie :-().

Saltstack

I’m using salt to automate some administration task in Kali, at home and at work. I discovered recently that the project tries to collect “Salt Formulas”: those are ready to use instructions for as many services as possibles.

I started using this for some simple services and quickly felt the need to extend “salt-formula”, the set of states used to configure salt with salt. I submitted 5 pull requests (#73 and #74 to configure salt in standalone mode, #75 to enable the upstream package repositories, #76 to automatically download and enable the desired salt formulas, #77 for some bugfixes) and they have all been merged in less than 24 hours (that’s the kind of thing that motivates you to contribute again in the future!).

I also submitted a bug fix for samba-formula and a bug report in salt itself (#19180).

BTW I have some salt states to setup schroot and sbuild. I will try to package those as proper salt formulas in the future…

Misc stuff

Mailing list governance. In Debian, we often complain about meta-discussion on mailing lists (i.e. discussions about how we discuss together) and at the same time we need to have that kind of discussions from time to time. So I suggested to host those discussions in a new mailing list and to get this new list setup, our rules require to have other people interested in having this list. The idea had some support when we discussed it on debian-private, so I relaunched it on debian-project while filing the official request in the BTS: #772645. Unfortunately, I only got one second. So if you’re interested in pursuing this idea, speak up now…

Sponsorship. I sponsored another Galette plugin this month: galette-plugin-fullcard. Thanks to François-Régis Vuillemin for his work.

Publican. Following one of my bug report against Publican and with the help of the upstream author, we identified the problem and I submitted a patch.

Thanks

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

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