Search Results: "santiago"

16 October 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for September.

Activity summary During the month of September, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 41 DLAs fixing 1854 CVEs. In September, the Debian LTS Team was back to focusing on a single release: Debian 12 ( bookworm ). Debian 11 ( bullseye ) reached the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026, and Freexian now provides its security maintenance under the Extended LTS offer. It is important to highlight the hard work done behind the scenes of the Front Desk fellows, whose role was fulfilled during September by Emilio, Emmanuel, Sylvain, Thorsten and Utkarsh. Besides the very high activity doing daily triage on dozens of packages and CVEs, Front Desk fellows spent much of their time answering questions and coordinating with people outside the Freexian team about update proposals. The team published several notable updates:
  • jbig2dec (DLA-4779-1), prepared by Andreas Henriksson, fixes CVE-2026-38076, where missing input checks could lead to a denial of service. It is to note that this library is used by different tools, such as ghostscript.
  • linux-6.12 (DLA-4788-1), uploaded by Ben Hutchings, fixing 414 CVEs in the bookworm backport of Linux kernel version 6.12.
  • lxml (DLA-4799-1), prepared by Guilhem Moulin, fixes four vulnerabilities in this widely used python XML/HTML library. The issues may yield to exposing local files.
  • nginx (DLA-4784-1), issued by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara ( charles ), fixing three memory-safety bugs in this popular web server and reverse proxy, which may result in denial of service, memory disclosure or potentially the execution of arbitrary code.
  • openssl (DLA-4795-1), by Arnaud Rebillout, fixing six vulnerabilities, including an out-of-bounds heap write in CMS decryption and an authentication tag verification bypass in ChaCha20-Poly1305/AES-OCB decryption. This update brings bookworm to OpenSSL 3.0.22, the last upstream release of the 3.0 series, which was reached its upstream EOL on 7 Sep 2026. Further fixes will be backported by the Debian LTS Team from more recent releases.
  • redis DLA-4794-1, by Chris Lamb, fixing vulnerabilities that could yield to arbitrary code execution
Contributions from other Debian fellows beyond the Freexian LTS Team:
  • Thomas Goirand, Keystone released by Emilio as DLA-4767-1
  • Thomas also prepared glance and swift updates, whose respective DLA-4800-1 and DLA-4801-1 were issued by Charles
  • Matthew Vernon uploaded a pcre2 security update, and Emilio issued its DLA-4772-1
  • Otto Kek l inen uploaded a xz-utils update, released as DLA-4783-1 by Sylvain
  • Salvatore Bonaccorso published a linux (6.1) update released as DLA-4777-1
  • Xavier Guimard prepared a lemonldap-ng, released as DLA-4797-1. Additionally, Sylvain sent DLA-4734-1 at the beginning of the month for the upload made on August.
  • Xavier also released DLA-4766-1 for cyrus-imapd.
  • Simon Quigley uploaded DLA-4803-1 to fix multiple issues in ruby-oj.
  • Finally, Ivo Marino proposed bookworm updates for cjose, git-lfs, caddy, libgit2, libwebsockets, libssh and unbound. Some of Ivo s proposals are still pending for a review.
Thank you so much to the developers above for these valuable contributions. The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases for the following packages:
  • ruby-jwt, prepared by Abhijith and released as DSA-6547-1
  • urwid, proposed for a point-release update by Abhijith (#1148950)
  • puma, proposed for a point-release update by Abhijith (#1149582)
  • tomcat10, and tomcat9 (which is actually backported to released suites) by Bastien
  • nodejs, prepared by Bastien and released as (DSA-6517-1).
If you benefit from Debian, especially throughout its full 5-year lifecycle, please consider becoming a sponsor of Debian LTS. You can find more information here: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

14 October 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: New experimental backend for autopkgtest using pconr, DebConf site visit and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-09 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf site visit, by Stefano Rivera In preparation for DebConf 27, Stefano Rivera, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, and Jongmin Kim from the DebConf Committee visited Asahikawa Japan. A contingent of the local team gathered to tour the venues with us, discuss plans, and meet the local organizations assisting the event. We held a press conference at the city hall that got some coverage. A few potential day-trip options were explored. Photos from the site visit.

autopkgtest-virt-pconr, by Helmut Grohne Following the creation of the pconr module that provides a basis for unschroot and a more secure containment for mmdebstrap, an experimental autopkgtest backend autopkgtest-virt-pconr is now available. It fits a spot between autopkgtest-virt-unshare and more fully fledged containers as it does not require much infrastructure like setting up incus or lxc but still provides a containment running an initsystem. Due to the use of erofs as base image format, it boots and reverts quickly. This development also required fixing concurrency issues in asyncvarlink and even shed light on a matching bug in systemd that was promptly fixed upstream.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles reviewed and submitted six Catalan po-debconf translations using po-debconf-manager. Improved po-debconf-manager s workflow for updating translations.
  • Carles reviewed, translated or updated webwml Catalan translations for security and CD pages. He also fixed issues that prevented building webwml, deleted orphaned translation pages, etc. and experimented with a more global HTML tidying up experiment.
  • Carles refactored check-relations adding capacity to ignore concrete from_package -> to_package specific relations and more flexibility around ignores. Detects unused ignore rules as well.
  • Carles improved some Wiki pages (LibreOffice, Framework amongst some other ones)
  • Thorsten did an hplip upload to replace an expired certificate of HP. This certificate is used to sign new upstream releases and modules that can be downloaded later. Afterwards work on a new upstream version started.
  • Thorsten also struggles with autopkgtest problems of the new upstream version of cups. Work is still ongoing.
  • Antonio loaded the video recording URLs into the MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026 website, and deployed the website for MiniDebConf Curitiba 2027 (still very early work in progress at this point).
  • Antonio uploaded debci 4.3, autodep8 0.31, gem2deb 2.2.10, ruby-sass 3.7.4-7, init-system-helpers 1.69+nmu2 and 1.69+nmu3.
  • Antonio worked on several topics around Debian CI maintenance, reliability and performance.
  • Stefano updated the autopkgtests for cPython packages in Debian to support setuptools 80.
  • Stefano uploaded pypy 8.
  • Stefano helped to get DebConf 26 reimbursement claims processed, and worked on some of the resulting issues in debian-reimbursements.
  • Emilio managed various transitions.
  • Emilio worked on the rustc-web/trixie bootstrap for armel, using the rustc 1.95 version from trixie-backports. This will be needed by the upcoming clamav security updates.
  • Helmut sent patches for 11 cross build failures.
  • Helmut introduced a new build profile to libcap-ng to keep architecture cross bootstrap working.
  • Helmut uploaded debvm_0.5.5 introducing support for Hurd thanks to a lot of work by Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues.
  • Colin worked with OpenSSH upstream to reduce the linkage of /usr/sbin/sshd, hardening it a little further.
  • Colin upgraded to new security releases of groff and parted.
  • Colin upgraded 50 Python packages to new upstream versions, and fixed over 40 RC bugs in the Python team.
  • Santiago continued mentoring Aryan Karamtoth with the GSoC project about introducing livepatching support for linux. This mentoring is done in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias. In particular, Santiago explored different requirements for providing binary modules for the same kernel packages used by Debian, that require a matching version number.
  • Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the files for point release announcement for Debian 13.7.

20 September 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2026 (by Thorsten Alteholz)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for August.

Activity summary During the month of August, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 58 DLAs fixing 1885 CVEs. Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which has reached the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026, will now get security support from Freexian under the Extended LTS offer. The team published several notable updates:
  • chromium (DLA 4710-1), uploaded by Emilio, to fix 375 security flaws in bookworm, including issues that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Further DLA 4728-1, uploaded by Emilio as well, fixed additional 41 security issues in bookworm and DLA 4739-1 fixed 5 issues. Last but not least, DLA 4749-1 fixed another 15 issues and DLA 4758-1 fixed another 7 issues.
  • ruby2.7 (DLA 4716-1), uploaded by Abhijith, to fix four security flaws in bookworm, including issues that could lead to arbitrary code execution.
  • several DLAs (DLA 4717-1, DLA 4720-1, DLA 4723-1, DLA 4724-1, DLA 4745-1) have been uploaded by Ben and Emilio to fix myriad security flaws in different versions of the linux kernel (5.10.262-1, 6.1.180-1, 6.12.100-1~deb12u1, 6.12.101-1~deb12u1) in bullseye and bookworm.
  • 7zip (DLA 4718-1) and p7zip (DLA 4719-1), uploaded by Sylvain, to fix multiple security flaws in bookworm and bullseye, including issues that could yield to remote code execution.
  • ca-certificates (DLA 4726-1), uploaded by Bastien to add some new trusted certificates to bookworm and bullseye, but also remove some untrusted ones.
  • thunderbird (DLA 4727-1 and DLA 4754-1), uploaded by Emilio to fix 35 and 31 issues in bookworm and bullseye.
  • nss (DLA 4729-1), uploaded by Jochen to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution.
  • libgd2 (DLA 4731-1), uploaded by Guilhem to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution if a malformed GIF file is processed.
  • xorg-server (DLA 4737-1 and DLA 4738-1), uploaded by Arnaud to fix several vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye.
  • postgresql-15 (DLA 4740-1), uploaded by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara to fix 26 vulnerabilities in bookworm.
  • unzip (DLA 4741-1), uploaded by Andrej to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution.
  • firefox-esr (DLA 4750-1), uploaded by Emilio to fix 31 vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye that could potentially result in arbitrary code execution, privilege escalation or information disclosure.
  • nvidia-graphics-drivers (DLA 4752-1 and DLA 4753-1), uploaded by Tobias to fix lots of vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye.
  • roundcube (DLA 4760-1), uploaded by Guilhem to fix ten vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye that could potentially result in remote code execution or information disclosure.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team: We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:
  • Salvatore Bonaccorso released a libyaml-syck-perl security update (DLA 4730-1), to fix a denial of service and potentially arbitrary code execution.
  • Thomas Goirand released a neutron security update (DLA 4735-1).
  • Thomas Goirand released an ironic security update (DLA 4743-1).
  • Thomas Goirand released a designate security update (DLA 4751-1), to fix a denial of service or DNS hijacking.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • xrdp (DSA 6469-1), prepared by Abhijith to address privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution related flaws.
Other contributions: Besides the work on security updates, different documentation and tooling changes were needed. This work was mainly done by Sylvain.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 September 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Security-tracker git performance, OpenSSH GSS-API split, Incus replacing lxc in Debian CI and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-08 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Replacing lxc with Incus for Debian CI, by Antonio Terceiro At the beginning of this month, the default backend for tests was changed to incus-lxc, leaving only a few dozen packages explicitly configured to run as lxc. Those packages got bug reports filed and once those bugs are fixed they will be migrated over to incus-lxc. This marks an important milestone for Debian CI, as the low level of isolation between the worker host OS and the OS under test when using lxc was a significant source of instability in our platform. Common causes for test failures when comparing runs under plain lxc with runs with incus-lxc are documented in the wiki page linked from the bug reports.

security-tracker git performance, by Helmut Grohne Developers working with Debian s security-tracker have reported degrading performance for a while. The options for solving this are few with repository sizes now reaching 30GB for a repository whose working tree is a mere 60MB. While there have been a number of proposals for changing the storage layout, Helmut evaluated options not requiring such changes. Much of the problem hinges on the 50MB data/CVE/list file that is updated in most commits. Efficiency hinges on representing its content in git packs. Practically, git frequently fails to represent its content as a delta and stores a full copy that is typically compressed to 12MB. Add a few thousand 12MB full blobs and you quickly have a large repository. In particular, the copy at salsa.debian.org stores many such full blobs, so pulling from it consumes significant bandwidth. One might think that running git gc helps, but its utility is limited here. When git stores objects in packs, it stores the history in reverse. It starts with the current version and represents older objects as differences (deltas) to more recent objects. A delta effectively is a sequence of copying ranges from a base object and insertion of new content. Given that humans tend to add content over time, those additions are often represented as deletions. The crux here is finding that base object. Given that the data/CVE/list file is large, finding it involves comparing quite a few versions of it with each other. This requires both a significant amount of RAM and CPU time. How many objects git considers for this comparison is controlled with the --window option. It is beneficial if the base object does not come from a direct child commit but skips over commits. In doing so, long chains of deltas are avoided. The --depth option controls the maximum chain length. In this search, git combines all objects into a single window to facilitate file renames. As such, it tends to compare data/CVE/list with data/DSA/list, data/DLA/list and others. This is less than helpful and tends to evict all data/CVE/list versions from the comparison window such that a new full blob of it becomes required. Since the security-tracker repository rarely renames files, we can ask git to instead consider one window per filename via --path-walk. Once doing so, it becomes quite a bit better at finding suitable deltas. The technique is less applicable to older history (2025 and earlier), but given a lot of RAM and a bit of partitioning, git gc can shrink that as well. Combining these techniques, we can shrink the repository into 700MB and keep new growth somewhat under control. Temporarily, Helmut is providing a proof-of-concept mirror at git://git.subdivi.de/~helmut/security-tracker.git using these techniques. Avoid pulling from it directly as it does not provide a secure transport. While it does reduce the amount of data being downloaded, it does not resolve a number of related problems. After downloading, a git client will still expend considerable amounts of CPU on verifying received deltas and attempting to git blame data/CVE/list is not improved in any way. Still, there is work on integrating some of the improvements back into salsa.

OpenSSH GSS-API split, by Colin Watson In an option review Colin did in 2024, shortly after the xz-utils backdoor, he explained that having GSS-API authentication and key exchange support in the main OpenSSH packages is problematic. The key exchange patch is large and intrusive. Even linking to the necessary libraries isn t without risk: as the Ebury malware attack demonstrated way back in 2009, each extra library linked into security-critical daemons such as sshd (or nowadays into its privilege-separated helper programs) can modify the behaviour of the daemon even if you aren t doing anything that would involve calling into that library. Of course some of that risk remains, but as Damien Miller wrote, minimizing the number of libraries that end up in the address space of sshd and friends is still valuable. This split is now complete in testing. As of openssh 1:10.4p1-5, the OpenSSH client and server are built without GSS-API authentication and key exchange support. If you need those features, install openssh-client-gssapi or openssh-server-gssapi instead, as appropriate. Debian 13 (trixie) already has packages with those names that just depend on the regular openssh-client and openssh-server so that you can pre-emptively install them, as documented in the release notes. The new openssh-*-gssapi packages have relatively tight dependencies on openssh-common, in order for the testing migration system to ensure that we can t forget to keep them up to date. This will mean a bit more ongoing work on each new upstream version, but it should be manageable.

Catching up on DebConf video publication, by Stefano Rivera DebConf 25 videos suffered terribly from a bug in voctomix that stopped us from being able to publish the videos immediately after the conference. Ivo De Decker did some work on the videos earlier this year, fixing enough of the audio problems to make the videos at least intelligible. While at MiniDebConf Winterthur Stefano published all the videos from 2025 and 2026 to PeerTube and YouTube. DebConf 25 and DebConf 26 videos as well as all the videos from miniconfs that had got caught up in the backlog were published.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles used po-debconf-manager to review and submit Catalan translations for six packages.
  • Carles prepared a prototype of building webwml and running tidy (linter) in Salsa.
  • Carles created different webwml merge requests with different fixes: invalid links to different architectures, 404s to external sites, fixed templates with invalid URL to favicon.ico, making USE_SAMPLE_FILES=1 to avoid fetching external files, typos in English, etc.
  • Carles updated the LibreOffice Wiki page.
  • Emilio managed several transitions, such as glibc 2.43, perl 5.42, kdepim, nginx, gnome-desktop 51, python3.14-only, and many others.
  • Emilio updated libxfont to 2.0.9, xorg-server to 21.1.24, xwayland to 24.1.13, and fixed a FTBFS bug in terminator.
  • Antonio deployed the website for MiniDebConf Beijing 2026, and archived the Hamburg 2026 and Kanpur 2026 MiniDebConf websites.
  • Antonio released auto-apt-proxy 18, adding new features and fixing bugs; that needed a followup 18.1 release to fix an issue identified in the testing migration tests.
  • Antonio did several Salsa maintenance tasks, including his first platform security update and investigating an issue that was causing the background tasks to be severely delayed, imparting the site usability.
  • Thorsten tried to fix some bugs in hplip and cups. Unfortunately this did not result in an upload this month, but stay tuned!
  • Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts and correspond about them.
  • Helmut reviewed and merged Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues work on adding hurd support to debvm.
  • Helmut fixed a pile of minor issues in the support libraries underpinning unschroot.
  • Helmut adapted rebootstrap to archive regressions and improved its handling of non-default gcc versions.
  • Helmut fixed the rendering of decompressed logs at crossqa.debian.net.
  • Helmut sent patches for two cross build failures.
  • Colin deployed the fix for Invalid link rel= canonical on bugs.debian.org. In the process he found a few bugs in recent undeployed code and fixed them.
  • Santiago continued helping Aryan Karamtoth with the GSoC project on introducing livepatching support for linux. Several challenges have been identified in the recent couple of months, and Santiago is trying to guide Aryan to address them and design the solution. The mentoring is done in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias.
  • Lucas onboarded a co-maintainer for Valkey.
  • Lucas has started to work on a draft for the Debian Outreach project for onboarding newcomers interested in Debian packaging via a video course.
  • Stefano worked on the after-math of DebConf 26, handling the bursary expense reimbursement process and winding down the conference finances.
  • Stefano uploaded Python 3.15 RC 1 to Debian unstable.
  • Stefano did some budgeting and travel planning for the DebConf 27 site-visit in Asahikawa, Japan. The DebConf committee sends a couple of members to meet with the local team and view the venue together, in advance of the next DebConf.

24 August 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for July.

Activity summary During the month of July, 23 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 52 DLAs fixing 2159 CVEs. In July, the Debian Stable Release Managers published the last point release of Debian 12 ( bookworm ), after which the Debian LTS team took full responsibility of Debian 12. This completes the handover from the Security Team, that took place in June. This also marks the second month in a row where the Debian LTS has been focusing on two simultaneous Debian releases. Other than Debian 12, the team is maintaining Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. After that date, Freexian will continue the security support under the Extended LTS offer. The team published several notable updates:
  • jq (DLA 4662-1 and DLA 4661-1) prepared by Andreas Henriksson in collaboration with Jochen Sprickerhof, addressing multiple vulnerabilities.
  • Several updates for the different linux supported versions prepared by Ben Hutchings, in collaboration with Emilio Pozuelo Monfort. Other than the regular security advisories: DLA 4664-1, DLA 4665-1, DLA 4671-1, DLA 4688-1, and DLA 4700-1, Ben started preparing packages of 6.12 via bookworm-backports.
  • nginx (DLA 4667-1), updated for bookworm by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara, as a follow up of the bullseye update (DLA 4660-1), that was prepared in June.
  • grub2/bullseye (DLA 4685-1), prepared by Emilio. Other than addressing several security issues, this DLA was needed for being able to update the shim boot loader.
  • samba (DLA 4692-1), uploaded by Markus Koschany, to fix several security flaws in bullseye, including issues that could yield to remote code execution.
  • imagemagick (DLA 4680-1 and DLA 4696-1), prepared by Bastien Roucari s, addressing several issues that could lead to denial of service, information disclosure or potentially arbitrary code execution in some scenarios.
  • poppler (DLA 4709-1), by Guilhem Moulin, fixing several vulnerabilities.
  • nss (DLA-4694-1), by Jochen, fixing flaws that may result in or denial of service or potentially the execution of arbitrary code.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team: The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Bastien also proposed two updates for imagemagick. The first one released as DSA 6383-1, and the second as a trixie point update proposal (#1142554).
  • python-httplib2 by Emmanuel Arias, and released by the security team as DSA 6441-1 in August.
  • hplip (DSA 6402-1), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, to address privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution related flaws.
  • libnfs trixie update (#1142351), by Thorsten
  • patool update for trixie #1141607, by Abhijith PA
Other contributions: Besides the work on security updates, different documentation and tooling changes were needed, especially in the context of the Debian 12 handover. This work was mainly done by Sylvain Beucler.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

11 August 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf 26 organization, d-i VLAN support and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 26 organization, by Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rinc n, Stefano Rivera and Antonio Terceiro The 27th Annual Debian Conference was held in Santa Fe, Argentina, and several Freexian fellows were quite busy by being involved in the organization team.
  • Santiago continued helping with duties related to the local team, e.g. preparing or proof-reading some announcements, reviewing the proposed food and the menus for the different diet required.
  • During the conference, Kanashiro and Santiago also carried over tasks related to the content of the conference, including updating the schedule as it became necessary during the event.
  • Stefano worked within the core video team, setting up equipment in talk rooms and coordinating the live video streaming. Stefano also supported the front desk and local organisers as a website developer and conference book-keeper.
  • Antonio kept working on website maintenance, specially in support of the content team. During DebConf he also ran a hands-on workshop to help interested contributors get started with developing the DebConf websites.

d-i VLAN support, by Colin Watson In environments that use IEEE 802.1Q VLANs, some hosts (such as routers attached to trunk ports) may need to apply VLAN tags themselves rather than relying on switches to do so. There has been a long-running request to add support for these to the Debian installer with a proposed patch set put together by several people over the years, and a Freexian customer asked us to help get this over the line. Colin reviewed the latest version of the patch set, applied a number of corrections, added Netplan support, spent some time testing a variety of possible paths through the installer, and landed this. There s also now documentation for this in the next version of the installation guide.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles wrote documentation for installing Mailman3 and migrating from Mailman2. Added it into Mailman3 upstream documentation.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 2 packages, submitted 2 packages
  • Carles organized Catalan translation update. Created a Debian Wiki page to have an overview of the work / coordination during next months. Reviewed and submitted some pages.
  • Carles improved the documentation for building the debian.org Web in MR 1154 and MR 1557. Fixed debian-reference documentation. Added sections on Mutt Wiki page (handling of mailto, viewing HTML parts web browser), update and improve bash-completion Wiki page. Added a troubleshooting section in Signal Wiki.
  • Thorsten did another upload of hplip to fix RC bugs. He also spent some time taking care of older bugs. Most of the time such bugs had been fixed in a previous upload but haven t been closed in the BTS. He also uploaded a new upstream version of foomatic-db. Last but not least, he gave some user support with the package epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. There seems to be a new software available for Epson printers. Unfortunately the license is not compatible with DFSG and so this software will never make it into Debian.
  • During DebCamp 26, the Golang team had a dedicated Sprint to transition the Golang toolchain (namely on dh-golang) to make builds aware of the module defined upstream with the aim of solving important issues. To help in these efforts, Santiago made changes in the Salsa CI pipeline and documented on how to use it to check if a package requires adjustments after the toolchain update.
  • Santiago continued co-mentoring Aryan Karamtoth on the Linux livepatching project, specifically providing feedback about the implementation of dlp-tools.
  • Stefano reviewed and merged a migration of Debian reimbursements from wkhtmltopdf to weasyprint, unblocking an upgrade to Debian trixie.
  • Stefano s cPython upstream merge request adding multiarch tags to stable ABI extensions was finally merged.
  • Stefano iterated on his upstream cPython merge request to add CI coverage for Debian s multi-arch expectations.
  • Stefano uploaded Python 3.15.0 beta 4 to Debian experimental.
  • Stefano uploaded Python 3.13 to trixie, fixing a regression in a previous trixie point update he made.
  • Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts.
  • Helmut sent patches for three cross build failures.
  • Helmut proposed a MR to port piuparts to pathlib.
  • Antonio has done quite some work on Debian CI, including rebuilding the Debian CI armhf/armel worker VMs, and releasing debci 4.2, implementing a backup scheme, and several improvements to the codebase such as improving the incus-lxc backend in preparation for switching to the upcoming switch to using it by default as announced in the latest bits from the ci.debian.net operators.
  • Emilio helped with transitions, particularly with Python 3.14 as default and Perl 5.42. During the Perl transition, an issue was identified with how britney schedules autopkgtests for binNMUs, and that testing was reverted for the time being.
  • Colin restructured openssh-* binary packages to better support the upcoming GSS-API package split. This caused several autopkgtest regressions in other packages because openssh-server no longer depends on openssh-client, all of which have fixes either pending review or merged now.
  • Lucas started a discussion around the creation of a Debian packaging video course for newcomers in the context of the Outreach team.
  • Lucas reviewed some contributions to ruby3.4 and provided feedback.
  • Anupa worked with Jean-Pierre Giraud on the point release announcements for Debian 13.6 and Debian 12.15.
  • Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the Micronews for DebConf 26 press coverage.

10 August 2026

Bits from Debian: DebConf26 Local Team says goodbye

On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. The Debian Press team would now like to share this personal and beautiful message from the Santa Fe Local Team. Words from DC26 Local Team DebConf26 is over, and those of us who were part of the Local Team are trying to return to normality , if such a thing exists after organizing a DebConf. This event changed our lives and would not have been possible without the help of many great people. We would especially like to thank everyone who became part of our extended local team. Our endless thanks go to Gunnar who also instigated this whole adventure , Santiago, Nattie, Stefano, and Olasd. Thank you for supporting and guiding us, sharing your experience, and helping us find solutions throughout the entire process. It was also made possible thanks to the great work, strong support and patience of international teams: Fundraising, Bursaries, Content, Video, Treasury, Visa, Website, Accommodation, Front Desk, Cheese and Wine, Publicity as well as all the other teams and individuals who contributed. We apologize if we have forgotten to mention anyone; many people helped make this event possible. Our deepest thanks also go to everyone who joined us in working on the event, especially Fer, Jos , and Juli n, who showed great commitment and took responsibility for several important tasks. We would also like to extend our gratitude to FICH, the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, the institutions, organizations, sponsors, suppliers, and everyone who contributed in one way or another to welcoming the Debian community to Santa Fe. And finally, a very special thank you to our families, to whom we dedicated little time these past few weeks, who supported us on this adventure, enduring the exhaustion, the calls and messages at all hours, and the occasional stressful situation. Always giving us that much-needed, encouraging hug with so much love. These were very intense weeks, during which we tried to give our best so that everyone could enjoy their stay and so that the Debian community had the necessary conditions to meet, work, share knowledge, and continue creating the magic that characterizes community life and the development of Debian. As happens at every DebConf, there were difficulties, unexpected situations, and challenges that required us to improvise, learn, and perform a few juggling acts. There were also moments that will certainly remain as memorable anecdotes: the antisocial room , some gas heaters worthy of a museum, and newly unlocked powers for negotiating with suppliers. We have no evidence, but also no doubt, that for many people the Conference Dinner was one of the best moments of the event. A few ingredients we had hoped would happen naturally were missing, such as more wine nights and at least one in-person football match. During the two weeks of DebConf, we experienced every kind of weather and a wide range of emotions. Above all, however, we saw people enjoying themselves and building friendships, which fills us with pride. Thank you very much to everyone who came and helped DebConf26 leave such a beautiful mark on our hearts. We hope our paths cross again somewhere in life. Best regards, Leonardo, Emmanuel, Mariano, Pablo, and Mart n DebConf26 Local Team About Debian The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential Open Source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system. About DebConf DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Korea, France. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/. Contact Information For further information, please visit the DebConf26 web page at https://debconf26.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

22 July 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2026 (by Thorsten Alteholz)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for June.

Activity summary During the month of June, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 48 DLAs fixing 231 CVEs. Debian 12 ( bookworm ) has been handed over to the LTS Team on June 11th. During this handover Sylvain helped to update relevant tools and documentation. If you benefit from Debian, especially during the full 5-year lifecycle, please consider subscribing as a sponsor of Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/. Moreover, Debian 11 ( bullseye ) will reach the end of the Debian LTS period on August 31st. After that, Freexian will continue the security support under the Extended LTS offer. The team published several notable updates:
  • haveged update (DLA-4616-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address local privilege escalation.
  • tomcat9 update (DLA-4619-1), prepared by Markus, to address, among others, an authentication bypass.
  • apache2 update (DLA-4620-1), prepared by Bastien, to address a HTTP/2 bomb.
  • apache2 update (DLA-4629-1), prepared by Bastien, to address, among others, remote code execution and privilege escalation.
  • libinput update (DLA-4626-1), prepared by Santiago, to address local privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution.
  • asterisk update (DLA-4631-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address, among others, wrong processing of invalid or untrusted certificates.
  • nginx update (DLA-4634-1), prepared by Charles, to address a remote code execution and denial of service.
  • firefox-esr update (DLA-4635-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.
  • thunderbird update (DLA-4636-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution.
  • chromium update (DLA-4654-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team: We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:
  • Salvatore Bonaccorso prepared a libhttp-daemon-perl update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4639-1.
  • Salvatore also directly uploaded libgd-perl DLA-4638-1 and libconfig-inifiles-perl DLA-4637-1.
  • Peter Palfrader prepared a tor update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4656-1.
  • Pieter Lenaerts prepared a beets update, that was released by Emmanuel as DLA-4641-1.
  • Noah Meyerhans prepared a cloud-init update DLA-4645-1.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Besides publishing DLA-4642-1 for package u-boot Andreas also prepared an NMU for an upload to sid and prepared a stable-proposed-update (SPU) bug for trixie, which was already acknowledged by a stable release manager (SRM).
  • Andreas also prepared an upload of package atril for trixie, which was handled by the security team as DSA-6349-1.
  • Besides publishing DLA-4620-1 for package apache Bastien also prepared an upload for trixie, which was handled by the security team as DSA-6323-1.
  • Tobi uploaded package mesa to trixie and bookworm.
  • Thorsten fixed some (not security related but RC) issues in package dahdi-linux. This was in preparation to fix lots of security issues in asterisk. Unfortunately the maintainer ignored the corresponding debdiff and prefered to upload a new upstream version. Anyway, the concerns of the security team about security support of asterisk could be overcome and asterisk can migrate to tesing and again be part of a Debian release.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 July 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.14 as default transition, DebConf 26 preparations, debvm, pconr and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-06 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Python 3.14 as default transition, by Stefano Rivera Debian has had Python 3.13 and 3.14 in unstable and testing since December 2025, with Python 3.13 as the default version (/usr/bin/python3 = 3.13). This gave time for packages to implement support and detect issues in their test suites. A slot to transition to 3.14 as default was requested from the release team in March, and they indicated that we would likely be able to schedule it in late June. In preparation, Stefano reviewed the open bugs against Python interpreters and squashed some in uploads of the latest point releases of Python: 3.13.14 and 3.14.6. Also in June, Python 3.15.0 beta 2 and beta 3 released. Stefano uploaded these to Debian experimental. The 3.15 betas were reason to attempt to revive review of a blocked upstream patch to support Debian multiarch in stable ABI Python extensions, now that Python 3.15 is adding a new stable ABI abi3t.

DebConf 26 preparations, by Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Anupa Ann Joseph DebConf 26, the annual Debian Developer Conference, is being held in Santa Fe, Argentina, in July. Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano and Anupa Ann Joseph contributed to the preparations for the event.
  • As usual, Stefano has been supporting the conference website and registration, helping the local team to get accurate data on attendee numbers.
  • Antonio has been supporting the conference website and helping the content team to put together the conference schedule.
  • Santiago has been helping the local team on different topics regarding logistics.
  • Anupa assisted with the accommodation arrangements for DebCamp and DebConf, working alongside Nattie.
  • Lucas has been coordinating the conference schedule and communicating with some speakers.

debvm, by Helmut Grohne The debvm tool used for creating and running ephemeral virtual machines saw a number of small improvements. The requirement of having a filesystem label has been removed in favor of using a uuid and /etc/fstab is no longer created. A memory balloon is enabled by default and this enables qemu to automatically release free guest memory to the host. Booting Ubuntu VMs regressed as a result of their use of uutils and has been fixed. The --architecture flag is back to be able to better support Hurd, which is a work-in-progress of Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Thanks to Jochen Sprickerhof, you can more easily create VMs for autopkgtest-virt-qemu using --hook-dir=/usr/share/mmdebstrap/hooks/autopkgtest-create-qemu. There also are a few documentation and error message improvements. All of this is pending in git waiting to be uploaded once development slows down. While booting a machine from virtiofsd succeeded, turning the proof-of-concept into production remains for later.

pconr, by Helmut Grohne At DebConf25, Helmut reported on a schroot substitute called unschroot. The second iteration uses varlink IPC to construct a container. That varlink API is now separated into a new project called programmable container runtime. It is meant to provide more flexibility in constructing containers than established solutions such as the unshare command from util-linux, bubblewrap or podman provide while still managing repetitive complexity such as process orchestration for the developer. A new example that uses this infrastructure is a better containment for mmdebstrap eliminating chroot escape. There also is an asyncvarlink/0.3.2 release taking steps to become more maintainable in Debian to eventually get pconr into Debian.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano did routine uploads (mostly new upstream versions) of python-pip, python-pipx, hatchling, dh-python, beautifulsoup4, python-virtualenv, python-mitogen.
  • Stefano uploaded a snowball mini-transition: snowball, snowball-data, and pystemmer
  • Stefano did some debian.net team admin, setting up a container and later a VM for vote.debian.net.
  • Stefano responded to a semi-escalation to the Debian Technical Committee, after some communication between an upstream, a bug reporter, and a Debian package maintainer went sideways and got heated.
  • Emilio managed several transitions, and filed bugs against the few remaining GCC 13 rdeps.
  • Antonio did salsa maintenance work, debugging service issues, approving user registrations, and processing support requests.
  • Antonio worked on Debian CI maintenance, including but not limited to deploying new armhf and armel workers, fixing bugs and preparing an upcoming release of debci.
  • Antonio did several maintenance tasks for MiniDebConf websites.
  • Antonio uploaded ruby-bunny, ruby-sinatra and ruby-mustermann, fixing a few FTBFS bugs among them.
  • Carles using po-debconf-manager: Reviewed Catalan translations for 5 packages, submitted 6 packages. Added a draft blog/update about the po-debconf-manager project.
  • Carles submitted a new Geeqie Catalan translation: it had accumulated a large number of untranslated strings over the last 4 years.
  • Carles contributed to the Debian wiki: improved documentation for the Framework Laptop and added a new section Battery charging control (after doing some debugging and testing). He wrote a page about Signal Desktop. Carles started looking at testing/documenting Mailman2 -> Mailman3 migration.
  • Carles, in relation to the migration process, double checked old pages without relevant information in the Debian wiki.
  • Thorsten did another upload of package hplip to fix some bugs.
  • In the context of the Google Summer of Code 2026 project, Santiago continued co-mentoring Aryan Karamtoth, who is working on the Linux live-patching project. As part of the team, Santiago guided Aryan to help design the different workflows and to study the different tools available, including the upstream klp-build (that was introduced in v6.19), and compare it with SUSE s klp-build.
  • Colin clarified the bug tracking system s documentation to indicate that maintainers may sometimes reasonably ask users to file bugs upstream themselves.
  • Colin fixed 15 packages for pytest 9.1.
  • Colin fixed a depthcharge-tools regression with Python 3.14 as default that broke debian-installer builds.
  • Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts and correspond about them.
  • Helmut wrote patches for strace to enable cross building and a 32bit personality on arm64.
  • Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap working fixing build failures in fontconfig, gettext and sqlite3 as well as changing the way packages from gcc builds are installed to better serve a need reported by Samuel Thibault.

30 June 2026

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activities in June 2026

Here s my monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the FOSS world.

Debian
Whilst I didn t get a chance to do much, here are still a few things that I worked on:
  • Leading the DebConf Bursary team along with PEB.
    • This took most of my Debian time this month but we ve been able to wrap that work now.
    • Got back to all the tickets on Zammad, too.
  • Assisted a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021. Whilst I can t give a full, detailed list of things I did, here s a quick TL;DR of what I did:
  • Continued to push for infrastructure improvements:
    • Charming.
    • Artifact signing.
    • Reorganizing cdimage.
    • And so on.
  • Successfully released 26.10 Snapshot 2!
    • We landed a breaking change in the directory structure.
    • whihc had consequences on the rsync, being run by the sysadmins.
      • The 30 GB rsync failed because of the load on the system and it resulted in things blowing up. Yay. Stress-testing the shit out of our infra. :)
      • We got it back under control in the next few days but oh wow, what a journey to get there.
  • Assisted a bunch of folks with my Archive Admin and Release team hats to:
    • Helped in archive opening tasks.
    • Promoting/demoting binaries to/from main.
    • Taking care of package removals and so on.
    • Reviewed the NEW queue.
  • Reviewed quite a lot of MPs, specs, and other people s work.
  • Mentoring, coaching, and leading the Release Management team.

Debian (E)LTS
This month I have worked 15 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:

Released Security Updates

Work in Progress

Other Activities
  • [LTS] Emilio pointed out that the gst-plugins-ugly1.0 binaries were still not fully released, so I ran dcut migrate to fully release them. The DLA had gone out earlier.
  • [ELTS] Did some more work on ruby-rack - a lot of new CVEs have opened up and, whilst I made some progress, Santiago let me know that ruby-rack is no longer supported and so it ll be removed from the ela-needed list.
  • [E/LTS] Set up the security-tracker and a few other things on the new machine, and debugged the git repository size madness. Sent a summary here.
  • [E/LTS] Monitored discussions on mailing lists, IRC, and all the documentation updates.
  • [E/LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on Jitsi. Meeting notes here.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

19 June 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for May.

Activity summary During the month of May, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 56 DLAs fixing 877 CVEs. May was a much busier month than usual, especially due to the disclosed vulnerabilities on linux regarding Local Privilege Escalation (LPE), that included public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits. These reports of course impacted Debian as a whole, and the situation warrants a special mention to the Kernel Team, especially Ben Hutching and Salvatore Bonaccorso, who faced the pace and released linux packages on a weekly basis. On the LTS side, the Front Desk team also triaged a significant flow of high severity CVEs. It is also important to note that Debian 12 ( bookworm ) will be handed over to the LTS Team on June 11th. If you benefit from Debian, especially during the full 5-year lifecycle, please consider subscribing as a sponsor of Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/. Moreover, Debian 11 ( bullseye ) will reach the end of the Debian LTS period on August 31st. After that, Freexian will continue the security support under the Extended LTS offer. The team published several notable updates:
  • As mentioned above, several exploitable LPE vulnerabilities in linux were published during May. Ben released the following DLAs for the Debian LTS versions:
  • exim update (DLA-4580-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address a vulnerability that may result in remote code execution.
  • gnutls28 update (DLA-4595-1) by Guilhem Moulin, fixes several vulnerabilities that may result in execution of arbitrary code, information leak, authentication bypass, among other impacts.
  • krb5 updates released as DLA-4603-1, fixing two vulnerabilities that may yield to a denial of service. Updated prepared by Emmanuel Arias
  • lemonldap-ng (DLA-4602-1), released by Abhijith PA, fixing multiple vulnerabilities
  • Two imagemagick updates (DLA-4559-1 and DLA-4609-1), prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixing several vulnerabilities
  • openjdk-11 and openjdk-17 updates (DLA-4566-1 and DLA-4565-1), both prepared by Emilio, to fix seven vulnerabilities.
  • php7.4 update (DLA-4586-1) to fix six vulnerabilities that could result in remote code execution, information disclosure or denial of service. Update prepared by Guilhem Moulin.
  • python3.9 update (DLA-4583-1), prepared by Arnaud Rebillout, addressing multiple vulnerabilities.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team: We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:
  • Colin Watson prepared an OpenSSH update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4584-1.
  • Thomas Goirand handled a keystone update, whose advisory was done by Santiago and released as DLA-4611-1.
  • Christopher Obbard kindly prepared a sentry-python update, released as DLA-4612-1.
  • Christoph Goehre made two thunderbird updates (DLA-4562-1 and DLA-4582-1). As is customary, Emilio released the advisories.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases: Moreover, thanks to our partnership with Catalyst, it has been possible to extend the support for Samba 4.17, the version shipped with Debian 12. In May, several vulnerabilities were disclosed, and their patches were prepared by Catalyst. For Debian 12, the update was prepared by the Samba maintainer and released as DSA-6297-1.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 June 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Go default compatibility, Trimming build-essential, Python upstream engagement and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-05 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Go default compatibility, by Helmut Grohne At the MiniDebConf Hamburg, Andrew Lee had prepared a talk on how Debian accidentally chooses Go compatibility. Helmut joined Tobias Quathammer and Andrew Lee in looking into the problem. Go has a compatibility system where modules declare a desired Go version to be compatible with. This influences various features such as whether RSA keys smaller than 1024 bits are accepted. Unfortunately, Debian s way of building Go packages is unique in setting GO111MODULE=off, which practically implies a very old compatibility version that enables a number of insecure settings. Most Linux distributions use the default GO111MODULE=on and therefore consult a go.mod file that often declares a sensible version. While doing so is the way for Debian longer term, getting there involves major changes so we also sought a more short term workaround. We developed a patch to the Go compiler that would enable it to pick up a compatibility version from the environment. Tobias uploaded it to unstable. The next step is communicating the declared compatibility version from go.mod to the compiler via the new variable. Then, rebuilding the archive resolves the immediate symptoms. This does not save us from having to perform the larger transition to GO111MODULE=on, but this shortcut can be backported to trixie.

Trimming build-essential, by Helmut Grohne One of the harder problems of the architecture cross bootstrap is correctly expressing the Build-Depends of glib during the toolchain bootstrap. It implicitly depends on build-essential, which happens to depend on libc6-dev. This poses a cycle. It applies even for cross building, because it is interpreted for the host architecture and that there is no way of satisfying this dependency during the toolchain bootstrap. Given discussions at MiniDebConf Hamburg with Jochen Sprickerhof and others, a seemingly stupid idea evolved: Let s delete build-essential. What looks insane on the surface might deserve a second look. Given how we moved away from C, C++ and autotools, what is in build-essential no longer is required by much of the archive. With the rise of debputy, debian/rules no longer has to be a makefile. While the task would be huge, those packages relevant to architecture bootstrap could explicitly support building without the implied dependency making their dependencies explicit. In a number of cases, this amounts to issuing a dependency on g++-for-host. This dependency requires the use of architecture-prefixed tools. Therefore, Helmut wrote a debhelper change that makes it always pass build tools to various build systems. This also enables more packages to honour environment variables such as CC and CXX.

Python upstream engagement, by Stefano Rivera Stefano attended PyCon US (at personal expense) to improve upstream relations and ensure Debian s voice is heard where it needs to be. On Friday there was a packaging summit (notes) with good discussion on the future of the wheel format, and some discussion of the new abi3t shared library format for free-threaded python. In preparation for the event, Stefano did a complete review of the current patch stack. Stefano s primary goal was to get some of Debian s patches merged during the sprints, and results were mixed. Some trivial patches (e.g. GH-150098, made progress and merged, but the most consequential patch Debian is carrying is still blocked. Stefano will continue to try to drive progress on this.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles worked on po-debconf-manager: Reviewed Catalan translations for 6 packages, submitted 10 packages to maintainers, and removed 3 packages from po-debconf-manager.
  • Carles worked on check-relations: Continued improving the backend, including importing source package build dependencies to better support analysis of Debian blends. Added support for ignoring packages using regular expressions and source package names in response to user feedback. Used the tool to report 5 new bugs and followed up on previously reported issues.
  • Helmut sent a cross build patch on behalf of a customer.
  • Helmut uploaded debvm and guess_concurrency both featuring improved reproducibility and documentation.
  • Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap and made it correctly handle binNMUs of gcc-defaults. Additionally, he poked at existing gcc patches giving answers, rebasing or closing them.
  • Helmut supported the video team in Hamburg mixing audio.
  • Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts of various kinds and corresponded with maintainers about them.
  • Antonio attended a debate during the Brazil Internet Forum about the impacts of the child protection regulation (ECA Digital) on free software operating systems.
  • Antonio worked on Debian CI to improve the system transparency for users. This included listing any pending jobs explicitly in the job lists for each package/architecture/suite page, as well as adding a queue status page that users can check for an estimate of test latency.
  • Antonio worked on several Debian CI maintenance tasks, including but not limited to some monitoring improvements, replacing usage of fonts-font-awesome with fonts-fork-awesome, and adding the ability in debci to configure a global notice (which is being used in Debian CI to point to the system status pages).
  • Antonio started doing some tests related to the change of default Debian CI backend from lxc to incus-lxc. This helped identify an omission in the creation of incus-lxc images. It was missing dpkg-dev, which caused a few packages that assumed its presence to fail. In the end, the incus-lxc backend will be fixed to include dpkg-dev by default in the image, but that uncovered an undeclared dependency in gem2deb (Ruby packaging helper) and in ruby-byebug, both already fixed in unstable.
  • Stefano did some minimal work on debian-reimbursements to get it working with current versions of django-allauth.
  • May included the discovery of several high-severity Linux kernel root exploits. Stefano updated kernels and rebooted debian.social infrastructure several times.
  • Stefano supported the Hamburg miniDebConf s wafer website during the event, and set up an instance for the 2027 edition too.
  • Stefano supported the bursary team issuing bursaries for DebConf 26.
  • Stefano uploaded routine updates of python-pip, pystemmer, snowball-data, snowball (making up a mini, uncoordinated snowball transition), python-authlib, python-discovery, python-installer, python-mitogen, python-pipx, python-cachecontrol, platformdirs, and python-virtualenv.
  • Stefano fixed a small number of bugs in dh-python, culminating in the 7.20260524 upload.
  • Thorsten finally managed to upload a new upstream version of hplip. He also uploaded a new upstream version of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. Last but not least with the help of other contributors he could fix bugs in lprng.
  • Lucas and Santiago contributed significantly to the DebConf 26 Content team; helping to organize the team, review and rate talk proposals.
  • Lucas also supported a packaging sprint held in India by rebuilding and publishing the latest results of the Ruby 3.4 transition effort.
  • Santiago continued contributing to the efforts to organize DebConf 26, especially supporting the local team with different tasks.
  • In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is mentoring Aryan Karamtoth, a GSoC participant that is working to introduce linux live-patching support in Debian. The GSoC project started in May, with community bonding and coding. Santiago reviewed a merge request to prepare the clang-extract package for debian. clang-extract is one of the building blocks that will help to extract specific functions from large C code, so only relevant code can be patched, without recompiling the whole original basecode.
  • Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud with the point release announcements for Debian 13.5 and Debian 12.14.
  • Colin backported various security fixes from OpenSSH 10.3 to all supported releases (including LTS and ELTS).
  • Colin backported IP quality-of-service fixes to OpenSSH in trixie. The situation there had been unsatisfactory for some time, and upstream reworked their QoS support in OpenSSH 10.1 in a way that typically produces much better results.
  • Colin imported new upstream versions of 26 Python packages, and fixed around 25 RC bugs for the Python team.

15 May 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Detecting undeclared file conflicts, contributors.debian.org mini-sprint, security-tracker performance and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-04 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Undeclared file conflicts, by Helmut Grohne The duplication checker, the Multi-Arch hinter, and the /usr-move analyzer share significant parts of their code. While the /usr-move transition is complete, the other tools needed a bit of love. Helmut added Python type annotations, slightly improved the performance of the duplication website and shared more code between these tools. Building upon this Helmut looked into file conflicts of various kinds such as unrelated packages installing overlapping files, file type conflicts, mismatching directory metadata and shared files of Multi-Arch: same packages with varying content. Implementing reliable detection proved to be difficult due to the amount of corner cases. So Helmut semi-manually filed bugs. In that process, it became apparent that binNMUs do not reproduce SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH across architectures and therefore some shared files embedding the build date would vary in content. Additionally, a significant number of reports required further correspondence.

contributors.debian.org mini-sprint, by Enrico Zini Enrico Zini met with Mattia Rizzolo to continue the work started at DebConf 25 on crediting contributions done via salsa, and to catch up with accumulated site issues. Building on the same kind of infrastructure used to notify tag2upload, salsa.debian.org triggers a webping on pushes and merge request activity, which causes a small JSON payload to be queued in a private directory on contributors.debian.org. We worked on processing, filtering and aggregating the files in the queue into a private, staging database table. When configuring a data source on the site, it is now possible to configure automated submission of contributions from information in the staging table. This makes it significantly simpler to credit contributors for all teams that use Salsa as their code repository and coordination tool, as the site can take care of the data mining for you. See more details in the sprint report posted to debian-devel-announce.

MiniDebConf Campinas, by Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Antonio Terceiro MiniDebConf Campinas was held between April 23rd and 25th, at the State University of Campinas, and was preceded by a MiniDebcamp between April 20th and 22nd. Freexian was Gold sponsor for the event, and Freexian collaborators were active contributors to the conference success. Lucas and Santiago delivered a talk about Debian LTS during MiniDebConf Campinas 2026, where they described how the LTS project benefits Debian users and developers, while strengthening Debian itself. Lucas and Antonio delivered a talk about internship programs in Debian during MiniDebConf Campinas 2026, with the goal of getting students interested in working in and with Debian. Lucas took part in the MiniDebConf Campinas content team, reviewing/accepting talks and building the schedule. Antonio led a session where he invited the audience to weigh in on current controversies in Debian. The session presented playful elements as colored signs to denote agree/disagree, and was not recorded, to help people feel more comfortable about speaking up. He might be convinced to lead a similar session at the next DebConf. Antonio also organized a debate to discuss the consequences of new Brazilian regulation for the protection of children and adolescents in digital spaces for Debian and other free operating systems, but also for the free software community in general. This session was very fruitful and will lead into further actions, as one of the main outcomes was the realization that the free software community must follow the discussion leading up to similar regulations more closely to avoid being caught by surprise when they come into effect.

security-tracker performance, by Helmut Grohne and Emilio Pozuelo Monfort Prompted by spontaneous influx of web requests on Freexian s security-tracker back in February, we considered the options for managing that demand. One of our mitigations was making it faster. To that end, Helmut sent two MRs towards improving the situation. There are four notable improvements. The use of Python s str.translate generally speeds up rendering of larger templates. Indexing the CVE names avoids a costly sequential table scan. Avoiding FFI calls while sorting and reducing the queryset speeds up the source package view. Emilio reviewed and deployed the changes on to the Debian instance. Together these changes provide a twofold speedup on both Freexian s and Debian s instance on average.

dput-ng data loss bug, by Colin Watson Ian Jackson (not affiliated with Freexian) reported that dput-ng could lose data when using the local install method, which could cause misleading results in tests of other packages; they also filed an initial merge request to fix it. Colin improved this to isolate its tests properly, and uploaded it.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Lucas coordinated the src:valkey update to version 9 in unstable with a potential co-maintainer.
  • Lucas provided a security update for src:valkey targeting trixie .
  • Thorsten did two uploads of foo2zjs, one to fix a bug and one to improve packaging. As there have been several CVEs published for cups he also did an upload of a new upstream version. Unfortunately this introduces a regression and another upload was needed to take care of a crash. The patch for one CVE also broke a test script, which is used by lots of printing packages in Debian. As a result some autopkgtest runs failed. This could be fixed as well and the only remaining issue that needs some more investigation is related to cups-pdf. It is also worth mentioning that some issues related to the apparmor configuration of cups could be resolved.
  • Helmut sent patches for 11 cross build failures.
  • Helmut sent a MR for enabling the new mainline YT6801 ethernet Linux driver and it is now working fine with Debian s 7.x kernels.
  • Helmut upgraded a crossqa.debian.net autobuilder to trixie .
  • Carles using po-debconf-manager, improved Catalan translations: reviewed 2 packages, submitted 3 packages, deleted 5 packages.
  • Carles did further code developments for check-relations: steps towards making it production ready when the initial round of reports are analyzed. New show-package (information) command, improvements for report_missing cases, added support for ignoring packages for specific reasons, added unit tests, added CI. Used it to open 39 new bugs. Also followed up different open bugs
  • Rapha l completed the French translation of Zulip for the release of version 12.0. Zulip is a nice 100% free software threaded communication platform for distributed teams.
  • Stefano did routine uploads of python-pipx, python-mitogen, platformdirs, python-authlib, python-discovery, distro-info-data, python-virtualenv, python-certifi, python-wheel, pypy3.
  • Stefano uploaded distro-info-data updates to stable and oldstable proposed updates, with the latest Ubuntu release.
  • Stefano took part in DebConf 26 preparation meetings.
  • Stefano prepared DebConf s online video streaming infrastructure for MiniDebConf Campinas, and configured the Debian reimbursement system to handle their travel bursary claims.
  • Stefano helped MiniDebConf Hamburg prepare their website for 2027.
  • Stefano did some sysadmin work on debian.social infrastructure.
  • Stefano reviewed Matthias python3.15 packaging and rebased his work on top of it.
  • Antonio implemented several improvements to the Debian CI platform, including but not limited to adding support for dark mode, dropping compatibility with ActiveRecord < 7 which is no longer shipped in Debian stable, and generating content-based links to static assets, in two parts.
  • Antonio debugged a general slowness in salsa, caused by loss of IPv6 connectivity between the salsa host and the remote object storage in the cloud , which is a problem due to an open upstream bug in gitlab.
  • Santiago reviewed different changes to the Salsa CI pipeline, including the new uscan test job, prepared by Tha s Rebou as Araujo, and the final review to introduce faketime testing, made by quila Macedo.
  • Santiago continued helping the DebConf 26 local team to prepare the conference.
  • Emilio updated libxpm to address a security issue.
  • Colin finished upgrading groff to 1.24.1; 1.24.0 and 1.24.1 were the first upstream releases since 2023 and had extensive changes, so this took some time to get right.
  • Colin released bookworm and trixie fixes for CVE-2026-3497 in openssh, and issued the corresponding BSA-130 for trixie-backports.
  • Colin upgraded openssh to 10.3p1.
  • Anupa worked on the accounting tasks for MiniDebConf Kanpur and prepared and submitted a report to the fiscal host.

13 May 2026

Sergio Cipriano: My experience at MiniDebConf Campinas 2026

My experience at MiniDebConf Campinas 2026 Last week, I spent the entire week in Campinas attending MiniDebConf and MiniDebCamp. The Debian Brazil community organizes this event every year, and this year's edition was the biggest so far. During MiniDebCamp, I sponsored a few uploads and spent two days teaching packaging to two participants. I usually teach packaging online, so it was refreshing to do it in person. I believe the experience was much better than teaching online. One of my mentees introduced me to the DDTSS (Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite). Even though there are many i18n contributors in Brazil, this was my first time learning about this system. I plan to contribute to translations over the next few weeks using DDTSS.

My Activities
NOTE: I translated every talk title; the original titles are in PT-BR, so some details may have been lost in translation.
I presented three talks and led one BoF session. The talks are all available on Debian's Peertube: You can also find my slides at people.d.o. My first talk was a showcase of dh-make-vim, a tool I created and have been using for a few months. Some people tested it and found bugs, which was really nice to see. My second talk was essentially a live version of my blog post Zero-Code Instrumentation of an Envoy TCP Proxy using eBPF. I also gave a lightning talk about something many people are not aware of: non-uploading DDs can also sponsor uploads. If you're interested, this bug report provides more context: tracker.debian.org: Signed by field is missing when sponsoring as DD non-uploading Finally, I led the BoF session "Experiences, lessons learned, and next steps from the mentoring sessions". This was my favorite session, we had many participants with different perspectives and ideas, which led to a very engaging discussion. I'm still working on the action plans and I plan to release them soon. Here are some photos of these activities: Mentorship BoF Mentorship BoF DD non-uploading can upload talk dh-make-vim showcase Zero-Code Instrumentation showcase

My favorite activities This is a list, in no particular order, of some of the sessions I enjoyed the most:
  • Salsa CI, showing features that almost nobody knows I wrote a blog post about one of the things I learned in this talk, and there is still a lot more to explore. Aquila Macedo is developing many cool features in Salsa CI.
  • Free Software: Freedom, Autonomy, Sovereignty I had been really looking forward to this one. Alexandre Oliva is a very important figure in the Free Software movement, especially in South America. I'll need to rewatch it, my futures talks about Free Software will likely be inspired by this one.
  • What I've lived/seen in 33 Years of Debian & Free Software in general Eduardo Ma an was the first Debian Developer in Brazil, so it's always valuable to hear the story from someone who was part of it.
  • Symbolism - an introduction Despite the title, this talk was not about astrology! I'll probably rewatch it as well, as there is a lot of information to take in. I really like the passion S rgio Durigan has for C. He is also a great speaker and knows how to guide the audience through the topic.
  • Debate: Contemporary controversies in Debian The debate itself was great, but the conversations we had afterward were even better. I changed some of my opinions after hearing different perspectives. I don't think this format would work at DebConf, but I would definitely like to attend another one like this.
  • Why LTS on Debian? I had a few questions about LTS, and Kanashiro and Santiago answered them both during the talk and in the Q&A session. They also shared some challenges and how to avoid them, it was a great learning experience.
  • From my first contribution to the Debian Maintainer Polkorny was a bit shy but did a great job! I really enjoy this kind of talk. It is always nice to see the different paths people take.
Unfortunatly, I couldn't attend everything I was interested in, as always.

DayTrip - The Brazilian Particle Accelerator Sirius is the largest and most complex scientific infrastructure ever built in Brazil and one of the most advanced synchrotron light sources in the world. My jaw dropped the entire time; it's hard to describe how incredible this is. My favorite detail: they're running Debian :)

Wrap up I believe this was the best MiniDebConf Brazil so far. There were many other things I chose not to include here, as this post is already quite long. Still, here are a few more highlights:
  • A Bug Squashing Party
  • Driving Samuel Henrique's drones
  • Lots of capybaras
  • A small birthday party
  • A visit to two data centers

11 May 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2026 (by Thorsten Alteholz)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for April.

Activity summary During the month of April, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 37 DLAs fixing 145 CVEs. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below.
  • Andrej Shadura prepared DLA 4525-1 for libyaml-syck-perl to fix a vulnerability related to a memory leak.
  • Andrej also prepared DLA 4551-1 for mbedtls to fix a leak of secrets.
  • Arnaud Rebillout prepared DLA 4532-1 for python3.9 to fix a use-after-free issue in several decompressors.
  • Arnaud also prepared DLA 4533-1 for systemd to fix multiple vulnerabilities, which might be also used to execute arbitrary code.
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared DLA 4529-1 for bind9 to fix a DNSSEC issues, which can cause the resolver to consume excessive CPU.
  • Bastien also prepared DLA 4539-1 for imagemagick to fix 21 vulnerabilities.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort prepared DLA 4535-1 for openssh to fix a potentially execution of arbitrary code.
  • Emilio also Monfort prepared DLA 4526-1, DLA 4546-1 and DLA 4555-1 for firefox-esr to fix 31 vulnerabilities.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof prepared DLA 4524-1 for postgresql-13 to fix multiple vulnerabilities, which might be also used to execute arbitrary code.
  • Sylvain Beucler prepared DLA 4538-1 for perl to fix unauthorized access to data or arbitrary code execution.
  • Thorsten Alteholz prepared DLA 4545-1 for packagekit to fix a local privilege escalation.
  • Thorsten also prepared DLA 4544-1 for ntfs-3g to fix a local privilege escalation.
  • Tobias Frost prepared DLA 4521-1 for libpng1 to fix multiple vulnerabilities, which might be also used to execute arbitrary code.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
  • As usual, the thunderbird updates, released as DLA 4534-1 and DLA 4549-1, were prepared by its maintainer Christoph Goehre. This month 28 CVEs has been fixed. Thanks a lot for his continuous contributions. The DLAs have been sent by Emilio.
  • Thanks alot as well to Mathias Behrle for providing DLA 4543-1 for package simpleeval. The DLA has been sent by Santiago.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Andreas Henriksson completed the upload of gvfs for trixie and bookworm
  • Ben Hutchings did uploads of several kernel packages to unstable and the corresponding backports repositories.
  • Sylvain took care of uploads of awstats to trixie and bookworm. He also did the same for 7zip-rar with an upload to bookworm-backports).
Some milestones in the lifecycle of two Debian releases are just around the corner. The support of Debian 12 will be handed over to the LTS team on June 11th 2026. After August 31st, support for Debian 11 will move from Debian LTS to ELTS managed by Freexian.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

24 April 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for March.

Activity summary During the month of March, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 24 DLAs fixing 250 CVEs. We also welcomed two new members: Lukas M rdian and Emmanuel Arias to the team, who actually started to contribute to the LTS project several months ago. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below.
  • ansible (DLA 4502-1), prepared by Lee Garret in collaboration with Jochen, fixing a vulnerability that allows attackers to bypass unsafe content protections
  • asterisk (DLA 4515-1), prepared by Lukas M rdian, fixing four CVEs that include possible privilege escalations.
  • gimp (DLA 4500-1), prepared by Thorsten, fixing four CVEs related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
  • gst-plugins-base1.0 and gst-plugins-ugly1.0 (DLA-4514-1, DLA-4516-1, respectively), both prepared by Utkarsh, addressing vulnerabilities that may yield to arbitrary code execution.
  • imagemagick, released by Bastien Roucari s (DLA 4497-1) fixing multiple vulnerabilities that could lead to information leaks, bypass of security policies, denial of service or arbitrary code execution.
  • libpng1.6 (DLA 4521-1), prepared by Tobias Frost, fixing an arbitrary code execution vulnerability
  • linux: Ben Hutchings released DLA 4498-1 and DLA 4499-1 for linux 5.10 and linux 6.1, respectively. Those updates especially address the CrackArmor flaw.
  • ruby-rack (DLA 4505-1), prepared by Utkarsh Gupta, addressing two vulnerabilities
  • strongswan (DLA 4512-1), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixing a Denial of Service vulnerability
  • roundcube (DLA 4517-1) prepared by Guilhem Moulin, who discovered that one of the fixes provided by upstream was incomplete.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team: As usual, the thunderbird update, released as DLA 4511-1, was prepared by its maintainer Christoph Goehre. Thanks a lot for his continuous contributions. The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Andreas Henriksson completed the uploads of glib2.0 for both trixie and bookworm
  • Arnaud Rebillout: python-cryptography for trixie
  • Arnaud and Bastien worked together to prepare a ca-certificates-java release for unstable
  • Bastien completed the upload of gpsd for trixie that was proposed in January.
  • Bastien uploaded a regression update of apache2 for trixie
  • Bastien prepared a zabbix point update for trixie
  • Bastien in collaboration with Markus released netty updates for trixie and bookworm DSA 6160-1
  • Daniel Leidert proposed python-tornado releases for both trixie and bookworm.
  • Daniel also prepared a python-authlib update for trixie
  • Guilhem prepared a mapserver update for bookworm.
  • Lucas Kanashiro proposed merge requests to fix three CVEs in erlang for both trixie and bookworm
  • Sylvain Beucler continued the work to replace p7zip with 7zip in the different supported releases, and proposed a point update for bookworm
  • Tobias prepared trixie and bookworm security updates, released as DSA-6189-1
  • Utkarsh prepared trixie and bookworm security update for ruby-rack, released as DSA-6180-1

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

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15 April 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Debusine projects in GSoC, Debian CI updates, Salsa CI maintenance and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-03 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Debusine projects in Google s Summer of Code While Freexian initiated Debusine, and is investing a lot of resources in the project, we manage it as a true free software project that can and should have a broader community. We always had documentation for new contributors and we aim to be reactive with them when they interact via the issue tracker or via merge requests. We decided to put those intentions under stress tests by proposing five projects for Google s Summer of Code as part of Debian s participation in that program. Given that at least 11 candidates managed to get their merge request accepted in the last 30 days (interacting with the development team is part of the pre-requisites to apply to Google Summer of Code projects these days), the contributing experience must not be too bad. If you want to try it out, we maintain a list of quick fixes that are accessible to newcomers. And as always, we welcome your feedback!

Debian CI: incus backend and upgrade to Bootstrap 5, by Antonio Terceiro debci 3.14 was released on March 4th, with a followup 3.14.1 release with regression fixes a few days afterwards. Those releases were followed by new development and maintenance work that will provide extra capabilities and stability to the platform. This month saw the initial version of an incus backend land in Debian CI. The transition into the new backend will be done carefully so as to not disrupt testing migration. Each package will be running jobs with both the current lxc backend and with incus. Packages that have the same result on both backends will be migrated over, and packages that exhibit different results will be investigated further, resulting in bug reports and/or other communication with the maintainers. On the frontend side, the code has been ported to Bootstrap 5 over from the now ancient Bootstrap 3. This need has been originally reported back in 2024 based on the lack of security support for Bootstrap 3. Beyond improving maintainability, this upgrade also enables support for dark mode in debci, which is still work in progress. Both updates mentioned in this section will be available in a following debci release.

Salsa CI maintenance by Santiago Ruano Rinc n et al. Santiago reviewed some Salsa CI issues and reviewed associated merge requests. For example, he investigated a regression (#545), introduced by the move to sbuild, on the use of extra repositories configured as .source files; and reviewed the MR (!712) that fixes it. Also, there were conflicts with changes made in debci 3.14 and debci 3.14.1 (those updates are mentioned above), and different people have contributed to fix the subsequent issues, in a long-term way. This includes Rapha l who proposed MR !707 and who also suggested Antonio to merge the Salsa CI patches to avoid similar errors in the future. This happened shortly after. Those fixes finally required the unrelated MR !709, which will prevent similar problems when building images. To identify bugs related to the autopkgtest support in the backport suites as early as possible, Santiago proposed MR !708. Finally, Santiago, in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias also had exchanges with GSoC candidates for the Salsa CI project, including the contributions they have made as merge requests. It is important to note that there are several very good candidates interested in participating. Thanks a lot to them for their work so far!

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l reported a zim bug affecting Debian Unstable users, which was already fixed in git apparently. He could thus cherry-pick the fix and update the package in Debian Unstable.
  • Carles created a new page on the InstallingDebianOn in Debian Wiki.
  • Carles submitted translation errors in the debian-installer Weblate.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager, improved Catalan translations: reviewed and submitted 3 packages. Also improved error handling when forking or submitting an MR if the fork already existed.
  • Carles kept improving check-relations: code base related general improvements (added strict typing, enabled pre-commit). Also added DebPorts support, virtual packages support and added commands for reporting missing relations and importing bugs from bugs.debian.org.
  • Antonio handled miscellaneous Salsa support requests.
  • Antonio improved the management of MiniDebConf websites by keeping all non-secret settings in git and fixed exporting these sites as static HTML.
  • Stefano uploaded routine updates to hatchling, python-mitogen, python-virtualenv, python-discovery, dh-python, pypy3, python-pipx, and git-filter-repo.
  • Faidon uploaded routine updates to crun, libmaxminddb, librdkafka, lowdown, platformdirs, python-discovery, sphinx-argparse-cli, tox, tox-uv.
  • Stefano and Santiago continued to help with DebConf 26 preparations.
  • Stefano reviewed some contributions to debian-reimbursements and handled admin for reimbursements.debian.net.
  • Stefano attended the Debian Technical Committee meeting.
  • Helmut sent 8 patches for cross build failures.
  • Building on the work of postmarketOS, Helmut managed to cross build systemd for musl in rebootstrap and sent several patches in the process.
  • Helmut reviewed several MRs of Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues expanding support for DPKG_ROOT to support installing hurd.
  • Helmut incorporated a final round of feedback for the Multi-Arch documentation in Debian policy, which finally made it into unstable together with documentation of Build-Profiles.
  • In order to fix python-memray, Helmut NMUed libunwind generally disabling C++ exception support as being an incompatible duplication of the gcc implementation. Unfortunately, that ended up breaking suricata on riscv64. After another NMU, python-memray finally migrated.
  • Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr and sane-airscan. He also fixed a packaging bug in printer-driver-oki. As of systemd 260.1-1 the configuration of lpadmin has been added to the sysusers.d configuration. All printing packages can now simply depend on the systemd-sysusers package and don t have to take care of its creation in maintainer scripts anymore.
  • In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago had exchanges with GSoC candidates and reviewed the proposals of the Linux livepatching GSoC 2026 project.
  • Colin helped to fix CVE-2026-3497 in openssh and CVE-2026-28356 in multipart.
  • Colin upgraded tango and pytango to new upstream releases and packaged pybind11-stubgen (needed for pytango), thanks to a Freexian customer. Tests of reproducible builds revealed that pybind11-stubgen didn t generate imports in a stable order; this is now fixed upstream.
  • Lucas fixed CVE-2025-67733 and CVE-2026-21863 affecting src:valkey in unstable and testing. Also reviewed the same fixes targeting stable proposed by Peter Wienemann.
  • Faidon worked with upstream and build-dep Debian maintainers on resolving blockers in order to bring pyHanko into Debian, starting with the adoption of python-pyhanko-certvalidator. pyHanko is a suite for signing and stamping PDF files, and one of the few libraries that can be leveraged to sign PDFs with eIDAS Qualified Electronic Signatures.
  • Anupa co-organized MiniDebConf Kanpur and attended the event with many others from all across India. She handled the accommodation arrangements along with the registration team members, worked on the budget and expenses. She was also a speaker at the event.
  • Lucas helped with content review/schedule for the MiniDebConf Campinas. Thanks Freexian for being a Gold sponsor!
  • Lucas organized and took part in a one-day in-person sprint to work on Ruby 3.4 transition. It was held in a coworking space in Brasilia - Brazil on April 6th. There were 5 DDs and they fixed multiple packages FTBFSing against Ruby 3.4 (coming to unstable soon hopefully). Lucas has been postponing a blog post about this sprint since then :-)

16 March 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2026 (by Thorsten Alteholz)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for February.

Activity summary During the month of February, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 35 DLAs fixing 527 CVEs. We also welcomed Arnaud Rebillout to the team and had to say farewell to Roberto, who left the team after more than nine years as part of it. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. Notable security updates:
  • Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA 4492-1 for gnutls28 to fix vulnerabilities which may lead to Denial of Service.
  • Utkarsh Gupta prepared DLA 4464-1 for xrdp, to fix a a vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target system.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort prepared DLA-4465-1 to replace ClamAV 1.0 with ClamAV 1.4. This latter is the current LTS version supported by upstream.
  • Markus Koschany prepared DLA 4468-1 for tomcat9, to fix a vulnerability that can be used to bypass security constraints.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared DLA 4471-1 to update package debian-security-support, the Debian security coverage checker.
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared DLA 4473-1 for zabbix, to fix a potential remote code execution vulnerability.
  • Paride Legovini prepared DLA 4478-1 for tcpflow, to fix a vulnerability that might result in DoS and potentially code execution.
  • Thorsten Alteholz prepared DLA 4477-1 for munge, to fix a vulnerability which may allow local users to leak the MUNGE cryptographic key and forge arbitrary credentials.
  • Ben Hutchings prepared DLA 4475-1 and DLA 4476-1 for Linux kernel updates.
  • Chris Lamb prepared DLA 4482-1 for ceph, to fix SSL certificate checking in the Python bindings.
  • Andreas Henriksson prepared DLA 4491-1 to fix vulnerabilities in glib2.0, which could result in denial of service, memory corruption or potentially arbitrary code execution.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
  • The update of nova was prepared by the maintainer, Thomas Goirand. The corresponding DLA 4486-1 was published by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara.
  • The updates of thunderbird were prepared by the maintainer Christoph Goehre. The corresponding DLA 4466-1 and DLA 4495-1 was published by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Jochen prepared a point update of wireshark for bookworm (#1127945).
  • Jochen prepared point updates of erlang for trixie (#1127606) and bookworm (#1127607).
  • Bastien helped preparing DSA 6160-1 for netty and uploaded a fixed package to unstable.
  • Bastien prepared a point update of zabbix for trixie (#1127437).
  • Tobias prepared a point update of modsecurity-crs for bookworm (#1128655).
  • Tobias prepared a point update of busybox for bookworm (#1129503).
  • Tobias helped preparing DSA 6138-1 for libpng1.6.
  • Daniel prepared point updates of python-authlib for trixie (#1129477) and bookworm (#1129246).
  • Ben uploaded several Linux kernel packages to trixie-backports and bookworm-backports.
  • Ben prepared point updates of wireless-regdb for trixie and bookworm.
Other than the work related to updates, Sylvain made several improvements to the documentation and tooling used by the team. Some milestones in the lifecycle of two Debian releases are just around the corner. The support of Debian 12 will be handed over to the LTS team on June 11th 2026. After August 31st, support for Debian 11 will move from Debian LTS to ELTS managed by Freexian.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

10 March 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Opening DebConf 26 Registration, Debian CI improvements and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-02 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 26 Registration, by Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 26, to be held in Santa Fe Argentina in July, has opened for registration and event proposals. Stefano, Antonio, and Santiago all contributed to making this happen. As always, some changes needed to be made to the registration system. Bigger changes were planned, but we ran out of time to implement them for DebConf 26. All 3 of us have had experience in hosting local DebConf events in the past and have been advising the DebConf 26 local team.

Debian CI improvements, by Antonio Terceiro Debian CI is the platform responsible for automated testing of packages from the Debian archive, and its results are used by the Debian Release team automation as Quality Assurance to control the migration of packages from Debian unstable into testing, the base for the next Debian release. Antonio started developing an incus backend, and that prompted two rounds of improvements to the platform, including but not limited to allowing user to select a job execution backend (lxc, qemu) during the job submission, reducing the part of testbed image creation that requires superuser privileges and other refactorings and bug fixes. The platform API was also improved to reduce disruption when reporting results to the Release Team automation after service downtimes. Last, but not least, the platform now has support for testing packages against variants of autopkgtest, which will allow the Debian CI team to test new versions of autopkgtest before making releases to avoid widespread regressions.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager while users requested features / found bugs. Improvements done - add packages from unstable instead of just salsa.debian.org, upgrade and merge templates of upgraded packages, finished adding typing annotations, improved deleting packages: support multiple line texts, add debug to see subprocess.run commands, etc.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager, reviewed 7 Catalan translations and sent bug reports or MRs for 11 packages. Also reviewed the translations of fortunes-debian-hints and submitted possible changes in the hints.
  • Carles submitted MRs for reportbug (reportbug --ui gtk detecting the wrong dependencies), devscript (delete unused code from debrebuild and add recommended dependency), wcurl (format help for 80 columns). Carles submitted a bug report for apt not showing the long descriptions of packages.
  • Carles resumed effort for checking relations (e.g. Recommends / Suggests) between Debian packages. A new codebase (still in early stages) was started with a new approach in order to detect, report and track the broken relations.
  • Emilio drove several transitions, most notably the haskell transition and the glibc/gcc-15/zlib transition for the s390 31-bit removal. This last one included reviewing and requeueing lots of autopkgtests due to britney losing a lot of results.
  • Emilio reviewed and uploaded poppler updates to experimental for a new transition.
  • Emilio reviewed, merged and deployed some performance improvements proposed for the security-tracker.
  • Stefano prepared routine updates for pycparser, python-confuse, python-cffi, python-mitogen, python-pip, wheel, platformdirs, python-authlib, and python-virtualenv.
  • Stefano updated Python 3.13 and 3.14 to the latest point releases, including security updates, and did some preliminary work for Python 3.15.
  • Stefano reviewed changes to dh-python and merged MRs.
  • Stefano did some debian.social sysadmin work, bridging additional IRC channels to Matrix.
  • Stefano and Antonio, as DebConf Committee Members, reviewed the DebConf 27 bids and took part in selecting the Japanese bid to host DebConf 27.
  • Helmut sent patches for 29 cross build failures.
  • Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap addressing issues relating to specific architectures (such as musl-linux-any, hurd-any or s390x) or specific packages (such as binutils, brotli or fontconfig).
  • Helmut worked on diagnosing bugs such as rocblas #1126608, python-memray #1126944 upstream and greetd #1129070 with varying success.
  • Antonio provided support for multiple MiniDebConfs whose websites run wafer + wafer-debconf (the same stack as DebConf itself).
  • Antonio fixed the salsa tagpending webhook.
  • Antonio sent specinfra upstream a patch to fix detection of Debian systems in some situations.
  • Santiago reviewed some Merge Requests for the Salsa CI pipeline, including !703 and !704, that aim to improve how the build source job is handled by Salsa CI. Thanks a lot to Jochen for his work on this.
  • In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago proposed a couple of projects for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026 round. Santiago has been reviewing applications and giving feedback to candidates.
  • Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of ipp-usb, brlaser and gutenprint.
  • Rapha l updated publican to fix an old bug that became release critical and that happened only when building with the nocheck profile. Publican is a build dependency of the Debian s Administrator Handbook and with that fix, the package is back into testing.
  • Rapha l implemented a small feature in Debusine that makes it possible to refer to a collection in a parent workspace even if a collection with the same name is present in the current workspace.
  • Lucas updated the current status of ruby packages affecting the Ruby 3.4 transition after a bunch of updates made by team members. He will follow up on this next month.
  • Lucas joined the Debian orga team for GSoC this year and tried to reach out to potential mentors.
  • Lucas did some content work for MiniDebConf Campinas - Brazil.
  • Colin published minor security updates to bookworm and trixie for CVE-2025-61984 and CVE-2025-61985 in OpenSSH, both of which allowed code execution via ProxyCommand in some cases. The trixie update also included a fix for mishandling of PerSourceMaxStartups.
  • Colin spotted and fixed a typo in the bug tracking system s spam-handling rules, which in combination with a devscripts regression caused bts forwarded commands to be discarded.
  • Colin ported 12 more Python packages away from using the deprecated (and now removed upstream) pkg_resources module.
  • Anupa is co-organizing MiniDebConf Kanpur with Debian India team. Anupa was responsible for preparing the schedule, publishing it on the website, co-ordination with the fiscal host in addition to attending meetings.
  • Anupa attended the Debian Publicity team online sprint which was a skill sharing session.

17 February 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for January.

Activity summary During the month of January, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 33 DLAs fixing 216 CVEs. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below. Notable security updates:
  • python3.9, prepared by Andrej Shadura (DLA-4455-1), fixing multiple vulnerabilities in the Python interpreter.
  • php, prepared by Guilhem Moulin (DLA-4447-1), fixing two vulnerabilities that could yield to request forgery or denial of service.
  • apache2, prepared by Bastien Roucari s DLA-4452-1, fixing four CVEs.
  • linux-6.1, prepared by Ben Hutchings (DLA-4436-1), as a regular update of the linux 6.1 backport to Debian 11.
  • python-django, prepared by Chris Lamb (DLA-4458-1), resolving multiple vulnerabilities.
  • firefox-esr prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (DLA-4439-1)
  • gnupg2, prepared by Roberto S nchez (DLA-4437-1), fixing multiple issues, including CVE-2025-68973 that could potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code.
  • apache-log4j2, prepared by Markus Koschany (DLA-4444-1)
  • ceph, prepared by Utkarsh Gupta (DLA-4460-1)
  • inetutils, prepared by Andreas Henriksson (DLA-4453-1), fixing an authentication bypass in telnetd.
Moreover, Sylvain Beucler studied the security support status of p7zip, a fork of 7zip that has become unmaintained upstream. To avoid letting the users continue using an unsupported package, Sylvain has investigated a path forward in collaboration with the security team and the 7zip maintainer, looking to replace p7zip with 7zip. It is to note however that 7zip developers don t reveal the information about the patches that fix CVEs, making it difficult to backport single patches to fix vulnerabilities in Debian released versions. Contributions from outside the LTS Team: Thunderbird, prepared by maintainer Christoph Goehre. The DLA (DLA-4442-1) was published by Emilio. The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Bastien uploaded gpsd to unstable, and proposed updates for trixie #1126121 and bookworm #1126168 to fix two CVEs.
  • Bastien also prepared the imagemagick updates for trixie and bookworm, released as DSA-6111-1, along with the bullseye update DLA-4448-1.
  • Chris proposed a trixie point update for python-django (#112646), and the work for bookworm was completed in February (#1079454). The longstanding bookworm update required tracking down a regression in the django-storages packages.
  • Markus prepared tomcat10 updates for trixie and bookworm (DSA-6120-1), and tomcat11 for trixie (DSA-6121-1)
  • Thorsten Alteholz prepared bookworm point updates for zvbi (#1126167) to fix five CVEs; taglib (#1126273) to fix one CVE; and libuev (#1126370) to fix one CVE.
  • Utkarsh prepared an unstable update of node-lodash to fix one CVE.
Other than the work related to updates, Sylvain made several improvements to the documentation and tooling used by the team.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

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