In the past I was not blogging small things if they were not worth a full blog entry on their own (or if I did not have the time to make up a full entry of it :). Inspired by the example of
Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> with
"News for Debian developers" for
<debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org>, I am intending to do the same on a monthly basis about my own Debian related work. This first entry about January 2008 also covers a few things from the last month of 2007.
General News
- Trusted Computing
After having taken over some rotting ITP bugs, Debian has now all the important packages to support Trusted Computing on platforms containing a TPM chip. The packages are not in good enough quality for release, but there is still some time left to fix that. Looking forward to make lenny supporting TPM properly out of the box, as well as aiming for making Debian the best TPM enabled distribution available.
Currently, the TSS software stack consists of trousers, tpm-tools, opencryptoki, libengine-tpm-openssl, and ecryptfs-utils.
- Smartcards
I am using smartcards since a while to hold GnuPG, LUKS, and OpenSSL keys/certificates. Thanks to Jonas Meurer <mejo@debian.org> for applying a fix and a patch of mine to cryptsetup. Together with my uploads of gnupg-pkcs11-scd, pam-pkcs11 and pcsc-omnikey, I can now use Debian out of the box with smartcards for authentification, not relaying on patched or private packages anymore.
The next aim is to integrate smartcard support into debian-installer. It should be possible to use/store keys or certificates for encrypted filesystems directly from/to a smartcard during installation time.
Package News
- botan-devel
The Botan library is maintained upstream in a stable release branch and a development release branch. Before, I was uploading as versioned source packages, botan1.4 and botan1.5. To be a bit more consistent, the two source packages are named botan and botan-devel now.
- gitosis
Tommi Virtanen <tv@eagain.net> has written a marvelous tool to securely manage hosted git repositories, named gitosis. Having always looked for an elegant sollution to maintain git repositories through push/pull over SSH only, this package made an excellent addition to the Debian archive.
- gnunet
GNUnet, more precisely the gnunet, gnunet-gtk and gnunet-qt packages where mainly maintained the last years by Arnaud Kyheng <Arnaud.Kyheng@free.fr> with me playing co-maintainer.
Arnaud has become busy within the last months, so I took over a more active role on its maintenance. Currently, all gnunet related packages are in sync and in its latest upstream version available in the archive. There is even a new sibling, gnunet-fuse.
- icedove-l10n
After one and a half year of pushing its maintainer without any effect at all, I finally took over the unmaintained icedove-locales package in October 2007. I immediately changed the package to the proper naming scheme (icedove-l10n-*) which was an outstanding issue since August 2006.
In the last weeks, I have added unofficial localizations for Galizian, Nepali and Ukrainian, now supporting 38 localizations in total. Icedove localizations are now in good shape again, always matching the Icedove version and no longer lagging behind.
- iceowl-l10n
Following iceweasel-l10n and icedove-l10n, there are finally also localizations for iceowl (Mozilla Sunbird) available. Populating packages for iceowl-extension (Mozilla Lightning) from the same source package is a bit trickier package-wise, but will be available soon too.
- iceweasel-l10n
In September 2007, Robert Milan <rmh@debian.org> on behalf of the Catalan/Valencian Debian translator team asked me to remove the iceweasel-l10n-roa-es-val package. Unfortunately, this localization is related to a long standing cultural and political dispute between the Catalan speaking Spanish people and the City of Valencia. Additionally, the localization itself is of poor quality. Of course, I removed the package in unstable immediately and prepared an upload for stable at the same time.
As usual, me asking something on debian-release results in first beeing ignored, then denied and third, two month after my request, beeing privately asked to upload nevertheless. This is one of the reasons I sometimes fully understand fellow maintainers not carring about stable at all anymore, it has become indeed too much of a hassle.
- traceroute
For the last decade, Debian was shipping an implementation of traceroute originating from BSD. After I took over the package in late 2006, it became clear to me that Debian should not maintain its very own version of traceroute. Therefore, I replaced traceroute in August 2007 with an implementation from Dmitry K. Butskoy <Dmitry@Butskoy.name>. Apart from the fact, that this modern implementation is better in every way (faster, cleaner, less bugs), it has an active upstream maintainer and is used by different other Linux distributions too.
- syslinux
Thanks to the work of Robert Milan <rmh@debian.org>, syslinux has now 64-bit CPU detection in unstable (2:3.55-2) and experimental (2:3.60-2) again.
Team News
- Debian Forensics
Unfortunately, Debian has at the moment very few forensic related packages in the archive.
Christophe Monniez <dfence.242@gmail.com> maintains a lot of forensic related packages on behalf of his Debian based forensic LiveCD. Beeing interested to see them in Debian, I am mentoring him now how to merge them properly into Debian where possible, and maintain them in the official archive. We have formed an Alioth project for this purpose. Packages are maintained in git, everyone is welcome to join.
- Debian Website
After having offered my help to maintain the Debian Consultants list, I got added to the webwml team. Doing Debian consultancy myself, this is just another way of helping out Debian from time to time by adding, removing and updating some entries of like-minded people in a list.