Search Results: "Ben Hutchings"

14 February 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, 113.50 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation As expected, we had a small drop in the amount of hours sponsored. New sponsors (re-)joined but others stopped too (Gree this time) mostly balancing the result. We only lost 2 hours of sponsored work. It would be nice if we could invert that curve and actually start again to get closer to our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. Let s hope that the switch to wheezy as the version supported by the LTS team will motivate many companies relying on Debian 7 in their IT system. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month(17 packages in dla-needed.txt, 27 in the list of CVE). It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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5 February 2016

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2016

In January I carried over 10 hours from December and was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked a total of 15 hours. I had a few days on 'front desk' at the start of the month, as my week in that role spanned the new year. I fixed a regression in the kernel that was introduced to all stable suites in December. I uploaded this along with some minor security fixes, and issued DLA 378-1. I finished backporting and testing fixes to sudo for CVE-2015-5602. I uploaded an update and issued DLA 382-1, which was followed by DSA 3440-1 for wheezy and jessie. I finished backporting and testing fixes to Claws Mail for CVE-2015-8614 and CVE-2015-8708. I uploaded an update and issued DLA 383-1. This was followed by DSA 3452-1 for wheezy and jessie, although the issues are less serious there. I also apent a little time on InspIRCd, though this isn't a package that Freexian's customers care about and it seems to have been broken in squeeze for several years due to a latent bug in the build system. I had already backported the security fix by the time I discovered this, so I went ahead with an update fixing that regression as well, and issued DLA 384-1. Finally, I diagnosed the regression in the update to isc-dhcp in DLA 385-1.

17 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 38 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 10th and January 16th:

Toolchain fixes Benjamin Drung uploaded mozilla-devscripts/0.43 which sorts the file list in preferences files. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Lunar submitted an updated patch series to make timestamps in packages created by dpkg deterministic. To ensure that the mtimes in data.tar are reproducible, with the patches, dpkg-deb uses the --clamp-mtime option added in tar/1.28-1 when available. An updated package has been uploaded to the experimental repository. This removed the need for a modified debhelper as all required changes for reproducibility have been merged or are now covered by dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: angband-doc, bible-kjv, cgoban, gnugo, pachi, wmpuzzle, wmweather, wmwork, xfaces, xnecview, xscavenger, xtrlock, virt-top. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes:

reproducible.debian.net Once again, Vagrant Cascadian is providing another armhf build system, allowing to run 6 more armhf builder jobs, right there. (h01ger) Stop requiring a modified debhelper and adapt to the latest dpkg experimental version by providing a predetermined identifier for the .buildinfo filename. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New X.509 certificates were set up for jenkins.debian.net and reproducible.debian.net using Let's Encrypt!. Thanks to GlobalSign for providing certificates for the last year free of charge. (h01ger)

Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 32 updated in the previous week. FTBFS issues filled: 29. Thanks to Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issue identified: timestamps_in_manpages_added_by_golang_cobra.

Misc. Most of the minutes from the meetings held in Athens in December 2015 are now available to the public.

13 January 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, 113.50 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation We lost our first silver sponsor (Gandi.net, they prefer to give the same amount of money to Debian directly) and another sponsor reduced his sponsorship level. While this won t show in the hours dispatched in January, we will do a small jump backwards in February (unless we get new sponsors replacing those in the next 3 weeks). This is a bit unfortunate as we are rather looking at reinforcing the amount of sponsorship we get as we approach Wheezy LTS and we will need more support to properly support virtualization related packages and other packages that were formerly excluded from Squeeze LTS. Can you convince your company and help us reach our second goal? In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month. It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on). Thanks to our sponsors We got one new bronze sponsor but he s not listed (he did not fill the form where we request their permission to be listed).

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11 January 2016

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, December 2015

In December I carried over 15 hours from October/November and was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked a total of 20 hours despite the holidays. I uploaded a security and bug fix update to linux-2.6 early in December, and sent DLA-360-1. I also backported several more security fixes, released in the new year. I sent several of the fixes to Willy Tarreau for inclusion in Linux 2.6.32-longterm. I prepared an update to sudo to fix CVE-2015-5602. This turned out not to have been properly fixed upstream, so I finished the job and am now in the process of backporting and uploading fixes for all suites. I reviewed the packages affected by CVE-2015-8614 and the upstream fix in claws-mail, and found that that was also incomplete. This resulted in another CVE ID being issued. I had another week in the front desk role, over the new year, and triaged about 20 new issues. About half of them affected packages supported in squeeze-lts. Updated: I also found a bug in the contact-maintainers script used by the LTS front desk. It used apt-cache show to find out the maintainers of a source package, which may result in outdated information particularly if you configure APT to fetch squeeze sources in order to work on LTS! I modified the script to grab maintainer information out of the RDF description provided by packages.qa.debian.org (not yet implemented on tracker.debian.org). I feel there ought to be an easier way to do this, but at least I learned something about RDF.

29 December 2015

Ben Hutchings: Comparing dracut and initramfs-tools

initramfs-tools version 0.121~rc2 and dracut version 044+3-2 have moved most of what was in their main binary packages into a 'core' package (dracut-core, initramfs-tools-core), leaving only automation hooks in the main package. The core packages can be coinstalled without conflicts and without creating any initramfs images at installation time. If you're been wondering how they compare but were afraid to break your system by overwriting your current working initramfs, now is the time to try the other option. Testing dracut, for initramfs-tools users
  1. Install dracut-core from unstable.
  2. Make an alternate initramfs image by running:
    dracut /boot/initrd.img-$(uname -r).dracut
  3. Add an entry to the boot loader configuration that uses your current kernel and the alternate initramfs image. (In GRUB, you can do this interactively at boot time.)
  4. Reboot through the new boot entry.
  5. In case of problems, check the dracut(8) and dracut.conf(5) manual pages.
By default, dracut creates an initramfs suitable for the current hardware, which will not boot if you move the disk to a system that requires different drivers. This is controlled by the hostonly configuration variable or --hostonly command-line option. Testing initramfs-tools, for dracut users
  1. Install initramfs-tools-core from experimental.
  2. Make an alternate initramfs image by running:
    mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-$(uname -r).i-t
  3. Add an entry to the boot loader configuration that uses your current kernel and the alternate initramfs image. (In GRUB, you can do this interactively at boot time.)
  4. Reboot through the new boot entry.
  5. In case of problems, check the mkinitramfs(8) and initramfs.conf(5) manual pages.
By default, initramfs-tools creates an initramfs suitable for most hardware, which will still boot if you move the disk to a system that requires different drivers. This is controlled by the MODULES configuration variable.

27 December 2015

Ben Hutchings: What's new in initramfs-tools

I spent much of my Debian time in the last few weeks triaging and fixing bugs in initramfs-tools. All of the important bugs should be fixed, except for two where I needed more information from the submitter. Due to the scope of these changes and potential for regressions, I've made a release candidate, version 0.121~rc2, rather than a full release. This is now available in experimental, and I would appreciate real-world testing feedback in the next few weeks. (If you're wondering what happened to rc1, that had 'unstable' as the distribution, which I didn't notice until after pushing the tag.) From the release announcement, the major changes are: Thanks to Andy Whitcroft, Boris Egorov, Laurent Bigonville, Roger Leigh, Roger Shimizu and Salvatore Bonaccorso for their patches which I applied in this version.

14 December 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In November, 114.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation We lost one hour of funding for December due to a sponsor not renewing, and we don t have any new sponsor lined up right now. There s another sponsor who will reduce his sponsorship starting with 2016. While the situation is relatively healthy right now, we should continue the efforts to find new sponsors, both to ensure we can cover more software in wheezy and to better share the costs: having many small sponsors is more resilient than relying on a few big ones. And we still haven t reached our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 19 packages awaiting an update (2 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (1 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

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11 December 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, November 2015

I've now been working on Debian LTS for a full year, so I'm going to stop counting months. In November, I carried over 5 hours from October and was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. However, I spent much of the month on sick leave, so I only worked 5 billable hours on Debian LTS plus some unbilled time while on leave. I had another week in the front desk role, and triaged about 20 new issues. Less than half actually affected packages supported in squeeze-lts, and only about 5 were important. CVE-2015-5309 in putty had a patch that was fairly easy to backport, so I did that, uploaded and sent DLA 347-1. I backported several security fixes to linux-2.6 and sent some of those we had already released to Willy Tarreau for inclusion in Linux 2.6.32-longterm. At the end of the month, I reviewed Linux 2.6.32.69-rc1 and found a couple of bugs, leading to an -rc2. I applied that to the linux-2.6 packaging branch for squeeze-lts and spent a little time testing it, thankfully not hitting any regressions.

13 November 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 85.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation November crossed a new record with 114.5 hours funded. This is mainly thanks to our first Platinum sponsor: TOSHIBA (through Toshiba Software Development Vietnam). They don t know yet if they can sponsor us in the long term (they hope so), but it s still a nice news as we jumped from 50% to 65% of the objective of the equivalent of a full-time position with a single new sponsor. Currently no change is expected for next month as we don t have any other new sponsor in the process of joining us. We still need more support to be able to support all the packages we could not afford to support during the squeeze cycle. We are currently discussing which package we can or cannot support on the LTS list, see the thread Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS for the current situation. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 21 packages awaiting an update (6 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (exactly like last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

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9 November 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, October 2015

For my 11th month working on Debian LTS, I carried over 5.5 hours from September and was assigned another 13.5 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked 14 of a possible 19 hours. As I mentioned in the report for September, I uploaded binutils and issued DLA-324-1 early in October. I fixed a few security issues in the kernel, uploaded and issued DLA-325-1. I had some email discussions about long-term support of the Linux kernel with Willy Tarreau (Linux 2.6.32 maintainer) and Greg Kroah-Hartman (overall stable maintainer). Greg normally selects one version per year to maintain as a 'longterm' branch for 2 years, after which he may hand it over to another maintainer. A few upstream versions have received long-term support entirely from another developer. We were in agreement that it's desirable to have fewer of these branches with more developers and distributions contributing to each, but didn't come to a conclusion about how to coordinate this. The topic came up again at the Kernel Summit, and Greg then agreed to select the first kernel version of each calendar year, starting with Linux 4.4 (expected in January). This doesn't fit well with Debian's current release schedule, but I mean to discuss with the release team whether the freeze date can be set to allow inclusion of 2017's LTS kernel. I spent another week in the 'front desk' role, where I triaged new security issues for squeeze. There was a mixture of serious and trivial, old and new (not affecting squeeze) issues. The many ntp issues announced in October were fixed in unstable by a new upstream release. I spent a long time digging out the specific commits that fixed them and comparing with the older version in squeeze. Several of the issues had been introduced in ntp 4.2.7 or 4.2.8 and therefore didn't affect squeeze (or the newer stable releases). Of the fixes that were needed, most applied with minimal changes. Having prepared an update, I asked the ntp maintainer, Kurt Roeckx, to review my work. (The package has a limited test suite and none of the fixes added new tests.) Following this review he added a few more patches, uploaded and issued DLA-335-1. MySQL 5.1, as shipped in squeeze, no longer receives security support from upstream, and the security fixes they do issue are mixed with other changes that make it impractical to backport them. The LTS team is planning to backport the mysql-5.5 package to squeeze while avoiding conflicts with the binaries built from mysql-5.1. Santiago Ruano Rinc n has prepared a backport and I spent some time reviewing this, but haven't yet sent my review comments.

2 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 27 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: maven-plugin-tools, norwegian, ocaml-melt, python-biom-format, rivet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: The following package is currently failing to build from source but should now be reproducible: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A quick update on current statistics: testing is at 85% of packages tested reproducible with our modified packages, unstable on armhf caught up with amd64 with 80%. The schroot name used for running diffoscope when testing OpenWrt, NetBSD, Coreboot, and Arch Linux has been fixed. (h01ger, Mattia Rizzolo) Documentation update Paul Gevers documented timestamps in unit files created by the Free Pascal Compiler. reproducible-builds.org is now live. It contains a comprehensive documentation on all aspects that have been identified so far of what we call reproducible builds . It makes room for pointers to projects working on reproducible builds, news, dedicated tools, and community events. Package reviews 206 reviews have been removed, 171 added and 196 updated this week. Chris Lamb reported 28 failing to build from source issues. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_pdf_content, different_encoding_in_html_by_docbook_xsl, timestamps_in_ppu_generated_by_fpc, method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc. Misc. Andrei Borzenkov has proposed a fix for uninitialized memory in GRUB's mkimage. Uninitialized memory is one source of hard to track down reproducibility errors. Holger Levsen presented the efforts on reproduible builds at Festival de Software Libre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

16 October 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 71.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation October is back to the highest level of funding with 85.5 hours funded. The late sponsors have all caught up now. And next month will again rise to a new record with multiple sponsors having joined up. So far we already have two new silver sponsors (Universit Jean Monnet de Saint- tienne and Univention GmbH) and a new bronze sponsor (Entr ouvert). Many thanks to them! With those sponsors we crossed the 50% mark that was our first objective. \o/ But we still need more support to reach our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full time position. That said the increased level of support already allows us to do a better job in some areas that have been neglected : I asked the paid contributors to work towards providing mysql-5.5 in squeeze since version 5.1 is no longer supported by Oracle. We need beta testers to test the upgrade, see this message on the mailling list. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 15 packages awaiting an update (3 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (7 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

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7 October 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, September 2015

For my 10th month working on Debian LTS, I was assigned 14.5 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked for 9 hours. Front desk I had another week in the 'front desk' role, where I triaged new security issues for squeeze. Happily, few of them affected squeeze. linux-2.6 I reviewed a new upstream stable update, 2.6.32.68, and then applied it to our package once it was released. I backported a further 3 security fixes, uploaded the package and issued DLA-310-1. binutils binutils had several buffer overflow bugs to be fixed. They aren't very likely to be exploitable as most users won't be processing untrusted input with binutils. Nevertheless, I backported the fixes from upstream and (early this month) issued DLA-324-1.

4 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 23 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Andreas Metzler uploaded autogen/1:5.18.6-1 in experimental with several patches for reproducibility issues written by Valentin Lorentz. Groovy upstream has merged a change proposed by Emmanuel Bourg to remove timestamps generated by groovydoc. Ben Hutchings submitted a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in linux-kbuild as an alternate way to specify the build timestamp. Reiner Herrman has sent a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in docbook-utils. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: commons-csv. fest-reflect, sunxi-tools, xfce4-terminal, The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Tomasz Rybak uploaded pycuda/2015.1.3-1 which should fix reproducibility issues. The package has not been tested as it is in contrib. akira found an embedded code copy of texi2html in fftw. reproducible.debian.net Email notifications are now only sent once a day per package, instead of on each status change. (h01ger) disorderfs has been temporarily disabled to see if it had any impact on the disk space issues. (h01ger) When running out of disk space, build nodes will now automatically detect the problem. This means test results will not be recorded as FTBFS and the problem will be reported to Jenkins maintainers. (h01ger) The navigation menu of package pages has been improved. (h01ger) The two amd64 builders now use two different kernel versions: 3.16 from stable and 4.1 from backports on the other. (h01ger) We now graph the number of packages which needs to be fixed. (h01ger) Munin now creates graphs on how many builds were performed by build nodes (example). (h01ger) A migration plan has been agreed with DSA on how to turn Jenkins into an official Debian service. A backport of jenkins-job-builder for Jessie is currently missing. (h01ger) Package reviews 119 reviews have been removed, 103 added and 45 updated this week. 16 fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Mattia Rizzolo. New issue this week: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_docbook_utils. Misc. Allan McRae has submitted a patch to make ArchLinux pacman record a .BUILDINFO file.

27 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 22 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 22 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: breathe, cdi-api, geronimo-jpa-2.0-spec, geronimo-validation-1.0-spec, gradle-propdeps-plugin, jansi, javaparser, libjsr311-api-java, mac-widgets, mockito, mojarra, pastescript, plexus-utils2, powerline, python-psutil, python-sfml, python-tldap, pythondialog, tox, trident, truffle, zookeeper. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: diffoscope development The changes to make diffoscope run under Python 3, along with many small fixes, entered the archive with version 35 on September 21th. Another release was made the very next day fixed two encoding-related issues discovered when running diffoscope on more Debian packages. strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.12.0 now preserves file permissions on modified zip files and dh_strip_nondeterminism has been made compatible with older debhelper. disorderfs development Version 0.3.0 implemented a multi-user mode that was required to build Debian packages using disorderfs. It also added command line options to control the ordering of files in directory (either shuffled or reversed) and another to do arbitrary changes to the reported space used by files on disk. A couple days later, version 0.4.0 was released to support locks, flush, fsync, fsyncdir, read_buf, and write_buf. Almost all known issues have now been fixed. reproducible.debian.net disorderfs is now used during the second build. This makes file ordering issue very easy to identify as such. (h01ger) Work has been done on making the distributed build setup more reliable. (h01ger) Documentation update Matt Kraii fixed the example on how to fix issues related to dates in Sphinx. Recent Sphinx versions should also be compatible with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Package reviews 53 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 13 updated this week. 46 packages failing to build from source has been identified by Chris Lamb, Chris West, and Niko Tyni. Chris Lamb was the lucky reporter of bug #800000 on vdr-plugin-prefermenu. Issues related to disorderfs are being tracked with a new issue.

21 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 21 in Stretch cycle

If you see someone on the Debian ReproducibleBuilds project, buy him/her a beer. This work is awesome. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Nathan Willis covered our DebConf15 status update in Linux Weekly News. Access to non-LWN subscribers will be given on Thursday 24th. Linux Journal published a more general piece last Tuesday. Unexpected praise for reproducible builds appeared this week in the form of several iOS applications identified as including spyware. The malware was undetected by Apple screening. This actually happened because application developers had simply downloaded a trojaned version of XCode through an unofficial source. While reproducible builds can't really help users of non-free software, this is exactly the kind of attacks that we are trying to prevent in our systems. Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote and uploaded a better patch for the source order problem in libmodule-build-perl. Tristan Seligmann identified how the code generated by python-cffi could be emitted in random order in some cases. Upstream has already fixed the problem. Packages fixed The following 24 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-curator, checkbox-ng, gant, gnome-clocks, hawtjni, jackrabbit, jersey1, libjsr305-java, mathjax-docs, mlpy, moap, octave-geometry, paste, pdf.js, pyinotify, pytango, python-asyncssh, python-mock, python-openid, python-repoze.who, shadow, swift, tcpwatch-httpproxy, transfig. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Tests for Coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, and FreeBSD now runs weekly (instead of monthly). diffoscope development Python 3 offers new features (namely yield from and concurrent.futures) that could help implement parallel processing. The clear separation of bytes and unicode strings is also likely to reduce encoding related issues. Mattia Rizolo thus kicked the effort of porting diffoscope to Python 3. tlsh was the only dependency missing a Python 3 module. This got quickly fixed by a new upload. The rest of the code has been moved to the point where only incompatibilities between Python 2.7 and Pyhon 3.4 had to be changed. The commit stream still require some cleanups but all tests are now passing under Python 3. Documentation update The documentation on how to assemble the weekly reports has been updated. (Lunar) The example on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with CMake has been improved. (Ben Beockel, Daniel Kahn Gillmor) The solution for timestamps in man pages generated by Sphinx now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Mattia Rizzolo) Package reviews 45 reviews have been removed, 141 added and 62 updated this week. 67 new FTBFS reports have been filled by Chris Lamb, Niko Tyni, and Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer. New issues added this week: randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, python-ply_compiled_parse_tables. Misc. The prebuilder script is now properly testing umask variations again. Santiago Villa started a discussion on debian-devel on how binNMUs would work for reproducible builds.

17 September 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In August, 71.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation September is stable compared to August (71.50 hours per month) and has not caught up back to the level of July as I hoped. Again it s because 2 sponsors were not able to pay their renewal invoice on time (one of last month paid, but another bigger sponsor failed this month). Those sponsors will continue to support us and I would like to be able to say that things will be back to normal next month, but I can t say it since we have also been informed of the (hopefully temporary) defection of another bronze sponsor that will affect us next month. Fortunately there are also good news, we have 3 new sponsors in the pipe (2 silver, 1 platinum) who shall join the project soon. And Blablacar increased their support from Silver to Gold (from 4h/month to 8h/month). But we still need more support in particular since we would like to commit to support virtualization related packages in Wheezy: that s clearly an objective for us. I recently published the summary of the work session held during DebConf 15 in Heidelberg (video recording). It would be really nice if we could get closer to the goal of funding a full-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 18 packages awaiting an update (2 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 30 affected packages in total (8 more than last month). Thanks to our sponsors

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16 September 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, August 2015

This was my ninth month working on Debian LTS. I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. Front desk I spent another week in the 'front desk' role, largely overlapping with DebConf. I investigated which new CVEs affected LTS-supported packages in squeeze, recorded this in the secure-testing repository, and mailed the package maintainers to give them a chance to handle the updates. I found that one claimed security flaw in glusterfs was actually harmless for all supported Debian releases. conntrack conntrack had one new issue (CVE-2015-6496, possible remote DoS if certain kernel modules aren't loaded). I didn't find a way to reproduce it, but it still seemed to be applicable to squeeze (but for fewer protocols). I was able to backport the upstream fix without difficulty, after which I uploaded and issued DLA-295-1. DebConf I attended the LTS BoF at DebConf 15 to discuss the plans for wheezy LTS. Raphael just posted a summary of these discussions. linux-2.6 I spent some time on kernel security fixes, but haven't uploaded an update yet. That will probably come in September.

6 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 19 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-6 with improved patches from Val Lorentz. Chris Lamb submitted a patch for ibus-table which makes the output of ibus-table-createdb deterministic. Niko Tyni wrote a patch to make libmodule-build-perl linking order deterministic. Santiago Vila has been leading discussions on the best way to fix timestamps coming from Gettext POT files. Packages fixed The following 35 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-log4j2, dctrl-tools, dms, gitit, gnubik, isrcsubmit, mailutils, normaliz, oaklisp, octave-fpl, octave-specfun, octave-vrml, opencolorio, openvdb, pescetti, php-guzzlehttp, proofgeneral, pyblosxom, pyopencl, pyqi, python-expyriment, python-flask-httpauth, python-mzml, python-simpy, python-tidylib, reactive-streams, scmxx, shared-mime-info, sikuli, siproxd, srtp, tachyon, tcltk-defaults, urjtag, velvet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: The package is not in yet in unstable, but linux/4.2-1~exp1 is now reproducible! Kudos to Ben Hutchings, and most fixes are already merged upstream. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Some bugs that prevented packages to build successfully in the remote builders have been fixed. (h01ger) Two more amd64 build jobs have been removed from the Jenkins host in favor of six more on the new remote nodes. (h01ger) The munin graphs currently looks fine, so more amd64 jobs will probably be added in the next week. diffoscope development Version 32 of diffoscope has been released on September 3rd with the following new features: It also fixes many bugs. Head over to the changelog for the full list. Version 33 was released the day after to fix a bug introduced in the packaging. Documentation update Chris Lamb blessed the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification with the version number 1.0 . Lunar documented how the .file assembler directive can help with random filenames in debug symbols. Package reviews 235 reviews have been removed, 84 added and 277 updated this week. 29 new FTBFS bugs were filled by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), Daniel Stender, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: random_order_in_ibus_table_createdb_output, random_order_in_antlr_output, nondetermistic_link_order_in_module_build, and timestamps_in_tex_documents. Misc. Thanks to Dhole and Thomas Vincent, the talk held at DebConf15 now has subtitles! Void Linux started to merge changes to make packages produced by xbps reproducible.

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