Search Results: "Colin Watson"

12 May 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2025

Welcome to our fourth report from the Reproducible Builds project in 2025. These monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. Lastly, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. reproduce.debian.net
  2. Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security
  3. 4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop
  4. Mailing list updates
  5. Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java
  6. OSS Rebuild adds new TUI features
  7. Distribution roundup
  8. diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism
  9. Website updates
  10. Reproducibility testing framework
  11. Upstream patches

reproduce.debian.net The last few months have seen the introduction, development and deployment of reproduce.debian.net. In technical terms, this is an instance of rebuilderd, our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results there. This month, however, we are pleased to announce that reproduce.debian.net now tests all the Debian trixie architectures except s390x and mips64el. The ppc64el architecture was added through the generous support of Oregon State University Open Source Laboratory (OSUOSL), and we can support the armel architecture thanks to CodeThink.

Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security Russ Cox has published a must-read article in ACM Queue on Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security. Subtitled, For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it s very real. , Russ article goes on to outline the history and original goals of software supply-chain security in the US military in the early 1970s, all the way to the XZ Utils backdoor of 2024. Through that lens, Russ explores the problem and how it has changed, and hasn t changed, over time. He concludes as follows:
We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it s very real. Modern programming environments such as Go, Node and Rust have made it trivial to reuse work by others, but our instincts about responsible behaviors have not yet adapted to this new reality. We all have more work to do.

4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop Convened as part of the CHAINS research project at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, the 4th CHAINS Software Supply Chain Workshop occurred during April. During the workshop, there were a number of relevant workshops, including: The full listing of the agenda is available on the workshop s website.

Mailing list updates On our mailing list this month:
  • Luca DiMaio of Chainguard posted to the list reporting that they had successfully implemented reproducible filesystem images with both ext4 and an EFI system partition. They go on to list the various methods, and the thread generated at least fifteen replies.
  • David Wheeler announced that the OpenSSF is building a glossary of sorts in order that they consistently use the same meaning for the same term and, moreover, that they have drafted a definition for reproducible build . The thread generated a significant number of replies on the definition, leading to a potential update to the Reproducible Build s own definition.
  • Lastly, kpcyrd posted to the list with a timely reminder and update on their repro-env tool. As first reported in our July 2023 report, kpcyrd mentions that:
    My initial interest in reproducible builds was how do I distribute pre-compiled binaries on GitHub without people raising security concerns about them . I ve cycled back to this original problem about 5 years later and built a tool that is meant to address this. [ ]

Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java Aman Sharma, Benoit Baudry and Martin Monperrus have published a new scholarly study related to reproducible builds within Java. Titled Canonicalization for Unreproducible Builds in Java, the article s abstract is as follows:
[ ] Achieving reproducibility at scale remains difficult, especially in Java, due to a range of non-deterministic factors and caveats in the build process. In this work, we focus on reproducibility in Java-based software, archetypal of enterprise applications. We introduce a conceptual framework for reproducible builds, we analyze a large dataset from Reproducible Central and we develop a novel taxonomy of six root causes of unreproducibility. We study actionable mitigations: artifact and bytecode canonicalization using OSS-Rebuild and jNorm respectively. Finally, we present Chains-Rebuild, a tool that raises reproducibility success from 9.48% to 26.89% on 12,283 unreproducible artifacts. To sum up, our contributions are the first large-scale taxonomy of build unreproducibility causes in Java, a publicly available dataset of unreproducible builds, and Chains-Rebuild, a canonicalization tool for mitigating unreproducible builds in Java.
A full PDF of their article is available from arXiv.

OSS Rebuild adds new TUI features OSS Rebuild aims to automate rebuilding upstream language packages (e.g. from PyPI, crates.io and npm registries) and publish signed attestations and build definitions for public use. OSS Rebuild ships a text-based user interface (TUI) for viewing, launching, and debugging rebuilds. While previously requiring ownership of a full instance of OSS Rebuild s hosted infrastructure, the TUI now supports a fully local mode of build execution and artifact storage. Thanks to Giacomo Benedetti for his usage feedback and work to extend the local-only development toolkit. Another feature added to the TUI was an experimental chatbot integration that provides interactive feedback on rebuild failure root causes and suggests fixes.

Distribution roundup In Debian this month:
  • Roland Clobus posted another status report on reproducible ISO images on our mailing list this month, with the summary that all live images build reproducibly from the online Debian archive .
  • Debian developer Simon Josefsson published another two reproducibility-related blog posts this month, the first on the topic of Verified Reproducible Tarballs. Simon sardonically challenges the reader as follows: Do you want a supply-chain challenge for the Easter weekend? Pick some well-known software and try to re-create the official release tarballs from the corresponding Git checkout. Is anyone able to reproduce anything these days? After that, they also published a blog post on Building Debian in a GitLab Pipeline using their multi-stage rebuild approach.
  • Roland also posted to our mailing list to highlight that there is now another tool in Debian that generates reproducible output, equivs . This is a tool to create trivial Debian packages that might Depend on other packages. As Roland writes, building the [equivs] package has been reproducible for a while, [but] now the output of the [tool] has become reproducible as well .
  • Lastly, 9 reviews of Debian packages were added, 10 were updated and 10 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues.
The IzzyOnDroid Android APK repository made more progress in April. Thanks to funding by NLnet and Mobifree, the project was also to put more time into their tooling. For instance, developers can now easily run their own verification builder in less than 5 minutes . This currently supports Debian-based systems, but support for RPM-based systems is incoming.
  • The rbuilder_setup tool can now setup the entire framework within less than five minutes. The process is configurable, too, so everything from just the basics to verify builds up to a fully-fledged RB environment is also possible.
  • This tool works on Debian, RedHat and Arch Linux, as well as their derivates. The project has received successful reports from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and some Arch Linux derivates so far.
  • Documentation on how to work with reproducible builds (making apps reproducible, debugging unreproducible packages, etc) is available in the project s wiki page.
  • Future work is also in the pipeline, including documentation, guidelines and helpers for debugging.
NixOS defined an Outreachy project for improving build reproducibility. In the application phase, NixOS saw some strong candidates providing contributions, both on the NixOS side and upstream: guider-le-ecit analyzed a libpinyin issue. Tessy James fixed an issue in arandr and helped analyze one in libvlc that led to a proposed upstream fix. Finally, 3pleX fixed an issue which was accepted in upstream kitty, one in upstream maturin, one in upstream python-sip and one in the Nix packaging of python-libbytesize. Sadly, the funding for this internship fell through, so NixOS were forced to abandon their search. Lastly, in openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for their work there.

diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading a number of versions to Debian:
  • Use the --walk argument over the potentially dangerous alternative --scan when calling out to zipdetails(1). [ ]
  • Correct a longstanding issue where many >-based version tests used in conditional fixtures were broken. This was used to ensure that specific tests were only run when the version on the system was newer than a particular number. Thanks to Colin Watson for the report (Debian bug #1102658) [ ]
  • Address a long-hidden issue in the test_versions testsuite as well, where we weren t actually testing the greater-than comparisons mentioned above, as it was masked by the tests for equality. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ]
In strip-nondeterminism, however, Holger Levsen updated the Continuous Integration (CI) configuration in order to use the standard Debian pipelines via debian/salsa-ci.yml instead of using .gitlab-ci.yml. [ ]

Website updates Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month including:
  • Aman Sharma added OSS-Rebuild s stabilize tool to the Tools page. [ ][ ]
  • Chris Lamb added a configure.ac (GNU Autotools) example for using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]. Chris also updated the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH snippet and move the archive metadata to a more suitable location. [ ]
  • Denis Carikli added GNU Boot to our ever-evolving Projects page.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In April, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related:
    • Add armel.reproduce.debian.net to support the armel architecture. [ ][ ]
    • Add a new ARM node, codethink05. [ ][ ]
    • Add ppc64el.reproduce.debian.net to support testing of the ppc64el architecture. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve the reproduce.debian.net front page. [ ][ ]
    • Make various changes to the ppc64el nodes. [ ][ ]9[ ][ ]
    • Make various changes to the arm64 and armhf nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Various changes related to the rebuilderd-worker entry point. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Create and deploy a pkgsync script. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Fix the monitoring of the riscv64 architecture. [ ][ ]
    • Make a number of changes related to starting the rebuilderd service. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Backup-related:
    • Backup the rebuilder databases every week. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve the node health checks. [ ][ ]
  • Misc:
    • Re-use existing connections to the SSH proxy node on the riscv64 nodes. [ ][ ]
    • Node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]
In addition:
  • Jochen Sprickerhof fixed the risvc64 host names [ ] and requested access to all the rebuilderd nodes [ ].
  • Mattia Rizzolo updated the self-serve rebuild scheduling tool, replacing the deprecated SSO -style authentication with OpenIDC which authenticates against salsa.debian.org. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus updated the configuration for the osuosl3 node to designate 4 workers for bigger builds. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf 25 preparations, PyPA tools updates, Removing libcrypt-dev from build-essential and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-04 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.

DebConf 25 Preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 25 preparations continue. In April, the bursary team reviewed and ranked bursary applications. Santiago Ruano Rinc n examined the current state of the conference s finances, to see if we could allocate any more money to bursaries. Stefano Rivera supported the bursary team s work with infrastructure and advice and added some metrics to assist Santiago s budget review. Santiago was also involved in different parts of the organization, including Content team matters, as reviewing the first of proposals, preparing public information about the new Academic Track; or coordinating different aspects of the Day trip activities and the Conference Dinner.

PyPA tools updates, by Stefano Rivera Around the beginning of the freeze (in retrospect, definitely too late) Stefano looked at updating setuptools in the archive to 78.1.0. This brings support for more comprehensive license expressions (PEP-639), that people are expected to adopt soon upstream. While the reverse-autopkgtests all passed, it all came with some unexpected complications, and turned into a mini-transition. The new setuptools broke shebangs for scripts (pypa/setuptools#4952). It also required a bump of wheel to 0.46 and wheel 0.46 now has a dependency outside the standard library (it de-vendored packaging). This meant it was no longer suitable to distribute a standalone wheel.whl file to seed into new virtualenvs, as virtualenv does by default. The good news here is that setuptools doesn t need wheel any more, it included its own implementation of the bdist_wheel command, in 70.1. But the world hadn t adapted to take advantage of this, yet. Stefano scrambled to get all of these issues resolved upstream and in Debian: We re now at the point where python3-wheel-whl is no longer needed in Debian unstable, and it should migrate to trixie.

Removing libcrypt-dev from build-essential, by Helmut Grohne The crypt function was originally part of glibc, but it got separated to libxcrypt. As a result, libc6-dev now depends on libcrypt-dev. This poses a cycle during architecture cross bootstrap. As the number of packages actually using crypt is relatively small, Helmut proposed removing the dependency. He analyzed an archive rebuild kindly performed by Santiago Vila (not affiliated with Freexian) and estimated the necessary changes. It looks like we may complete this with modifications to less than 300 source packages in the forky cycle. Half of the bugs have been filed at this time. They are tracked with libcrypt-* usertags.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles uploaded a new version of simplemonitor.
  • Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci-team/pipeline regarding piuparts arguments.
  • Carles closed an FTBFS on gcc-15 on qnetload.
  • Carles worked on Catalan translations using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 57 translations and created their merge requests in salsa, created 59 bug reports for packages that didn t merge in more than 30 days. Followed-up merge requests and comments in bug reports. Managed some translations manually for packages that are not in Salsa.
  • Lucas did some work on the DebConf Content and Bursary teams.
  • Lucas fixed multiple CVEs and bugs involving the upgrade from bookworm to trixie in ruby3.3.
  • Lucas fixed a CVE in valkey in unstable.
  • Stefano updated beautifulsoup4, python-authlib, python-html2text, python-packaging, python-pip, python-soupsieve, and unidecode.
  • Stefano packaged python-dependency-groups, a new vendored library in python-pip.
  • During an afternoon Bug Squashing Party in Montevideo, Santiago uploaded a couple of packages fixing RC bugs #1057226 and #1102487. The latter was a sponsored upload.
  • Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of brlaser, ptouch-driver and sane-airscan to get the latest upstream bug fixes into Trixie.
  • Rapha l filed an upstream bug on zim for a graphical glitch that he has been experiencing.
  • Colin Watson upgraded openssh to 10.0p1 (also known as 10.0p2), and debugged various follow-up bugs. This included adding riscv64 support to vmdb2 in passing, and enabling native wtmpdb support so that wtmpdb last now reports the correct tty for SSH connections.
  • Colin fixed dput-ng s override option, which had never previously worked.
  • Colin fixed a security bug in debmirror.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team: 21 packages upgraded to new upstream versions, 8 CVEs fixed, and about 25 release-critical bugs fixed.
  • Helmut filed patches for 21 cross build failures.
  • Helmut uploaded a new version of debvm featuring a new tool debefivm-create to generate EFI-bootable disk images compatible with other tools such as libvirt or VirtualBox. Much of the work was prototyped in earlier months. This generalizes mmdebstrap-autopkgtest-build-qemu.
  • Helmut continued reporting undeclared file conflicts and suggested package removals from unstable.
  • Helmut proposed build profiles for libftdi1 and gnupg2. To deal with recently added dependencies in the architecture cross bootstrap package set.
  • Helmut managed the /usr-move transition. He worked on ensuring that systemd would comply with Debian s policy. Dumat continues to locate problems here and there yielding discussion occasionally. He sent a patch for an upgrade problem in zutils.
  • Anupa worked with the Debian publicity team to publish Micronews and Bits posts.
  • Anupa worked with the DebConf 25 content team to review talk and event proposals for DebConf 25.

4 May 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in April 2025

About 90% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Request for OpenSSH debugging help Following the OpenSSH work described below, I have an open report about the sshd server sometimes crashing when clients try to connect to it. I can t reproduce this myself, and arm s-length debugging is very difficult, but three different users have reported it. For the time being I can t pass it upstream, as it s entirely possible it s due to a Debian patch. Is there anyone reading this who can reproduce this bug and is capable of doing some independent debugging work, most likely involving bisecting changes to OpenSSH? I d suggest first seeing whether a build of the unmodified upstream 10.0p2 release exhibits the same bug. If it does, then bisect between 9.9p2 and 10.0p2; if not, then bisect the list of Debian patches. This would be extremely helpful, since at the moment it s a bit like trying to look for a needle in a haystack from the next field over by sending instructions to somebody with a magnifying glass. OpenSSH I upgraded the Debian packaging to OpenSSH 10.0p1 (now designated 10.0p2 by upstream due to a mistake in the release process, but they re the same thing), fixing CVE-2025-32728. This also involved a diffoscope bug report due to the version number change. I enabled the new --with-linux-memlock-onfault configure option to protect sshd against being swapped out, but this turned out to cause test failures on riscv64, so I disabled it again there. Debugging this took some time since I needed to do it under emulation, and in the process of setting up a testbed I added riscv64 support to vmdb2. In coordination with the wtmpdb maintainer, I enabled the new Y2038-safe native wtmpdb support in OpenSSH, so wtmpdb last now reports the correct tty. I fixed a couple of packaging bugs: I reviewed and merged several packaging contributions from others: dput-ng Since we added dput-ng integration to Debusine recently, I wanted to make sure that it was in good condition in trixie, so I fixed dput-ng: will FTBFS during trixie support period. Previously a similar bug had been fixed by just using different Ubuntu release names in tests; this time I made the tests independent of the current supported release data returned by distro_info, so this shouldn t come up again. We also ran into dput-ng: override doesn t override profile parameters, which needed somewhat more extensive changes since it turned out that that option had never worked. I fixed this after some discussion with Paul Tagliamonte to make sure I understood the background properly. man-db I released man-db 2.13.1. This just included various small fixes and a number of translation updates, but I wanted to get it into trixie in order to include a contribution to increase the MAX_NAME constant, since that was now causing problems for some pathological cases of manual pages in the wild that documented a very large number of terms. debmirror I fixed one security bug: debmirror prints credentials with progress. Python team I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: In bookworm-backports, I updated these packages: I dropped a stale build-dependency from python-aiohttp-security that kept it out of testing (though unfortunately too late for the trixie freeze). I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures: I packaged python-typing-inspection, needed for a new upstream version of pydantic. I documented the architecture field in debian/tests/autopkgtest-pkg-pybuild.conf files. I fixed other odds and ends of bugs: Science team I fixed various build/test failures:

11 April 2025

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 294 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 294. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Correct longstanding issue where many ">"-based version tests used in
  conditional fixtures were broken due to the lack of a __gt__ method.
  Thanks, Colin Watson! (Closes: #1102658)
* Address a long-hidden issue in the test_versions testsuite where we weren't
  actually testing ">" as it was masked by the tests for equality in the
  testsuite.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

9 April 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Preparations for Trixie, Updated debvm, DebConf 25 registration website updates and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-03 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.

Preparing for Trixie, by Rapha l Hertzog As we are approaching the trixie freeze, it is customary for Debian developers to review their packages and clean them up in preparation for the next stable release. That s precisely what Rapha l did with publican, a package that had not seen any change since the last Debian release and that partially stopped working along the way due to a major Perl upgrade. While upstream s activity is close to zero, hope is not yet entirely gone as the git repository moved to a new location a couple of months ago and contained the required fix. Rapha l also developed another fix to avoid an annoying warning that was seen at runtime. Rapha l also ensured that the last upstream version of zim was uploaded to Debian unstable, and developed a fix for gnome-shell-extension-hamster to make it work with GNOME 48 and thus ensure that the package does not get removed from trixie.

Abseil and re2 transition in Debian, by Stefano Rivera One of the last transitions to happen for trixie was an update to abseil, bringing it up to 202407. This library is a dependency for one of Freexian s customers, as well as blocking newer versions of re2, a package maintained by Stefano. The transition had been stalled for several months while some issues with reverse dependencies were investigated and dealt with. It took a final push to make the transition happen, including fixing a few newly discovered problems downstream. The abseil package s autopkgtests were (trivially) broken by newer cmake versions, and some tests started failing on PPC64 (a known issue upstream).

debvm uploaded, by Helmut Grohne debvm is a command line tool for quickly creating a Debian-based virtual machine for testing purposes. Over time, it accumulated quite a few minor issues as well as CI failures. The most notorious one was an ARM32 failure present since August. It was diagnosed down to a glibc bug by Tj and Chris Hofstaedtler and little has happened since then. To have debvm work somewhat, it now contains a workaround for this situation. Few changes are expected to be noticeable, but related tools such as apt, file, linux, passwd, and qemu required quite a few adaptations all over the place. Much of the necessary debugging was contributed by others.

DebConf 25 Registration website, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 25, the annual Debian developer conference, is now open for registration. Other than preparing the conference website, getting there always requires some last minute changes to the software behind the registration interface and this year was no exception. Every year, the conference is a little different to previous years, and has some different details that need to be captured from attendees. And every year we make minor incremental improvements to fix long-standing problems. New concepts this year included: brunch, the closing talks on the departure day, venue security clearance, partial contributions towards food and accommodation bursaries, and attendee-selected bursary budgets.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut uploaded guess-concurrency incorporating feedback from others.
  • Helmut reacted to rebootstrap CI results and adapted it to cope with changes in unstable.
  • Helmut researched real world /usr-move fallout though little was actually attributable. He also NMUed systemd unsuccessfully.
  • Helmut sent 12 cross build patches.
  • Helmut looked into undeclared file conflicts in Debian more systematically and filed quite some bugs.
  • Helmut attended the cross/bootstrap sprint in W rzburg. A report of the event is pending.
  • Lucas worked on the CFP and tracks definition for DebConf 25.
  • Lucas worked on some bits involving Rails 7 transition.
  • Carles investigated why the job piuparts on salsa-ci/pipeline was passing but was failing on piuparts.debian.org for simplemonitor package. Created an issue and MR with a suggested fix, under discussion.
  • Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci/pipeline: added documentation for different variables.
  • Carles made debian-history package reproducible (with help from Chris Lamb).
  • Carles updated simplemonitor package (new upstream version), prepared a new qdacco version (fixed bugs in qdacco, packaged with the upgrade from Qt 5 to Qt 6).
  • Carles reviewed and submitted translations to Catalan for adduser, apt, shadow, apt-listchanges.
  • Carles reviewed, created merge-requests for translations to Catalan of 38 packages (using po-debconf-manager tooling). Created 40 bug reports for some merge requests that haven t been actioned for some time.
  • Colin Watson fixed 59 RC bugs (including 26 packages broken by the long-overdue removal of dh-python s dependency on python3-setuptools), and upgraded 38 packages (mostly Python-related) to new upstream versions.
  • Colin worked with Pranav P to track down and fix a dnspython autopkgtest regression on s390x caused by an endianness bug in pylsqpack.
  • Colin fixed a time-based test failure in python-dateutil that would have triggered in 2027, and contributed the fix upstream.
  • Colin fixed debconf to automatically use the noninteractive frontend if stdin is not a terminal.
  • Stefano bisected and fixed a pypy translation regression on Debian stable and older on 32-bit ARM.
  • Emilio coordinated and helped finish various transitions in light of the transition freeze.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups-filters to fix an FTBFS with a new upstream version of qpdf.
  • With the aim of enhancing the support for packages related to Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in recent industrial standards, Santiago has worked on finishing the packaging of and uploaded CycloneDX python library. There is on-going work about SPDX python tools, but it requires (build-)dependencies currently not shipped in Debian, such as owlrl and pyshacl.
  • Anupa worked with the Publicity team to announce the Debian 12.10 point release.
  • Anupa with the support of Santiago prepared an announcement and announced the opening of CfP and Registrations for DebConf 25.

1 April 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in March 2025

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. OpenSSH Changes in dropbear 2025.87 broke OpenSSH s regression tests. I cherry-picked the fix. I reviewed and merged patches from Luca Boccassi to send and accept the COLORTERM and NO_COLOR environment variables. Python team Following up on last month, I fixed some more uscan errors: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: In bookworm-backports, I updated python-django to 3:4.2.19-1. Although Debian s upgrade to python-click 8.2.0 was reverted for the time being, I fixed a number of related problems anyway since we re going to have to deal with it eventually: dh-python dropped its dependency on python3-setuptools in 6.20250306, which was long overdue, but it had quite a bit of fallout; in most cases this was simply a question of adding build-dependencies on python3-setuptools, but in a few cases there was a missing build-dependency on python3-typing-extensions which had previously been pulled in as a dependency of python3-setuptools. I fixed these bugs resulting from this: We agreed to remove python-pytest-flake8. In support of this, I removed unnecessary build-dependencies from pytest-pylint, python-proton-core, python-pyzipper, python-tatsu, python-tatsu-lts, and python-tinycss, and filed #1101178 on eccodes-python and #1101179 on rpmlint. There was a dnspython autopkgtest regression on s390x. I independently tracked that down to a pylsqpack bug and came up with a reduced test case before realizing that Pranav P had already been working on it; we then worked together on it and I uploaded their patch to Debian. I fixed various other build/test failures: I enabled more tests in python-moto and contributed a supporting fix upstream. I sponsored Maximilian Engelhardt to reintroduce zope.sqlalchemy. I fixed various odds and ends of bugs: I contributed a small documentation improvement to pybuild-autopkgtest(1). Rust team I upgraded rust-asn1 to 0.20.0. Science team I finally gave in and joined the Debian Science Team this month, since it often has a lot of overlap with the Python team, and Freexian maintains several packages under it. I fixed a uscan error in hdf5-blosc (maintained by Freexian), and upgraded it to a new upstream version. I fixed python-vispy: missing dependency on numpy abi. Other bits and pieces I fixed debconf should automatically be noninteractive if input is /dev/null. I fixed a build failure with GCC 15 in yubihsm-shell (maintained by Freexian). Prompted by a CI failure in debusine, I submitted a large batch of spelling fixes and some improved static analysis to incus (#1777, #1778) and distrobuilder. After regaining access to the repository, I fixed telegnome: missing app icon in About dialogue and made a new 0.3.7 release.

28 March 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2025 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In February, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 12.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 63.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 51.5h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 10.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 23.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 53.0h (out of 53.0h assigned and 0.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 11.0h (out of 3.25h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 27.0h (out of 30.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 11.75h (out of 9.5h assigned and 44.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 42.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 7.0h (out of 14.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.75h (out of 21.75h assigned and 3.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 52.5h (out of 14.75h assigned and 39.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 38 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • pam-u2f, prepared by Patrick Winnertz, fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability
    • openjdk-17, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixed an authorization bypass/information disclosure vulnerability
    • firefox-esr, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixed several vulnerabilities
    • thunderbird, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixed several vulnerabilities
    • postgresql-13, prepared by Christoph Berg, fixed an SQL injection vulnerability
    • freerdp2, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixed several vulnerabilities
    • openssh, prepared by Colin Watson, fixed a machine-in-the-middle vulnerability
LTS contributors Emilio Pozuelo Monfort and Santiago Ruano Rinc n coordinated the administrative aspects of LTS updates of postgresql-13 and pam-u2f, which were prepared by the respective maintainers, to whom we are most grateful. As has become the custom of the LTS team, work is under way on a number of package updates targeting Debian 12 (codename bookworm ) with fixes for a variety of vulnerabilities. In February, Guilhem Moulin prepared an upload of sssd, while several other updates are still in progress. Bastien Roucari s prepared an upload of krb5 for unstable as well. Given the importance of the Debian Security Tracker to the work of the LTS Team, we regularly contribute improvements to it. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort reviewed and merged a change to improve performance, and then dealt with unexpected issues that arose as a result. He also made improvements in the processing of CVEs which are not applicable to Debian. Looking to the future (the release of Debian 13, codename trixie , and beyond), LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n has initiated a conversation among the broader community involved in the development of Debian. The purpose of the discussion is to explore ways to improve the long term supportability of packages in Debian, specifically by focusing effort on ensuring that each Debian release contains the best supported upstream version of packages with a history of security issues.

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

11 March 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Debian.Social administration, DebConf 25 preparations, Fixing Time-based test failure in Python requests package and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-02 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.

Debian.Social administration, by Stefano Rivera Over the last year, the Debian.social services outgrew the infrastructure that was supporting them. The matrix bridge in particular was hosted on a cloud instance backed by a large expensive storage volume. Debian.CH rented a new large physical server to host all these instances, earlier this year. Stefano set up Incus on the new physical machine and migrated all the old debian.social LXC Containers, libvirt VMs, and cloud instances into Incus-managed LXC containers. Stefano set up Prometheus monitoring and alerts for the new infrastructure and a Grafana dashboard. The current stack of debian.social services seem to comfortably fit on the new machine, with good room to grow.

DebConf 25, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Stefano Rivera DebConf 25 preparations continue. The team is currently finalizing a budget. Stefano helped to review the current budget proposals and suggest approaches for balancing it. Stefano installed a Zammad instance to organize queries from attendees, for the registration and visa teams. Santiago continued discussions with possible caterers so we can have options for the different diet requirements and that could fit into the DebConf budget. Also, in collaboration with Anupa, Santiago pushed the first draft changes to document the venue information in the DebConf 25 website and how to get to Brest.

Time-based test failure in requests, by Colin Watson Colin fixed a fun bug in the Python requests package. Santiago Vila has been running tests of what happens when Debian packages are built on a system in which time has been artificially set to somewhere around the end of the support period for the next Debian release, in order to make it easier to do things like issuing security updates for the lifetime of that release. In this case, the failure indicated an expired test certificate, and since the repository already helpfully included scripts to regenerate those certificates, it seemed natural to try regenerating them just before running tests. However, this failed for more obscure reasons and Colin spent some time investigating. This turned out to be because the test CA was missing the CA constraint and so recent versions of OpenSSL reject it; Colin sent a pull request to fix this.

Priority list for outdated packages, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago started a discussion on debian-devel about packages that have a history of security issues and that are outdated regarding new upstream releases. The goal of the mentioned effort is to have a prioritized list of packages needing some work, from a security point of view. Moreover, the aim of publicly sharing the list of packages with the Debian Developers community is to make it easier to look at the packages maintained by teams, or even other maintainers where help could be welcome. Santiago is planning to take into account the feedback provided in debian-devel and to propose a tooling that could help to regularly bring collective awareness of these packages.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles worked on English to Catalan po-debconf translations: reviewed translations, created merge requests and followed up with developers for more than 30 packages using po-debconf-manager.
  • Carles helped users, fixed bugs and implemented downloading updated templates on po-debconf-manager.
  • Carles packaged a new upstream version of python-pyaarlo.
  • Carles improved reproducibility of qnetload (now reported as reproducible) and simplemonitor (followed up with upstream and pending update of Debian package).
  • Carles collaborated with debian-history package: fixed FTBFS from master branch, enabled salsa-ci and investigated reproducibility.
  • Emilio improved support for automatically marking CVEs as NOT-FOR-US in the security-tracker, closing #1073012.
  • Emilio updated xorg-server and xwayland in unstable, fixing the last round of security vulnerabilities.
  • Stefano prepared a few PyPy and cPython uploads, and started the python3.13-only transition.
  • Helmut Grohne sent patches for 24 cross build failures.
  • Helmut fixed two problems in the Debian /usr-merge analysis tool. In one instance, it would overmatch Debian bugs to issues and in another it would fail to recognize Pre-Depends as a conflict mechanism.
  • Helmut attempted making rebootstrap work for gcc-15 with limited success as very many packages FTBFS with gcc-15 due to using function declarations without arguments.
  • Helmut provided a change to the security-tracker that would pre-compute /data/json during database updates rather than on demand resulting in a reduced response time.
  • Colin uploaded OpenSSH security updates for testing/unstable, bookworm, bullseye, buster, and stretch.
  • Colin fixed upstream monitoring for 26 Python packages, and upgraded 54 packages (mostly Python-related, but also PuTTY) to new upstream versions.
  • Colin updated python-django in bookworm-backports to 4.2.18 (issuing BSA-121), and added new backports of python-django-dynamic-fixture and python-django-pgtrigger, all of which are dependencies of debusine.
  • Thorsten Alteholz finally managed to upload hplip to fix two release critical and some normal bugs. The next step in March would be to upload the latest version of hplip.
  • Faidon updated crun in unstable & trixie, resolving a long-standing request of enabling criu support and thus enabling podman with checkpoint/restore functionality (With gratitude to Salvatore Bonaccorso and Reinhard Tartler for the cooperation and collaboration).
  • Faidon uploaded a number of packages (librdkafka, libmaxminddb, python-maxminddb, lowdown, tox, tox-uv, pyproject-api, xiccd and gdnsd) bringing them up to date with new upstream releases, resolving various bugs.
  • Lucas Kanashiro uploaded some ruby packages involved in the Rails 7 transition with new upstream releases.
  • Lucas triaged a ruby3.1 bug (#1092595)) and prepared a fix for the next stable release update.
  • Lucas set up the needed wiki pages and updated the Debian Project status in the Outreachy portal, in order to send out a call for projects and mentors for the next round of Outreachy.
  • Anupa joined Santiago to prepare a list of companies to contact via LinkedIn for DebConf 25 sponsorship.
  • Anupa printed Debian stickers and sponsorship brochures, flyers for DebConf 25 to be distributed at FOSS ASIA summit 2025.
  • Anupa participated in the Debian publicity team meeting and discussed the upcoming events and tasks.
  • Rapha l packaged zim 0.76.1 and integrated an upstream patch for another regression that he reported.
  • Rapha l worked with the Debian System Administrators for tracker.debian.org to better cope with gmail s requirement for mails to be authenticated.

2 March 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in February 2025

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. OpenSSH OpenSSH upstream released 9.9p2 with fixes for CVE-2025-26465 and CVE-2025-26466. I got a heads-up on this in advance from the Debian security team, and prepared updates for all of testing/unstable, bookworm (Debian 12), bullseye (Debian 11), buster (Debian 10, LTS), and stretch (Debian 9, ELTS). jessie (Debian 8) is also still in ELTS for a few more months, but wasn t affected by either vulnerability. Although I m not particularly active in the Perl team, I fixed a libnet-ssleay-perl build failure because it was blocking openssl from migrating to testing, which in turn was blocking the above openssh fixes. I also sent a minor sshd -T fix upstream, simplified a number of autopkgtests using the newish Restrictions: needs-sudo facility, and prepared for removing the obsolete slogin symlink. PuTTY I upgraded to the new upstream version 0.83. GCC 15 build failures I fixed build failures with GCC 15 in a few packages: Python team A lot of my Python team work is driven by its maintainer dashboard. Now that we ve finished the transition to Python 3.13 as the default version, and inspired by a recent debian-devel thread started by Santiago, I thought it might be worth spending a bit of time on the uscan error section. uscan is typically scraping upstream web sites to figure out whether new versions are available, and so it s easy for its configuration to become outdated or broken. Most of this work is pretty boring, but it can often reveal situations where we didn t even realize that a Debian package was out of date. I fixed these packages: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: In bookworm-backports, I updated python-django to 3:4.2.18-1 (issuing BSA-121) and added new backports of python-django-dynamic-fixture and python-django-pgtrigger, all of which are dependencies of debusine. I went through all the build failures related to python-click 8.2.0 (which was confusingly tagged but not fully released upstream and posted an analysis. I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures: I dropped support for the old setup.py ftest command from zope.testrunner upstream. I fixed various odds and ends of bugs: Installer team Following up on last month, I merged and uploaded Helmut s /usr-move fix.

23 February 2025

Colin Watson: Qalculate time hacks

Anarcat recently wrote about Qalculate, and I think I m a convert, even though I ve only barely scratched the surface. The thing I almost immediately started using it for is time calculations. When I started tracking my time, I quickly found that Timewarrior was good at keeping all the data I needed, but I often found myself extracting bits of it and reprocessing it in variously clumsy ways. For example, I often don t finish a task in one sitting; maybe I take breaks, or I switch back and forth between a couple of different tasks. The raw output of timew summary is a bit clumsy for this, as it shows each chunk of time spent as a separate row: 
$ timew summary 2025-02-18 Debian
Wk Date       Day Tags                            Start      End    Time   Total
W8 2025-02-18 Tue CVE-2025-26465, Debian,       9:41:44 10:24:17 0:42:33
                  next, openssh
                  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15,   10:24:17 10:27:12 0:02:55
                  icoutils
                  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15,   11:50:05 11:57:25 0:07:20
                  kali
                  Debian, Upgrade to 0.67,     11:58:21 12:12:41 0:14:20
                  python_holidays
                  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15,   12:14:15 12:33:19 0:19:04
                  vigor
                  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15,   12:39:02 12:39:38 0:00:36
                  python_setproctitle
                  Debian, Upgrade to 1.3.4,    12:39:39 12:46:05 0:06:26
                  python_setproctitle
                  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15,   12:48:28 12:49:42 0:01:14
                  python_setproctitle
                  Debian, Upgrade to 3.4.1,    12:52:07 13:02:27 0:10:20 1:44:48
                  python_charset_normalizer
                                                                         1:44:48
So I wrote this Python program to help me: 
#! /usr/bin/python3
"""
Summarize timewarrior data, grouped and sorted by time spent.
"""
import json
import subprocess
from argparse import ArgumentParser, RawDescriptionHelpFormatter
from collections import defaultdict
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone
from operator import itemgetter
from rich import box, print
from rich.table import Table
parser = ArgumentParser(
    description=__doc__, formatter_class=RawDescriptionHelpFormatter
)
parser.add_argument("-t", "--only-total", default=False, action="store_true")
parser.add_argument(
    "range",
    nargs="?",
    default=":today",
    help="Time range (usually a hint, e.g. :lastweek)",
)
parser.add_argument("tag", nargs="*", help="Tags to filter by")
args = parser.parse_args()
entries: defaultdict[str, timedelta] = defaultdict(timedelta)
now = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
for entry in json.loads(
    subprocess.run(
        ["timew", "export", args.range, *args.tag],
        check=True,
        capture_output=True,
        text=True,
    ).stdout
):
    start = datetime.fromisoformat(entry["start"])
    if "end" in entry:
        end = datetime.fromisoformat(entry["end"])
    else:
        end = now
    entries[", ".join(entry["tags"])] += end - start
if not args.only_total:
    table = Table(box=box.SIMPLE, highlight=True)
    table.add_column("Tags")
    table.add_column("Time", justify="right")
    for tags, time in sorted(entries.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True):
        table.add_row(tags, str(time))
    print(table)
total = sum(entries.values(), start=timedelta())
hours, rest = divmod(total, timedelta(hours=1))
minutes, rest = divmod(rest, timedelta(minutes=1))
seconds = rest.seconds
print(f"Total time:  hours:02 : minutes:02 : seconds:02 ")
$ summarize-time 2025-02-18 Debian
  Tags                                                     Time
  
  CVE-2025-26465, Debian, next, openssh                 0:42:33
  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, vigor                      0:19:04
  Debian, Upgrade to 0.67, python_holidays              0:14:20
  Debian, Upgrade to 3.4.1, python_charset_normalizer   0:10:20
  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, kali                       0:07:20
  Debian, Upgrade to 1.3.4, python_setproctitle         0:06:26
  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, icoutils                   0:02:55
  Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, python_setproctitle        0:01:50
Total time: 01:44:48
Much nicer. But that only helps with some of my reporting. At the end of a month, I have to work out how much time to bill Freexian for and fill out a timesheet, and for various reasons those queries don t correspond to single timew tags: they sometimes correspond to the sum of all time spent on multiple tags, or to the time spent on one tag minus the time spent on another tag, or similar. As a result I quite often have to do basic arithmetic on time intervals; but that s surprisingly annoying! I didn t previously have good tools for that, and was reduced to doing things like str(timedelta(hours=..., minutes=..., seconds=...) + ...) in Python, which gets old fast. Instead: 
$ qalc '62:46:30 - 51:02:42 to time'
(225990 / 3600)   (183762 / 3600) = 11:43:48
I also often want to work out how much of my time I ve spent on Debian work this month so far, since Freexian pays me for up to 20% of my work time on Debian; if I m under that then I might want to prioritize more Debian projects, and if I m over then I should be prioritizing more Freexian projects as otherwise I m not going to get paid for that time. 
$ summarize-time -t :month Freexian
Total time: 69:19:42
$ summarize-time -t :month Debian
Total time: 24:05:30
$ qalc '24:05:30 / (24:05:30 + 69:19:42) to %'
(86730 / 3600) / ((86730 / 3600) + (249582 / 3600))   25.78855349%
I love it.

11 February 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.13 as the default Python 3 version, Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, sbuild support for Salsa CI, Rails 7 transition, DebConf preparations and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-01 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 3.13 is now the default Python 3 version in Debian, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson The Python 3.13 as default transition has now completed. The next step is to remove Python 3.12 from the archive, which should be very straightforward, it just requires rebuilding C extension packages in no particular order. Stefano fixed some miscellaneous bugs blocking the completion of the 3.13 as default transition.

Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, by Helmut Grohne While Qt5 used to use qmake to query installation properties, Qt6 is moving more and more to CMake and to ease that transition it relies on more qtpaths. Since this tool is not naturally aware of the architecture it is called for, it tends to produce results for the build architecture. Therefore, more than 100 packages were picking up a multiarch directory for the build architecture during cross builds. In collaboration with the Qt/KDE team and Sandro Knau in particular (none affiliated with Freexian), we added an architecture-specific wrapper script in the same way qmake has one for Qt5 and Qt6 already. The relevant CMake module has been updated to prefer the triplet-prefixed wrapper. As a result, most of the KDE packages now cross build on unstable ready in time for the trixie release.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In December, Emil S dergren reported that a live-build was not working for him and in January, Colin Watson reported that the proposed mitigation for debian-installer-utils would practically fail. Both failures were to be attributed to a wrong understanding of implementation-defined behavior in dpkg-divert. As a result, all M18 mitigations had to be reviewed and many of them replaced. Many have been uploaded already and all instances have received updated patches. Even though dumat has been in operation for more than a year, it gained recent changes. For one thing, analysis of architectures other than amd64 was requested. Chris Hofstaedler (not affiliated with Freexian) kindly provided computing resources for repeatedly running it on the larger set. Doing so revealed various cross-architecture undeclared file conflicts in gcc, glibc, and binutils-z80, but it also revealed a previously unknown /usr-move issue in rpi.rpi-common. On top of that, dumat produced false positive diagnostics and wrongly associated Debian bugs in some cases, both of which have now been fixed. As a result, a supposedly fixed python3-sepolicy issue had to be reopened.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne As much as we think of our base system as stable, it is changing a lot and the architecture cross bootstrap tooling is very sensitive to such changes requiring permanent maintenance. A problem that recently surfaced was that building a binutils cross toolchain would result in a binutils-for-host package that would not be practically installable as it would depend on a binutils-common package that was not built. This turned into an examination of binutils-common and noticing that it actually differed across architectures even though it should not. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (not affiliated with Freexian) and Colin Watson kindly helped brainstorm possible solutions. Eventually, Helmut provided a patch to move gprofng bits out of binutils-common. Independently, Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) split out binutils-gold into a separate source package. As a result, binutils-common is now equal across architectures and can be marked Multi-Arch: foreign resolving the initial problem.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago continued the work about the sbuild support for Salsa CI, that was mentioned in the previous month report. The !568 merge request that created the new build image was merged, making it easier to test !569 with external projects. Santiago used a fork of the debusine repo to try the draft !569, and some issues were spotted, and part of them fixed. This is the last debusine pipeline run with the current !569: https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/debusine/-/pipelines/794233. One of the last improvements relates to how to enable projects to customize the pipeline, in an equivalent way than they currently do in the extract-source and build jobs. While this is work-in-progress, the results are rather promising. Next steps include deciding on introducing schroot support for bookworm, bookworm-security, and older releases, as they are done in the official debian buildd.

DebConf preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf will be happening in Brest, France, in July. Santiago continued the DebConf 25 organization work, looking for catering providers. Both Stefano and Santiago have been reaching out to some potential sponsors. DebConf depends on sponsors to cover the organization cost, if your company depends on Debian, please consider sponsoring DebConf. Stefano has been winding up some of the finances from previous DebConfs. Finalizing reimbursements to team members from DebConf 23, and handling some outstanding issues from DebConf 24. Stefano and the rest of the DebConf committee have been reviewing bids for DebConf 26, to select the next venue.

Ruby 3.3 is now the default Ruby interpreter, by Lucas Kanashiro Ruby 3.3 is about to become the default Ruby interpreter for Trixie. Many bugs were fixed by Lucas and the Debian Ruby team during the sprint hold in Paris during Jan 27-31. The next step is to remove support of Ruby 3.1, which is the alternative Ruby interpreter for now. Thanks to the Debian Release team for all the support, especially Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

Rails 7 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro Rails 6 has been shipped by Debian since Bullseye, and as a WEB framework, many issues (especially security related issues) have been encountered and the maintainability of it becomes harder and harder. With that in mind, during the Debian Ruby team sprint last month, the transition to Rack 3 (an important dependency of rails containing many breaking changes) was started in Debian unstable, it is ongoing. Once it is done, the Rails 7 transition will take place, and Rails 7 should be shipped in Debian Trixie.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano improved a poor ImportError for users of the turtle module on Python 3, who haven t installed the python3-tk package.
  • Stefano updated several packages to new upstream releases.
  • Stefano added the Python extension to the re2 package, allowing for the use of the Google RE2 regular expression library as a direct replacement for the standard library re module.
  • Stefano started provisioning a new physical server for the debian.social infrastructure.
  • Carles improved simplemonitor (documentation on systemd integration, worked with upstream for fixing a bug).
  • Carles upgraded packages to new upstream versions: python-ring-doorbell and python-asyncclick.
  • Carles did po-debconf translations to Catalan: reviewed 44 packages and submitted translations to 90 packages (via salsa merge requests or bugtracker bugs).
  • Carles maintained po-debconf-manager with small fixes.
  • Rapha l worked on some outstanding DEP-14 merge request and participated in the associated discussion. The discussions have been more contentious than anticipated, somewhat exacerbated by Otto s desire to conclude fast while the required tool support is not yet there.
  • Rapha l, with the help of Philipp Kern from the DSA team, upgraded tracker.debian.org to use Django 4.2 (from bookworm-backports) which in turn enabled him to configure authentication via salsa.debian.org. It s now possible to login to tracker.debian.org with your salsa credentials!
  • Rapha l updated zim a nice desktop wiki that is very handy to organize your day-to-day digital life to the latest upstream version (0.76).
  • Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures.
  • Helmut continued working on a tool for memory-based concurrency limit of builds.
  • Helmut NMUed libtool, opensysusers and virtualbox.
  • Enrico tried to support Helmut in working out tricky usrmerge situations
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of brlaser.
  • Colin Watson upgraded 33 Python packages to new upstream versions, including fixes for CVE-2024-42353, CVE-2024-47532, and CVE-2025-22153.
  • Emilio Pozuelo managed various transitions, and fixed various RC bugs (telepathy-glib, xorg, xserver-xorg-video-vesa, apitrace, mesa).
  • Anupa attended the monthly team meeting for Debian publicity team and shared the social media stats.
  • Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud in the point release announcement for Debian 12.9 and published the Micronews.
  • Anupa took part in multiple Debian publicity team discussions regarding our presence in social media platforms.

9 February 2025

Antoine Beaupr : Qalculate hacks

This is going to be a controversial statement because some people are absolute nerds about this, but, I need to say it. Qalculate is the best calculator that has ever been made. I am not going to try to convince you of this, I just wanted to put out my bias out there before writing down those notes. I am a total fan. This page will collect my notes of cool hacks I do with Qalculate. Most examples are copy-pasted from the command-line interface (qalc(1)), but I typically use the graphical interface as it's slightly better at displaying complex formulas. Discoverability is obviously also better for the cornucopia of features this fantastic application ships.

Qalc commandline primer On Debian, Qalculate's CLI interface can be installed with: 
apt install qalc
Then you start it with the qalc command, and end up on a prompt: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
>
Then it's a normal calculator: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
> 1+1
  1 + 1 = 2
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.1429
> pi
  pi   3.142
>
There's a bunch of variables to control display, approximation, and so on: 
> set precision 6
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.142857
> set precision 20
> pi
  pi   3.1415926535897932385
When I need more, I typically browse around the menus. One big issue I have with Qalculate is there are a lot of menus and features. I had to fiddle quite a bit to figure out that set precision command above. I might add more examples here as I find them.

Bandwidth estimates I often use the data units to estimate bandwidths. For example, here's what 1 megabit per second is over a month ("about 300 GiB"): 
> 1 megabit/s * 30 day to gibibyte 
  (1 megabit/second)   (30 days)   301.7 GiB
Or, "how long will it take to download X", in this case, 1GiB over a 100 mbps link: 
> 1GiB/(100 megabit/s)
  (1 gibibyte) / (100 megabits/second)   1 min + 25.90 s

Password entropy To calculate how much entropy (in bits) a given password structure, you count the number of possibilities in each entry (say, [a-z] is 26 possibilities, "one word in a 8k dictionary" is 8000), extract the base-2 logarithm, multiplied by the number of entries. For example, an alphabetic 14-character password is: 
> log2(26*2)*14
  log (26   2)   14   79.81
... 80 bits of entropy. To get the equivalent in a Diceware password with a 8000 word dictionary, you would need: 
> log2(8k)*x = 80
  (log (8   000)   x) = 80  
  x   6.170
... about 6 words, which gives you: 
> log2(8k)*6
  log (8   1000)   6   77.79
78 bits of entropy.

Exchange rates You can convert between currencies! 
> 1 EUR to USD
  1 EUR   1.038 USD
Even fake ones! 
> 1 BTC to USD
  1 BTC   96712 USD
This relies on a database pulled form the internet (typically the central european bank rates, see the source). It will prompt you if it's too old: 
It has been 256 days since the exchange rates last were updated.
Do you wish to update the exchange rates now? y
As a reader pointed out, you can set the refresh rate for currencies, as some countries will require way more frequent exchange rates. The graphical version has a little graphical indicator that, when you mouse over, tells you where the rate comes from.

Other conversions Here are other neat conversions extracted from my history 
> teaspoon to ml
  teaspoon = 5 mL
> tablespoon to ml
  tablespoon = 15 mL
> 1 cup to ml 
  1 cup   236.6 mL
> 6 L/100km to mpg
  (6 liters) / (100 kilometers)   39.20 mpg
> 100 kph to mph
  100 kph   62.14 mph
> (108km - 72km) / 110km/h
  ((108 kilometers)   (72 kilometers)) / (110 kilometers/hour)  
  19 min + 38.18 s

Completion time estimates This is a more involved example I often do.

Background Say you have started a long running copy job and you don't have the luxury of having a pipe you can insert pv(1) into to get a nice progress bar. For example, rsync or cp -R can have that problem (but not tar!). (Yes, you can use --info=progress2 in rsync, but that estimate is incremental and therefore inaccurate unless you disable the incremental mode with --no-inc-recursive, but then you pay a huge up-front wait cost while the entire directory gets crawled.)

Extracting a process start time First step is to gather data. Find the process start time. If you were unfortunate enough to forget to run date --iso-8601=seconds before starting, you can get a similar timestamp with stat(1) on the process tree in /proc with: 
$ stat /proc/11232
  File: /proc/11232
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 1024   directory
Device: 0,21    Inode: 57021       Links: 9
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Modify: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Change: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
 Birth: -
So our start time is 2025-02-07 15:50:25, we shave off the nanoseconds there, they're below our precision noise floor. If you're not dealing with an actual UNIX process, you need to figure out a start time: this can be a SQL query, a network request, whatever, exercise for the reader.

Saving a variable This is optional, but for the sake of demonstration, let's save this as a variable: 
> start="2025-02-07 15:50:25"
  save("2025-02-07T15:50:25"; start; Temporary; ; 1) =
  "2025-02-07T15:50:25"

Estimating data size Next, estimate your data size. That will vary wildly with the job you're running: this can be anything: number of files, documents being processed, rows to be destroyed in a database, whatever. In this case, rsync tells me how many bytes it has transferred so far: 
# rsync -ASHaXx --info=progress2 /srv/ /srv-zfs/
2.968.252.503.968  94%    7,63MB/s    6:04:58  xfr#464440, ir-chk=1000/982266)
Strip off the weird dots in there, because that will confuse qalculate, which will count this as: 
  2.968252503968 bytes   2.968 B
Or, essentially, three bytes. We actually transferred almost 3TB here: 
  2968252503968 bytes   2.968 TB
So let's use that. If you had the misfortune of making rsync silent, but were lucky enough to transfer entire partitions, you can use df (without -h! we want to be more precise here), in my case: 
Filesystem              1K-blocks       Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_hdd-srv 7512681384 7258298036  179205040  98% /srv
tank/srv               7667173248 2870444032 4796729216  38% /srv-zfs
(Otherwise, of course, you use du -sh $DIRECTORY.)

Digression over bytes Those are 1 K bytes which is actually (and rather unfortunately) Ki, or "kibibytes" (1024 bytes), not "kilobytes" (1000 bytes). Ugh. 
> 2870444032 KiB
  2870444032 kibibytes   2.939 TB

> 2870444032 kB
  2870444032 kilobytes   2.870 TB
At this scale, those details matter quite a bit, we're talking about a 69GB (64GiB) difference here: 
> 2870444032 KiB - 2870444032 kB
  (2870444032 kibibytes)   (2870444032 kilobytes)   68.89 GB
Anyways. Let's take 2968252503968 bytes as our current progress. Our entire dataset is 7258298064 KiB, as seen above.

Solving a cross-multiplication We have 3 out of four variables for our equation here, so we can already solve: 
> (now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB) to h
  ((actual   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes))
  x   59.24 h
The entire transfer will take about 60 hours to complete! Note that's not the time left, that is the total time. To break this down step by step, we could calculate how long it has taken so far: 
> now-start
  now   start   23 h + 53 min + 6.762 s
> now-start to s
  now   start   85987 s
... and do the cross-multiplication manually, it's basically: 
x/(now-start) = (total/current)
so: 
x = (total/current) * (now-start)
or, in Qalc: 
> ((7258298064  kibibytes) / ( 2996538438607 bytes) ) *  85987 s
  ((7258298064 kibibytes) / (2996538438607 bytes))   (85987 secondes)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.81 s
It's interesting it gives us different units here! Not sure why.

Now and built-in variables The now here is actually a built-in variable: 
> now
  now   "2025-02-08T22:25:25"
There is a bewildering list of such variables, for example: 
> uptime
  uptime = 5 d + 6 h + 34 min + 12.11 s
> golden
  golden   1.618
> exact
  golden = ( (5) + 1) / 2

Computing dates In any case, yay! We know the transfer is going to take roughly 60 hours total, and we've already spent around 24h of that, so, we have 36h left. But I did that all in my head, we can ask more of Qalc yet! Let's make another variable, for that total estimated time: 
> total=(now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB)
  save(((now   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes)); total; Temporary; ; 1)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.22 s
And we can plug that into another formula with our start time to figure out when we'll be done! 
> start+total
  start + total   "2025-02-10T03:28:52"
> start+total-now
  start + total   now   1 d + 11 h + 34 min + 48.52 s
> start+total-now to h
  start + total   now   35 h + 34 min + 32.01 s
That transfer has ~1d left, or 35h24m32s, and should complete around 4 in the morning on February 10th. But that's icing on top. I typically only do the cross-multiplication and calculate the remaining time in my head. I mostly did the last bit to show Qalculate could compute dates and time differences, as long as you use ISO timestamps. Although it can also convert to and from UNIX timestamps, it cannot parse arbitrary date strings (yet?).

Other functionality Qalculate can:
  • Plot graphs;
  • Use RPN input;
  • Do all sorts of algebraic, calculus, matrix, statistics, trigonometry functions (and more!);
  • ... and so much more!
I have a hard time finding things it cannot do. When I get there, I typically need to resort to programming code in Python, use a spreadsheet, and others will turn to more complete engines like Maple, Mathematica or R. But for daily use, Qalculate is just fantastic. And it's pink! Use it!

Further reading and installation This is just scratching the surface, the fine manual has more information, including more examples. There is also of course a qalc(1) manual page which also ships an excellent EXAMPLES section. Qalculate is packaged for over 30 Linux distributions, but also ships packages for Windows and MacOS. There are third-party derivatives as well including a web version and an Android app.

Updates Colin Watson liked this blog post and was inspired to write his own hacks, similar to what's here, but with extras, check it out!

2 February 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in January 2025

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. If you appreciate this sort of work and are at a company that uses Debian, have a look to see whether you can pay for any of Freexian s services; as well as the direct benefits, that revenue stream helps to keep Debian development sustainable for me and several other lovely people. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Python team We finally made Python 3.13 the default version in testing! I fixed various bugs that got in the way of this: As with last month, I fixed a few more build regressions due to the removal of a deprecated intersphinx_mapping syntax in Sphinx 8.0: I ported a few packages to Django 5.1: I ported python-pypump to IPython 8.0. I fixed python-datamodel-code-generator to handle isort 6, and contributed that upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools: I removed the old python-celery-common transitional package from celery, since nothing in Debian needs it any more. I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: Rust team I fixed rust-pyo3-ffi to avoid explicit Python version dependencies that were getting in the way of making Python 3.13 the default version. Security tools packaging team I uploaded libevt to fix a build failure on i386 and to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools. Installer team I helped with some testing of a debian-installer-utils patch as part of the /usr move. I need to get around to uploading this, since it looks OK now. Other small things Helmut Grohne reached out for help debugging a multi-arch coinstallability problem (you know it s going to be complicated when even Helmut can t figure it out on his own ) in binutils, and we had a call about that. I reviewed and applied a new Romanian translation of debconf s manual pages. I did my twice-yearly refresh of debmirror s mirror_size documentation, and applied a contribution to improve the example debmirror.conf. I fixed an arguable preprocessor string handling bug in man-db, and applied a fix for out-of-tree builds.

9 January 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Tracker.debian.org updates, Salsa CI improvements, Coinstallable build-essential, Python 3.13 transition, Ruby 3.3 transition and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph, Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-12 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.

Tracker.debian.org updates, by Rapha l Hertzog Profiting from end-of-year vacations, Rapha l prepared for tracker.debian.org to be upgraded to Debian 12 bookworm by getting rid of the remnants of python3-django-jsonfield in the code (it was superseded by a Django-native field). Thanks to Philipp Kern from the Debian System Administrators team, the upgrade happened on December 23rd. Rapha l also improved distro-tracker to better deal with invalid Maintainer fields which recently caused multiples issues in the regular data updates (#1089985, MR 105). While working on this, he filed #1089648 asking dpkg tools to error out early when maintainers make such mistakes. Finally he provided feedback to multiple issues and merge requests (MR 106, issues #21, #76, #77), there seems to be a surge of interest in distro-tracker lately. It would be nice if those new contributors could stick around and help out with the significant backlog of issues (in the Debian BTS, in Salsa).

Salsa CI improvements, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Given that the Debian buildd network now relies on sbuild using the unshare backend, and that Salsa CI s reproducibility testing needs to be reworked (#399), Santiago resumed the work for moving the build job to use sbuild. There was some related work a few months ago that was focused on sbuild with the schroot and the sudo backends, but those attempts were stalled for different reasons, including discussions around the convenience of the move (#296). However, using sbuild and unshare avoids all of the drawbacks that have been identified so far. Santiago is preparing two merge requests: !568 to introduce a new build image, and !569 that moves all the extract-source related tasks to the build job. As mentioned in the previous reports, this change will make it possible for more projects to use the pipeline to build the packages (See #195). Additional advantages of this change include a more optimal way to test if a package builds twice in a row: instead of actually building it twice, the Salsa CI pipeline will configure sbuild to check if the clean target of debian/rules correctly restores the source tree, saving some CPU cycles by avoiding one build. Also, the images related to Ubuntu won t be needed anymore, since the build job will create chroots for different distributions and vendors from a single common build image. This will save space in the container registry. More changes are to come, especially those related to handling projects that customize the pipeline and make use of the extract-source job.

Coinstallable build-essential, by Helmut Grohne Building on the gcc-for-host work of last December, a notable patch turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same became feasible. Whilst the change is small, its implications and foundations are not. We still install crossbuild-essential-$ARCH for cross building and due to a britney2 limitation, we cannot have it depend on the host s C library. As a result, there are workarounds in place for sbuild and pbuilder. In turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same, we may actually express these dependencies directly as we install build-essential:$ARCH instead. The crossbuild-essential-$ARCH packages will continue to be available as transitional dummy packages.

Python 3.13 transition, by Colin Watson and Stefano Rivera Building on last month s work, Colin, Stefano, and other members of the Debian Python team fixed 3.13 compatibility bugs in many more packages, allowing 3.13 to now be a supported but non-default version in testing. The next stage will be to switch to it as the default version, which will start soon. Stefano did some test-rebuilds of packages that only build for the default Python 3 version, to find issues that will block the transition. The default version transition typically shakes out some more issues in applications that (unlike libraries) only test with the default Python version. Colin also fixed Sphinx 8.0 compatibility issues in many packages, which otherwise threatened to get in the way of this transition.

Ruby 3.3 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro The Debian Ruby team decided to ship Ruby 3.3 in the next Debian release, and Lucas took the lead of the interpreter transition with the assistance of the rest of the team. In order to understand the impact of the new interpreter in the ruby ecosystem, ruby-defaults was uploaded to experimental adding ruby3.3 as an alternative interpreter, and a mass rebuild of reverse dependencies was done here. Initially, a couple of hundred packages were failing to build, after many rounds of rebuilds, adjustments, and many uploads we are down to 30 package build failures, of those, 21 packages were asked to be removed from testing and for the other 9, bugs were filled. All the information to track this transition can be found here. Now, we are waiting for PHP 8.4 to finish to avoid any collision. Once it is done the Ruby 3.3 transition will start in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Enrico Zini redesigned the way nm.debian.org stores historical audit logs and personal data backups.
  • Carles Pina submitted a new package (python-firebase-messaging) and prepared updates for python3-ring-doorbell.
  • Carles Pina developed further po-debconf-manager: better state transition, fixed bugs, automated assigning translators and reviewers on edit, updating po header files automatically, fixed bugs, etc.
  • Carles Pina reviewed, submitted and followed up the debconf templates translation (more than 20 packages) and translated some packages (about 5).
  • Santiago continued to work on DebConf 25 organization related tasks, including handling the logo survey and results. Stefano spent time on DebConf 25 too.
  • Santiago continued the exploratory work about linux livepatching with Emmanuel Arias. Santiago and Emmanuel found a challenge since kpatch won t fully support linux in trixie and newer, so they are exploring alternatives such as klp-build.
  • Helmut maintained the /usr-move transition filing bugs in e.g. bubblewrap, e2fsprogs, libvpd-2.2-3, and pam-tmpdir and corresponding on related issues such as kexec-tools and live-build. The removal of the usrmerge package unfortunately broke debootstrap and was quickly reverted. Continued fallout is expected and will continue until trixie is released.
  • Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures and worked with Sandro Knau on stuck Qt/KDE patches related to cross building.
  • Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap removing the need to build gnu-efi in the process.
  • Helmut collaborated with Emanuele Rocca and Jochen Sprickerhof on an interesting adventure in diagnosing why gcc would FTBFS in recent sbuild.
  • Helmut proposed supporting build concurrency limits in coreutils s nproc. As it turns out nproc is not a good place for this functionality.
  • Colin worked with Sandro Tosi and Andrej Shadura to finish resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, as mentioned last month.
  • Colin upgraded 48 Python packages to new upstream versions, fixing four CVEs and a number of compatibility bugs with recent Python versions.
  • Colin issued an openssh bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which had been quite broken in bookworm.
  • Stefano fixed a minor bug in debian-reimbursements that was disallowing combination PDFs containing JAL tickets, encoded in UTF-16.
  • Stefano uploaded a stable update to PyPy3 in bookworm, catching up with security issues resolved in cPython.
  • Stefano fixed a regression in the eventlet from his Python 3.13 porting patch.
  • Stefano continued discussing a forwarded patch (renaming the sysconfigdata module) with cPython upstream, ending in a decision to drop the patch from Debian. This will need some continued work.
  • Anupa participated in the Debian Publicity team meeting in December, which discussed the team activities done in 2024 and projects for 2025.

2 January 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian, as well as one direct donation via Liberapay (thanks!). OpenSSH I issued a bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which was quite broken in bookworm. base-passwd A few months ago, the adduser maintainer started a discussion with me (as the base-passwd maintainer) and the shadow maintainer about bringing all three source packages under one team, since they often need to cooperate on things like user and group names. I agreed, but hadn t got round to doing anything about it until recently. I ve now officially moved it under team maintenance. debconf Gioele Barabucci has been working on eliminating duplicated code between debconf and cdebconf, ultimately with the goal of migrating to cdebconf (which I m not sure I m convinced of as a goal, but if we can make improvements to both packages as part of working towards it then there s no harm in that). I finally got round to reviewing and merging confmodule changes in each of debconf and cdebconf. This caused an installer regression due to a weirdness in cdebconf-udeb s packaging, which I fixed - sorry about that! I ve also been dealing with a few patch submissions that had been in my queue for a long time, but more on that next month if all goes well. CI issues I noticed and fixed a problem with Restrictions: needs-sudo in autopkgtest. I fixed broken aptly images in the Salsa CI pipeline. Python team Last month, I mentioned some progress on sorting out the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728), and said that I thought we d be able to finish it soon. I was right! We got it all done this month: The Python 3.13 transition continues, and last month we were able to add it to the supported Python versions in testing. (The next step will be to make it the default.) I fixed lots of problems in aid of this, including: Sphinx 8.0 removed some old intersphinx_mapping syntax which turned out to still be in use by many packages in Debian. The fixes for this were individually trivial, but there were a lot of them: I found that twisted 24.11.0 broke tests in buildbot and wokkel, and fixed those. I packaged python-flatdict, needed for a new upstream version of python-semantic-release. I tracked down a test failure in vdirsyncer (which I ve been using for some years, but had never previously needed to modify) and contributed a fix upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools: I fixed django-cte to remove a build-dependency on the obsolete python3-nose package. I added Django 5.1 support to django-polymorphic. (There are a number of other packages that still need work here.) I fixed various other build/test failures: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I updated the team s library style guide to remove material related to Python 2 and early versions of Python 3, which is no longer relevant to any current Python packaging work. Other Python upstream work I happened to notice a Twisted upstream issue requesting the removal of the deprecated twisted.internet.defer.returnValue, realized it was still used in many places in Debian, and went on a PR-filing spree informed by codesearch to try to reduce the future impact of such a change on Debian: Other small fixes Santiago Vila has been building the archive with make --shuffle (also see its author s explanation). I fixed associated bugs in cccc (contributed upstream), groff, and spectemu. I backported an upstream patch to putty to fix undefined behaviour that affected use of the small keypad . I removed groff s Recommends: libpaper1 (#1091375, #1091376), since it isn t currently all that useful and was getting in the way of a transition to libpaper2. I filed an upstream bug suggesting better integration in this area.

9 December 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: OpenMPI transitions, cPython 3.12.7+ update uploads, Python 3.13 Transition, and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph, Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-11 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.

Transition management, by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort Emilio has been helping finish the mpi-defaults switch to mpich on 32-bit architectures, and the openmpi transitions. This involves filing bugs for the reverse dependencies, doing NMUs, and requesting removals for outdated (Not Built from Source) binaries on 32-bit architectures where openmpi is no longer available. Those transitions got entangled with a few others, such as the petsc stack, and were blocking many packages from migrating to testing. These transitions were completed in early December.

cPython 3.12.7+ update uploads, by Stefano Rivera Python 3.12 had failed to build on mips64el, due to an obscure dh_strip failure. The mips64el porters never figured it out, but the missing build on mips64el was blocking migration to Debian testing. After waiting a month, enough changes had accumulated in the upstream 3.12 maintenance git branch that we could apply them in the hope of changing the output enough to avoid breaking dh_strip. This worked. Of course there were other things to deal with too. A test started failing due to a Debian-specific patch we carry for python3.x-minimal, and it needed to be reworked. And Stefano forgot to strip the trailing + from PY_VERSION, which confuses some python libraries. This always requires another patch when applying git updates from the maintenance branch. Stefano added a build-time check to catch this mistake in the future. Python 3.12.7 migrated.

Python 3.13 Transition, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson During November the Python 3.13-add transition started. This is the first stage of supporting a new version of Python in Debian archive (after preparatory work), adding it as a new supported but non-default version. All packages with compiled Python extensions need to be re-built to add support for the new version. We have covered the lead-up to this transition in the past. Due to preparation, many of the failures we hit were expected and we had patches waiting in the bug tracker. These could be NMUed to get the transition moving. Others had been known about but hadn t been worked on, yet. Some other packages ran into new issues, as we got further into the transition than we d been able to in preparation. The whole Debian Python team has been helping with this work. The rebuild stage of the 3.13-add transition is now over, but many packages need work before britney will let python3-defaults migrate to testing.

Limiting build concurrency based on available RAM, by Helmut Grohne In recent years, the concurrency of CPUs has been increasing as has the demand for RAM by linkers. What has not been increasing as quickly is the RAM supply in typical machines. As a result, we more frequently run into situations where the package builds exhaust memory when building at full concurrency. Helmut initiated a discussion about generalizing an approach to this in Debian packages. Researching existing code that limits concurrency as well as providing possible extensions to debhelper and dpkg to provide concurrency limits based on available system RAM. Thus far there is consensus on the need for a more general solution, but ideas are still being collected for the precise solution.

MiniDebConf Toulouse at Capitole du Libre The whole Freexian Collaborator team attended MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the Capitole du Libre event. Several members of the team gave talks: Stefano and Anupa worked as part of the video team, streaming and recording the event s talks.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano looked into packaging the latest upstream python-falcon version in Debian, in support of the Python 3.13 transition. This appeared to break python-hug, which is sadly looking neglected upstream, and the best course of action is probably its removal from Debian.
  • Stefano uploaded videos from various 2024 Debian events to PeerTube and YouTube.
  • Stefano and Santiago visited the site for DebConf 2025 in Brest, after the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, to meet with the local team and scout out the venue. The on-going DebConf 25 organization work of last month also included handling the logo and artwork call for proposals.
  • Stefano helped the press team to edit a post for bits.debian.org on OpenStreetMap s migration to Debian.
  • Carles implemented multiple language support on po-debconf-manager and tested it using Portuguese-Brazilian during MiniDebConf Toulouse. The system was also tested and improved by reviewing more than 20 translations to Catalan, creating merge requests for those packages, and providing user support to new users. Additionally, Carles implemented better status transitions, configuration keys management and other small improvements.
  • Helmut sent 32 patches for cross build failures. The wireplumber one was an interactive collaboration with Dylan A ssi.
  • Helmut continued to monitor the /usr-move, sent a patch for lib64readline8 and continued several older patch conversations. lintian now reports some aliasing issues in unstable.
  • Helmut initiated a discussion on the semantics of *-for-host packages. More feedback is welcome.
  • Helmut improved the crossqa.debian.net infrastructure to fail running lintian less often in larger packages.
  • Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap mostly dropping applied patches and continuing discussions of submitted patches.
  • Helmut prepared a non-maintainer upload of gzip for several long-standing bugs.
  • Colin came up with a plan for resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, and began work on converting reverse-dependencies.
  • Colin upgraded 42 Python packages to new upstream versions. Some were complex: python-catalogue had some upstream version confusion, pydantic and rpds-py involved several Rust package upgrades as prerequisites, and python-urllib3 involved first packaging python-quart-trio and then vendoring an unpackaged test-dependency.
  • Colin contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream.
  • Lucas set up a machine to do a rebuild of all ruby reverse dependencies to check what will be broken by adding ruby 3.3 as an alternative interpreter. The tool used for this is mass-rebuild and the initial rebuilds have already started. The ruby interpreter maintainers are planning to experiment with debusine next time.
  • Lucas is organizing a Debian Ruby sprint towards the end of January in Paris. The plan of the team is to finish any missing bits of Ruby 3.3 transition at the time, try to push Rails 7 transition and fix RC bugs affecting the ruby ecosystem in Debian.
  • Anupa attended a Debian Publicity team meeting in-person during MiniDebCamp Toulouse.
  • Anupa moderated and posted in the Debian Administrator group in LinkedIn.

1 December 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in November 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Conferences I attended MiniDebConf Toulouse 2024, and the MiniDebCamp before it. Most of my time was spent with the Freexian folks working on debusine; Stefano gave a talk about its current status with a live demo (frantically fixed up over the previous couple of days, as is traditional) and with me and others helping to answer questions at the end. I also caught up with some people I haven t seen in ages, ate a variety of delicious cheeses, and generally had a good time. Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors! After the conference, Freexian collaborators spent a day and a half doing some planning for next year, and then went for an afternoon visiting the Cit de l espace. Rust team I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions, as part of upgrading pydantic and rpds-py: Python team Last month, I mentioned that we still need to work out what to do about the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728). We eventually managed to come up with an agreed plan; Sandro has uploaded a renamed binary package to experimental, and I ve begun work on converting reverse-dependencies (asgi-csrf, fastapi, python-curies, and starlette done so far). There s a bit more still to do, but I expect we can finish it soon. I fixed problems related to adding Python 3.13 support in: I fixed some packaging problems that resulted in failures any time we add a new Python version to Debian: I fixed other build/autopkgtest failures in: I packaged python-quart-trio, needed for a new upstream version of python-urllib3, and contributed a small packaging tweak upstream. I backported a twisted fix that caused problems in other packages, including breaking debusine s tests. I disentangled some upstream version confusion in python-catalogue, and upgraded to the current upstream version. I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: Other small fixes I contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream. In response to Helmut s Cross building talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse, I fixed libfilter-perl to support cross-building (5b4c2e10, f9788c27). I applied a patch to move aliased files from / to /usr in iprutils (#1087733). I adjusted debconf to use the new /usr/lib/apt/apt-extracttemplates path (#1087523). I upgraded putty to 0.82.

8 November 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: October s report (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2024-10 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.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne After significant changes earlier this year, the state of architecture cross bootstrap is normalizing again. More and more architectures manage to complete rebootstrap testing successfully again. Here are two examples of what kind of issues the bootstrap testing identifies. At some point, libpng1.6 would fail to cross build on musl architectures whereas it would succeed on other ones failing to locate zlib. Adding --debug-find to the cmake invocation eventually revealed that it would fail to search in /usr/lib/<triplet>, which is the default library path. This turned out to be a bug in cmake assuming that all linux systems use glibc. libpng1.6 also gained a baseline violation for powerpc and ppc64 by enabling the use of AltiVec there. The newt package would fail to cross build for many 32-bit architectures whereas it would succeed for armel and armhf due to -Wincompatible-pointer-types. It turns out that this flag was turned into -Werror and it was compiling with a warning earlier. The actual problem is a difference in signedness between wchar_t and FriBidChar (aka uint32_t) and actually affects native building on i386.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut sent 35 patches for cross build failures.
  • Stefano Rivera uploaded the Python 3.13.0 final release.
  • Stefano continued to rebuild Python packages with C extensions using Python 3.13, to catch compatibility issues before the 3.13-add transition starts.
  • Stefano uploaded new versions of a handful of Python packages, including: dh-python, objgraph, python-mitogen, python-truststore, and python-virtualenv.
  • Stefano packaged a new release of mkdocs-macros-plugin, which required packaging a new Python package for Debian, python-super-collections (now in NEW review).
  • Stefano helped the mini-DebConf Online Brazil get video infrastructure up and running for the event. Unfortunately, Debian s online-DebConf setup has bitrotted over the last couple of years, and it eventually required new temporary Jitsi and Jibri instances.
  • Colin Watson fixed a number of autopkgtest failures to get ansible back into testing.
  • Colin fixed an ssh client failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange, and added an integration test to ensure this doesn t regress in future.
  • Colin worked on the Python 3.13 transition, fixing problems related to it in 15 packages. This included upstream work in a number of packages (postgresfixture, python-asyncssh, python-wadllib).
  • Colin upgraded 41 Python packages to new upstream versions.
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: now it can create merge requests to Salsa automatically (created 17, new batch coming this month), imported almost all the packages with debconf translation templates whose VCS is Salsa (currently 449 imported), added statistics per package and language, improved command line interface options. Performed user support fixing different issues. Also prepared an abstract for the talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n continued the organization work for the DebConf 25 conference, to be held in Brest, France. Part of the work relates to the initial edits of the sponsoring brochure. Thanks to Benjamin Somers who finalized the French and English versions.
  • Rapha l forwarded a couple of zim and hamster bugs to the upstream developers, and tried to diagnose a delayed startup of gdm on his laptop (cf #1085633).
  • On behalf of the Debian Publicity Team, Anupa interviewed 7 women from the Debian community, old and new contributors. The interview was published in Bits from Debian.

1 November 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in October 2024

Almost all of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Ansible I noticed that Ansible had fallen out of Debian testing due to autopkgtest failures. This seemed like a problem worth fixing: in common with many other people, we use Ansible for configuration management at Freexian, and it probably wouldn t make our sysadmins too happy if they upgraded to trixie after its release and found that Ansible was gone. The problems here were really just slogging through test failures in both the ansible-core and ansible packages, but their test suites are large and take a while to run so this took some time. I was able to contribute a few small fixes to various upstreams in the process: This should now get back into testing tomorrow. OpenSSH Martin- ric Racine reported that ssh-audit didn t list the ext-info-s feature as being available in Debian s OpenSSH 9.2 packaging in bookworm, contrary to what OpenSSH upstream said on their specifications page at the time. I spent some time looking into this and realized that upstream was mistakenly saying that implementations of ext-info-c and ext-info-s were added at the same time, while in fact ext-info-s was added rather later. ssh-audit now has clearer output, and the OpenSSH maintainers have corrected their specifications page. I looked into a report of an ssh failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange (which is a Debian patch). Once again, having integration tests was a huge win here: the affected scenario is quite a fiddly one, but I was able to set it up in the test, and thereby make sure it doesn t regress in future. It still took me a couple of hours to get all the details right, but in the past this sort of thing took me much longer with a much lower degree of confidence that the fix was correct. On upstream s advice, I cherry-picked some key exchange fixes needed for big-endian architectures. Python team I packaged python-evalidate, needed for a new upstream version of buildbot. The Python 3.13 transition rolls on. I fixed problems related to it in htmlmin, humanfriendly, postgresfixture (contributed upstream), pylint, python-asyncssh (contributed upstream), python-oauthlib, python3-simpletal, quodlibet, zope.exceptions, and zope.interface. A trickier Python 3.13 issue involved the cgi module. Years ago I ported zope.publisher to the multipart module because cgi.FieldStorage was broken in some situations, and as a result I got a recommendation into Python s dead batteries PEP 594. Unfortunately there turns out to be a name conflict between multipart and python-multipart on PyPI; python-multipart upstream has been working to disentangle this, though we still need to work out what to do in Debian. All the same, I needed to fix python-wadllib and multipart seemed like the best fit; I contributed a port upstream and temporarily copied multipart into Debian s python-wadllib source package to allow its tests to pass. I ll come back and fix this properly once we sort out the multipart vs. python-multipart packaging. tzdata moved some timezone definitions to tzdata-legacy, which has broken a number of packages. I added tzdata-legacy build-dependencies to alembic and python-icalendar to deal with this in those packages, though there are still some other instances of this left. I tracked down an nltk regression that caused build failures in many other packages. I fixed Rust crate versioning issues in pydantic-core, python-bcrypt, and python-maturin (mostly fixed by Peter Michael Green and Jelmer Vernoo , but it needed a little extra work). I fixed other build failures in entrypoints, mayavi2, python-pyvmomi (mostly fixed by Alexandre Detiste, but it needed a little extra work), and python-testing.postgresql (ditto). I fixed python3-simpletal to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools. I fixed broken symlinks in python-treq. I removed (build-)depends on python3-pkg-resources from alembic, autopep8, buildbot, celery, flufl.enum, flufl.lock, python-public, python-wadllib (contributed upstream), pyvisa, routes, vulture, and zodbpickle (contributed upstream). I upgraded astroid, asyncpg (fixing a Python 3.13 failure and a build failure), buildbot (noticing an upstream test bug in the process), dnsdiag, frozenlist, netmiko (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), psycopg3, pydantic-settings, pylint, python-asyncssh, python-bleach, python-btrees, python-cytoolz, python-django-pgtrigger, python-django-test-migrations, python-gssapi, python-icalendar, python-json-log-formatter, python-pgbouncer, python-pkginfo, python-plumbum, python-stdlib-list, python-tokenize-rt, python-treq (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), python-typeguard, python-webargs (fixing a build failure), pyupgrade, pyvisa, pyvisa-py (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), toolz, twisted, vulture, waitress (fixing CVE-2024-49768 and CVE-2024-49769), wtf-peewee, wtforms, zodbpickle, zope.exceptions, zope.interface, zope.proxy, zope.security, and zope.testrunner to new upstream versions. I tried to fix a regression in python-scruffy, but I need testing feedback. I requested removal of python-testing.mysqld.

10 October 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Packaging Pydantic v2, Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, Python archive rebuilds and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2024-09 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.

Pydantic v2, by Colin Watson Pydantic is a useful library for validating data in Python using type hints: Freexian uses it in a number of projects, including Debusine. Its Debian packaging had been stalled at 1.10.17 in testing for some time, partly due to needing to make sure everything else could cope with the breaking changes introduced in 2.x, but mostly due to needing to sort out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo R hling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck. Colin upgraded a few Rust libraries to new upstream versions, packaged rust-jiter, and chased various failures in other packages. This eventually allowed getting current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing. It should now be much easier for us to stay up to date routinely.

Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, by Helmut Grohne Simon McVittie (not affiliated with Freexian) earlier restructured the libglib2.0-dev such that it would absorb more functionality and in particular provide tools for working with .gir files. Those tools practically require being run for their host architecture (practically this means running under qemu-user) which is at odds with the requirements of architecture cross bootstrap. The qemu requirement was expressed in package dependencies and also made people unhappy attempting to use libglib2.0-dev for i386 on amd64 without resorting to qemu. The use of qemu in architecture bootstrap is particularly problematic as it tends to not be ready at the time bootstrapping is needed. As a result, Simon proposed and implemented the introduction of a libgio-2.0-dev package providing a subset of libglib2.0-dev that does not require qemu. Packages should continue to use libglib2.0-dev in their Build-Depends unless involved in architecture bootstrap. Helmut reviewed and tested the implementation and integrated the necessary changes into rebootstrap. He also prepared a patch for libverto to use the new package and proposed adding forward compatibility to glib2.0. Helmut continued working on adding cross-exe-wrapper to architecture-properties and implemented autopkgtests later improved by Simon. The cross-exe-wrapper package now provides a generic mechanism to a program on a different architecture by using qemu when needed only. For instance, a dependency on cross-exe-wrapper:i386 provides a i686-linux-gnu-cross-exe-wrapper program that can be used to wrap an ELF executable for the i386 architecture. When installed on amd64 or i386 it will skip installing or running qemu, but for other architectures qemu will be used automatically. This facility can be used to support cross building with targeted use of qemu in cases where running host code is unavoidable as is the case for GObject introspection. This concludes the joint work with Simon and Niels Thykier on glib2.0 and architecture-properties resolving known architecture bootstrap regressions arising from the glib2.0 refactoring earlier this year.

Analyzing binary package metadata, by Helmut Grohne As Guillem Jover (not affiliated with Freexian) continues to work on adding metadata tracking to dpkg, the question arises how this affects existing packages. The dedup.debian.net infrastructure provides an easy playground to answer such questions, so Helmut gathered file metadata from all binary packages in unstable and performed an explorative analysis. Some results include: Guillem also performed a cursory analysis and reported other problem categories such as mismatching directory permissions for directories installed by multiple packages and thus gained a better understanding of what consistency checks dpkg can enforce.

Python archive rebuilds, by Stefano Rivera Last month Stefano started to write some tooling to do large-scale rebuilds in debusine, starting with finding packages that had already started to fail to build from source (FTBFS) due to the removal of setup.py test. This month, Stefano did some more rebuilds, starting with experimental versions of dh-python. During the Python 3.12 transition, we had added a dependency on python3-setuptools to dh-python, to ease the transition. Python 3.12 removed distutils from the stdlib, but many packages were expecting it to still be available. Setuptools contains a version of distutils, and dh-python was a convenient place to depend on setuptools for most package builds. This dependency was never meant to be permanent. A rebuild without it resulted in mass-filing about 340 bugs (and around 80 more by mistake). A new feature in Python 3.12, was to have unittest s test runner exit with a non-zero return code, if no tests were run. We added this feature, to be able to detect tests that are not being discovered, by mistake. We are ignoring this failure, as we wouldn t want to suddenly cause hundreds of packages to fail to build, if they have no tests. Stefano did a rebuild to see how many packages were affected, and found that around 1000 were. The Debian Python community has not come to a conclusion on how to move forward with this. As soon as Python 3.13 release candidate 2 was available, Stefano did a rebuild of the Python packages in the archive against it. This was a more complex rebuild than the others, as it had to be done in stages. Many packages need other Python packages at build time, typically to run tests. So transitions like this involve some manual bootstrapping, followed by several rounds of builds. Not all packages could be tested, as not all their dependencies support 3.13 yet. The result was around 100 bugs in packages that need work to support Python 3.13. Many other packages will need additional work to properly support Python 3.13, but being able to build (and run tests) is an important first step.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles prepared the update of python-pyaarlo package to a new upstream release.
  • Carles worked on updating python-ring-doorbell to a new upstream release. Unfinished, pending to package a new dependency python3-firebase-messaging RFP #1082958 and its dependency python3-http-ece RFP #1083020.
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager. Main new feature is that it can open Salsa merge requests. Aiming for a lightning talk in MiniDebConf Toulouse (November) to be functional end to end and get feedback from the wider public for this proof of concept.
  • Carles helped one translator to use po-debconf-manager (added compatibility for bullseye, fixed other issues) and reviewed 17 package templates.
  • Colin upgraded the OpenSSH packaging to 9.9p1.
  • Colin upgraded the various YubiHSM packages to new upstream versions, enabled more tests, fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures, made yubihsm-shell build reproducibly, and fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed. As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes.
  • Colin fixed quite a bit of fallout from setuptools 72.0.0 removing setup.py test, backported a large upstream patch set to make buildbot work with SQLAlchemy 2.0, and upgraded 25 other Python packages to new upstream versions.
  • Enrico worked with Jakob Haufe to get him up to speed for managing sso.debian.org
  • Rapha l did remove spam entries in the list of teams on tracker.debian.org (see #1080446), and he applied a few external contributions, fixing a rendering issue and replacing the DDPO link with a more useful alternative. He also gave feedback on a couple of merge requests that required more work. As part of the analysis of the underlying problem, he suggested to the ftpmasters (via #1083068) to auto-reject packages having the too-many-contacts lintian error, and he raised the severity of #1076048 to serious to actually have that 4 year old bug fixed.
  • Rapha l uploaded zim and hamster-time-tracker to fix issues with Python 3.12 getting rid of setuptools. He also uploaded a new gnome-shell-extension-hamster to cope with the upcoming transition to GNOME 47.
  • Helmut sent seven patches and sponsored one upload for cross build failures.
  • Helmut uploaded a Nagios/Icinga plugin check-smart-attributes for monitoring the health of physical disks.
  • Helmut collaborated on sbuild reviewing and improving a MR for refactoring the unshare backend.
  • Helmut sent a patch fixing coinstallability of gcc-defaults.
  • Helmut continued to monitor the evolution of the /usr-move. With more and more key packages such as libvirt or fuse3 fixed. We re moving into the boring long-tail of the transition.
  • Helmut proposed updating the meson buildsystem in debhelper to use env2mfile.
  • Helmut continued to update patches maintained in rebootstrap. Due to the work on glib2.0 above, rebootstrap moves a lot further, but still fails for any architecture.
  • Santiago reviewed some Merge Request in Salsa CI, such as: !478, proposed by Otto to extend the information about how to use additional runners in the pipeline and !518, proposed by Ahmed to add support for Ubuntu images, that will help to test how some debian packages, including the complex MariaDB are built on Ubuntu. Santiago also prepared !545, which will make the reprotest job more consistent with the result seen on reproducible-builds.
  • Santiago worked on different tasks related to DebConf 25. Especially he drafted the fundraising brochure (which is almost ready).
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded package libcupsfilter to fix the autopkgtest and a dependency problem of this package. After package splix was abandoned by upstream and OpenPrinting.org adopted its maintenance, Thorsten uploaded their first release.
  • Anupa published posts on the Debian Administrators group in LinkedIn and moderated the group, one of the tasks of the Debian Publicity Team.
  • Anupa helped organize DebUtsav 2024. It had over 100 attendees with hand-on sessions on making initial contributions to Linux Kernel, Debian packaging, submitting documentation to Debian wiki and assisting Debian Installations.

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