The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Paride Legovini (paride)
• Ana Custura (acute)
• Felix Lechner (lechner)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sven Geuer
• H vard Flaget Aasen

Congratulations!

I d like to start making weekly reports again on my free software efforts. Part of the reason for these reports is for me to see how much time I m putting into free software. Hopefully I can keep these reports up.

Debian I have updated txtorcon (a Twisted-based asynchronous Tor control protocol implementation used by ooniprobe, magic-wormhole and tahoe-lafs) to its latest upstream version. I ve also added two new binary packages that are built by the txtorcon source package: python3-txtorcon and python-txtorcon-doc for Python 3 support and generated HTML documentation respectively. I have gone through the scapy (Python module for the forging and dissection of network packets) bugs and closed a couple that seem to have been silently fixed by new upstream releases and not been caught in the BTS. I ve uploaded a minor revision to include a patch that fixes the version number reported by scapy. I have prepared and uploaded a new package for measurement-kit (a portable C++11 network measurement library) from the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which at time of writing is still in the NEW queue. I have also updated ooniprobe (probe for the Open Observatory of Network Interference) to its latest upstream version. I have updated the Swedish debconf strings in the xastir (X Amateur Station Tracking and Information Reporting) package, thanks to the translators. I have updated the direwolf (soundcard terminal node controller for APRS) package to its latest upstream version and fixed the creation of the system user to run direwolf with systemd to happen at the time the package is installed. Unfortunately, it has been necessary to drop the PDF documentation from the package as I was unable to contact the upstream author and acquire the Microsoft Word sources for this release. I have reviewed and sponsored the uploads of the new packages comptext (GUI based tool to compare two text streams), comptty (GUI based tool to compare two radio teletype streams) and flnet (amateur radio net control station software) in the hamradio team. Thanks to Ana Custura for preparing those packages, comptext and comptty are now available in unstable. I have updated the Debian Hamradio Blend metapackages to include cubicsdr (a software defined radio receiver). This build also refreshes the list of packages that can now be included as they had not been packaged at the time of the last build. I have produced and uploaded an initial package for python-azure-devtools (development tools for Azure SDK and CLI for Python) and have updated python-azure (the Azure SDK for Python) to a recent git snapshot. Due to some issues with python-vcr it is currently not possible to run the test suite as part of the build process and I m watching the situation. I have also fixed the auto dependency generation for python3-azure, which had previously been broken. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #873036, #871940, #869566, #873083, #867420, #861753, #855385, #855497, #684727, #683711

Tor Project I have been working through tickets for Atlas (a tool for looking up details about Tor relays and bridges) and have merged and deployed a number of fixes. Some highlights include: bandwidth sorting in search results is now semantically correct (not just an alphanumeric sort ignoring units), added when a relay was first seen to the details page along with the host name if a reverse DNS record has been found for the IP address of the relay and added support for the NoEdConsensus flag (although happily no relays had this flag at the time this support was added). The metrics team has been working on merging projects into the metrics team website to give a unified view of information about the Tor network. This week I have been working towards a prototype of a port of Atlas to the metrics website s style and this work has been published in my personal Atlas git repository. If you d like to have a click around, you can do so. A relay operators meetup will be happening in Montreal on the 14th of October. I won t be present, but I have taken this opportunity to ask operators if there s anything that they would like from Atlas that they are not currently getting. Some feedback has already been received and turned into code and trac tickets. I also attended the weekly metrics team meeting in #tor-dev. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #6787, #9814, #21958, #21636, #23296, #23160

Sustainability I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report. I continue to be happy to spend my time on this work, however I do find myself in a position where it may not be sustainable when it comes to hardware. My desktop, a Sun Ultra 24, is now 10 years old and I m starting to see random reboots which so far have not been explained. It is incredibly annoying to have this happen during a long build. Further, the hard drives in my NAS which are used for the local backups and for my local Debian mirror are starting to show SMART errors. It is not currently within my budget to replace any of this hardware. Please contact me if you believe you can help.

This week's energy was provided by Club Mate

Last week saw the quiet upload of live-wrapper 0.4 to unstable. I would have blogged at the time, but there is another announcement coming later in this blog post that I wanted to make at the same time. live-wrapper is a wrapper around vmdebootstrap for producing bootable live images using Debian GNU/Linux. Accompanied by the live-tasks package in Debian, this provides the toolchain and configuration necessary for building live images using Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE and XFCE. There is also work ongoing to add a GNUstep image to this. Building a live image with live-wrapper is easy:

sudo apt install live-wrapper
sudo lwr

This will build you a file named output.iso in the current directory containing a minimal live-image. You can the test this in QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G -cdrom live.iso

You can find the latest documentation for live-wrapper here and any feedback you have is appreciated. So far it looks that booting from CD and USB with both ISOLINUX (BIOS) and GRUB (EFI) are all working as expected on real hardware. The second announcement that I wanted to accompany this announcement is that we will be running a vmdebootstrap sprint where we will be working on live-wrapper at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge. I will be working on installer integration while Ana Custura will be investigating bootloaders and their customisation. I d like to thank the Debian Project and those who have given donations to it for supporting our travel and accomodation costs for this sprint.

Last week saw the quiet upload of live-wrapper 0.4 to unstable. I would have blogged at the time, but there is another announcement coming later in this blog post that I wanted to make at the same time. live-wrapper is a wrapper around vmdebootstrap for producing bootable live images using Debian GNU/Linux. Accompanied by the live-tasks package in Debian, this provides the toolchain and configuration necessary for building live images using Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE and XFCE. There is also work ongoing to add a GNUstep image to this. Building a live image with live-wrapper is easy:

sudo apt install live-wrapper
sudo lwr

This will build you a file named output.iso in the current directory containing a minimal live-image. You can the test this in QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G -cdrom live.iso

You can find the latest documentation for live-wrapper here and any feedback you have is appreciated. So far it looks that booting from CD and USB with both ISOLINUX (BIOS) and GRUB (EFI) are all working as expected on real hardware. The second announcement that I wanted to accompany this announcement is that we will be running a vmdebootstrap sprint where we will be working on live-wrapper at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge. I will be working on installer integration while Ana Custura will be investigating bootloaders and their customisation. I d like to thank the Debian Project and those who have given donations to it for supporting our travel and accomodation costs for this sprint.

I'm currently in Vienna for MiniDebCamp and MiniDebConf at FH Technikum Wien, hosted as a part of Linuxwochen Wien. Today and yesterday have been spent hacking on Debian, and I've produced a few package updates and closed a few bugs.

Scapy The last update to Scapy in Debian was in August 2011. Bug #773554 was filed in 2014 to request a new upstream version be packaged and in a few days this bug should be closed. As this package is maintained by someone else and I'm performing a non-maintainer upload, the upload will sit in the delayed queue for 3 days. There has also been a Python 3 port of Scapy developed, and I've also packaged this (bug #822096). You will be able to install this version as python3-scapy and run it as /usr/bin/scapy3, which means it can fully co-exist with an installation of the original Python 2 version on the same system.

Hamradio Blend

• Carles Fernandez had produced an updated package for gnss-sdr and this has now been uploaded to unstable.
• Ana Custura produced an updated package for chirp and this has now been uploaded to unstable.
• I've made a couple of updates to the hamradio-maintguide and released version 0.2 of that documentation. This was simple changes for secure URIs for the Vcs-* fields and options for updating existing packages to new upstream versions using uscan, by tarball URL or by local tarball.

qtile qtile is a "full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written and configured in Python". I've been a big fan of tiling window managers for a few years now, starting with XMonad in 2013, moving to i3 and now I plan to move to qtile as I think its customisability and complete removal of window decorations will work well for me. I have now packaged qtile (bug #762637), and updated one of its dependencies (xcffib), and it will appear in unstable after passing ftp-master scrutiny.