Search Results: "Helmut Grohne"

13 March 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, packaging simplemonitor, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne Much of the work was spent on handling interaction with time time64 transition and sending patches for mitigating fallout. The set of packages relevant to debootstrap is mostly converted and the patches for glibc and base-files have been refined due to feedback from the upload to Ubuntu noble. Beyond this, he sent patches for all remaining packages that cannot move their files with dh-sequence-movetousr and packages using dpkg-divert in ways that dumat would not recognize.

Upcoming improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Last month, Santiago Ruano Rinc n started the work on integrating sbuild into the Salsa CI pipeline. Initially, Santiago used sbuild with the unshare chroot mode. However, after discussion with josch, jochensp and helmut (thanks to them!), it turns out that the unshare mode is not the most suitable for the pipeline, since the level of isolation it provides is not needed, and some test suites would fail (eg: krb5). Additionally, one of the requirements of the build job is the use of ccache, since it is needed by some C/C++ large projects to reduce the compilation time. In the preliminary work with unshare last month, it was not possible to make ccache to work. Finally, Santiago changed the chroot mode, and now has a couple of POC (cf: 1 and 2) that rely on the schroot and sudo, respectively. And the good news is that ccache is successfully used by sbuild with schroot! The image here comes from an example of building grep. At the end of the build, ccache -s shows the statistics of the cache that it used, and so a little more than half of the calls of that job were cacheable. The most important pieces are in place to finish the integration of sbuild into the pipeline. Other than that, Santiago also reviewed the very useful merge request !346, made by IOhannes zm lnig to autodetect the release from debian/changelog. As agreed with IOhannes, Santiago is preparing a merge request to include the release autodetection use case in the very own Salsa CI s CI.

Packaging simplemonitor, by Carles Pina i Estany Carles started using simplemonitor in 2017, opened a WNPP bug in 2022 and started packaging simplemonitor dependencies in October 2023. After packaging five direct and indirect dependencies, Carles finally uploaded simplemonitor to unstable in February. During the packaging of simplemonitor, Carles reported a few issues to upstream. Some of these were to make the simplemonitor package build and run tests reproducibly. A reproducibility issue was reprotest overriding the timezone, which broke simplemonitor s tests. There have been discussions on resolving this upstream in simplemonitor and in reprotest, too. Carles also started upgrading or improving some of simplemonitor s dependencies.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera spent some time doing admin on debian.social infrastructure. Including dealing with a spike of abuse on the Jitsi server.
  • Stefano started to prepare a new release of dh-python, including cleaning out a lot of old Python 2.x related code. Thanks to Niels Thykier (outside Freexian) for spear-heading this work.
  • DebConf 24 planning is beginning. Stefano discussed venues and finances with the local team and remotely supported a site-visit by Nattie (outside Freexian).
  • Also in the DebConf 24 context, Santiago took part in discussions and preparations related to the Content Team.
  • A JIT bug was reported against pypy3 in Debian Bookworm. Stefano bisected the upstream history to find the patch (it was already resolved upstream) and released an update to pypy3 in bookworm.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
  • Colin Watson backported a python-channels-redis fix to bookworm, rediscovered while working on debusine.
  • Colin dug into a cluster of celery build failures and tracked the hardest bit down to a Python 3.12 regression, now fixed in unstable. celery should be back in testing once the 64-bit time_t migration is out of the way.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cpdb-libs. Unfortunately upstream changed the naming of their release tags, so updating the watch file was a bit demanding. Anyway this version 2.0 is a huge step towards introduction of the new Common Print Dialog Backends.
  • Helmut send patches for 48 cross build failures.
  • Helmut changed debvm to use mkfs.ext4 instead of genext2fs.
  • Helmut sent a debci MR for improving collector robustness.
  • In preparation for DebConf 25, Santiago worked on the Brest Bid.

11 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently, the first job in a Salsa CI pipeline is the extract-source job, used to produce a debianize source tree of the project. This job was introduced to make it possible to build the projects on different architectures, on the subsequent build jobs. However, that extract-source approach is sub-optimal: not only it increases the execution time of the pipeline by some minutes, but also projects whose source tree is too large are not able to use the pipeline. The debianize source tree is passed as an artifact to the build jobs, and for those large projects, the size of their source tree exceeds the Salsa s limits. This is specific issue is documented as issue #195, and the proposed solution is to get rid of the extract-source job, relying on sbuild in the very build job (see issue #296). Switching to sbuild would also help to improve the build source job, solving issues such as #187 and #298. The current work-in-progress is very preliminary, but it has already been possible to run the build (amd64), build-i386 and build-source job using sbuild with the unshare mode. The image on the right shows a pipeline that builds grep. All the test jobs use the artifacts of the new build job. There is a lot of remaining work, mainly making the integration with ccache work. This change could break some things, it will also be important to test how the new pipeline works with complex projects. Also, thanks to Emmanuel Arias, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2024 project to improve Salsa CI. As part of the ongoing work in preparation for the GSoC 2024 project, Santiago has proposed a merge request to make more efficient how contributors can test their changes on the Salsa CI pipeline.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In January, we sent most of the moving patches for the set of packages involved with debootstrap. Notably missing is glibc, which turns out harder than anticipated via dumat, because it has Conflicts between different architectures, which dumat does not analyze. Patches for diversion mitigations have been updated in a way to not exhibit any loss anymore. The main change here is that packages which are being diverted now support the diverting packages in transitioning their diversions. We also supported a few packages with non-trivial changes such as netplan.io. dumat has been enhanced to better support derivatives such as Ubuntu.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Python 3.12 migration trundles on. Stefano Rivera helped port several new packages to support 3.12.
  • Stefano updated the Sphinx configuration of DebConf Video Team s documentation, which was broken by Sphinx 7.
  • Stefano published the videos from the Cambridge MiniDebConf to YouTube and PeerTube.
  • DebConf 24 planning has begun, and Stefano & Utkarsh have started work on this.
  • Utkarsh re-sponsored the upload of golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter for Lena.
  • Colin Watson added Incus support to autopkgtest.
  • Colin discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of his packages, including debconf.
  • Colin did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
  • Colin figured out how to update the mirror size documentation in debmirror, last updated in 2010. It should now be much easier to keep it up to date regularly.
  • Colin issued a man-db buster update to clean up some irritations due to strict sandboxing.
  • Thorsten Alteholz adopted two more packages, magicfilter and ifhp, for the debian-printing team. Those packages are the last ones of the latest round of adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don t hesitate to contact Thorsten.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
  • Helmut sent patches for 16 cross build failures.
  • Helmut supported Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) with adding -for-host support to gcc-defaults.
  • Helmut uploaded dput-ng enabling dcut migrate and merging two MRs of Ben Hutchings.
  • Santiago took part in the discussions relating to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Debian public statement that was published last year. He participated in a meeting with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Marcel Kolaja and Karen Melchior, and their teams to clarify some points about the impact of the CRA and Debian and downstream projects, and the improvements in the last version of the proposed regulation.

13 January 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: LXD/Incus backend bug, /usr-merge updates, gcc-for-host, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

LXD/Incus backend bug in autopkgtest by Stefano Rivera While working on the Python 3.12 transition, Stefano repeatedly ran into a bug in autopkgtest when using LXD (or in the future Incus), that caused it to hang when running cython s multi-hour autopkgtests. After some head-banging, the bug turned out to be fairly straightforward: LXD didn t shut down on receiving a SIGTERM, so when a testsuite timed out, it would hang forever. A simple fix has been applied.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Thanks to Christian Hofstaedtler and others, the effort is moving into a community effort and the work funded by Freexian becomes more difficult to separate from non-funded work. In particular, since the community fully handled all issues around lost udev rules, dh_installudev now installs rules to /usr. The story around diversions took another detour. We learned that conflicts do not reliably prevent concurrent unpack and the reiterated mitigation for molly-guard triggered this. After a bit of back and forth and consultation with the developer mailing list, we concluded that avoiding the problematic behavior when using apt or an apt-based upgrader combined with a loss mitigation would be good enough. The involved packages bfh-container, molly-guard, progress-linux-container and systemd have since been uploaded to unstable and the matter seems finally solved except that it doesn t quite work with sysvinit yet. The same approach is now being proposed for the diversions of zutils for gzip. We thank involved maintainers for their timely cooperation.

gcc-for-host, by Helmut Grohne Since forever, it has been difficult to correctly express a toolchain build dependency. This can be seen in the Build-Depends of the linux source package for instance. While this has been solved for binutils a while back, the patches for gcc have been unfinished. With lots of constructive feedback from gcc package maintainer Matthias Klose, Helmut worked on finalizing and testing these patches. Patch stacks are now available for gcc-13 and gcc-14 and Matthias already included parts of them in test builds for Ubuntu noble. Finishing this work would enable us to resolve around 1000 cross build dependency satisfiability issues in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano continued work on the Python 3.12 transition, including uploads of cython, pycxx, numpy, python-greenlet, twisted, foolscap and dh-python.
  • Stefano reviewed and selected from a new round of DebConf 24 bids, as part of the DebConf Committee. Busan, South Korea was selected.
  • For debian-printing Thorsten uploaded hplip to unstable to fix a /usr-merge bug and cups to Bookworm to fix bugs related to printing in color.
  • Utkarsh helped newcomers in mentoring and reviewing their packaging; eg: golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter.
  • Helmut sent patches for 42 cross build failures unrelated to the gcc-for-host work.
  • Helmut continues to maintain rebootstrap. In December, blt started depending on libjpeg and this poses a dependency loop. Ideally, Python would stop depending on blt. Also linux-libc-dev having become Multi-Arch: foreign poses non-trivial issues that are not fully resolved yet.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.

10 December 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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 Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
  • For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
  • Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
  • Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
  • Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
  • Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
  • Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
  • Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
  • Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
  • Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
  • Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
  • Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

3 December 2023

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in November 2023

23 November 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Preparing for Python 3.12, /usr-merge updates, invalid PEP-440 versions, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

urllib3 s old security patch by Stefano Rivera Stefano ran into a test-suite failure in a new Debian package (python-truststore), caused by Debian s patch to urllib3 from a decade ago, making it enable TLS verification by default (remember those days!). Some analysis confirmed that this patch isn t useful any more, and could be removed. While working on the package, Stefano investigated the scope of the urllib3 2.x transition. It looks ready to start, not many packages are affected.

Preparing for Python 3.12 in dh-python by Stefano Rivera We are preparing to start the Python 3.12 transition in Debian. Two of the upstream changes that are going to cause a lot of packages to break could be worked-around in dh-python, so we did:
  • Distutils is no longer shipped in the Python stdlib. Packages need to Build-Depend on python3-setuptools to get a (compatibility shim) distutils. Until that happens, dh-python will Depend on setuptools.
  • A failure to find any tests to execute will now make the unittest runner exit 5, like pytest does. This was our change, to test-suites that have failed to be automatically discovered. It will cause many packages to fail to build, so until they explicitly skip running test suites, dh-python will ignore these failures.

/usr-merge by Helmut Grohne It has become clear that the planned changes to debhelper and systemd.pc cause more rc-bugs. Helmut researched these systematically and filed another stack of patches. At the time of this writing, the uploads would still cause about 40 rc-bugs. A new opt-in helper dh_movetousr has been developed and added to debhelper in trixie and unstable.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten adopted two packages, namely rlpr and lprng, and moved them to the debian-printing team. As part of this Thorsten could close eight bugs in the BTS. Thorsten also uploaded a new upstream version of cups, which also meant that eleven bugs could be closed. As package hannah-foo2zjs still depended on the deprecated policykit-1 package, Thorsten changed the dependency list accordingly and could close one RC bug by the following upload.

Invalid PEP-440 Versions in Python Packages by Stefano Rivera Stefano investigated how many packages in Debian (typically Debian-native packages) recorded versions in their packaging metadata (egg-info directories) that weren t valid PEP-440 Python versions. pip is starting to enforce that all versions on the system are valid.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • distro-info-data updates in Debian, due to the new Ubuntu release, by Stefano.
  • DebConf 23 bookkeeping continues, but is winding down. Stefano still spends a little time on it.
  • Utkarsh continues to monitor and help with reimbursements.
  • Helmut continues to maintain architecture bootstrap and accidentally broke pam briefly
  • Anton uploaded boost1.83 and started to prepare a transition to make boost1.83 as a default boost version.
  • Rejuntada Debian UY 2023, a MiniDebConf that will be held in Montevideo, from 9 to 11 November, mainly organized by Santiago.

13 November 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2023 (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 October, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 8.0h (out of 7.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.75h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.75h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 9.75h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.75h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 17.5h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 9.75h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 1.5h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 10.75h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.0h (out of 0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 12.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.625h (out of 7.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.375h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 13.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 7.5h (out of 11.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0.75h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In October, we have released 49 DLAs. Of particular note in the month of October, LTS contributor Chris Lamb issued DLA 3627-1 pertaining to Redis, the popular key-value database similar to Memcached, which was vulnerable to an authentication bypass vulnerability. Fixing this vulnerability involved dealing with a race condition that could allow another process an opportunity to establish an otherwise unauthorized connection. LTS contributor Markus Koschany was involved in the mitigation of CVE-2023-44487, which is a protocol-level vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol. The impacts within Debian involved multiple packages, across multiple releases, with multiple advisories being released (both DSA for stable and old-stable, and DLA for LTS). Markus reviewed patches and security updates prepared by other Debian developers, investigated reported regressions, provided patches for the aforementioned regressions, and issued several security updates as part of this. Additionally, as MariaDB 10.3 (the version originally included with Debian buster) passed end-of-life earlier this year, LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun investigating the feasibility of backporting MariaDB 10.11. The work is in early stages, with much testing and analysis remaining before a final decision can be made, as this only one of several available potential courses of action concerning MariaDB. Finally, LTS contributor Lee Garrett has invested considerable effort into the development the Functional Test Framework here. While so far only an initial version has been published, it already has several features which we intend to begin leveraging for testing of LTS packages. In particular, the FTF supports provisioning multiple VMs for the purposes of performing functional tests of network-facing services (e.g., file services, authentication, etc.). These tests are in addition to the various unit-level tests which are executed during package build time. Development work will continue on FTF and as it matures and begins to see wider use within LTS we expect to improve the quality of the updates we publish.

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

20 October 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Freexian meetup, debusine updates, lpr/lpd in Debian, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

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.

Freexian Meetup, by Stefano Rivera, Utkarsh Gupta, et al. During DebConf, Freexian organized a meetup for its collaborators and those interested in learning more about Freexian and its services. It was well received and many people interested in Freexian showed up. Some developers who were interested in contributing to LTS came to get more details about joining the project. And some prospective customers came to get to know us and ask questions. Sadly, the tragic loss of Abraham shook DebConf, both individually and structurally. The meetup got rescheduled to a small room without video coverage. With that, we still had a wholesome interaction and here s a quick picture from the meetup taken by Utkarsh (which is also why he s missing!).

Debusine, by Rapha l Hertzog, et al. Freexian has been investing into debusine for a while, but development speed is about to increase dramatically thanks to funding from SovereignTechFund.de. Rapha l laid out the 5 milestones of the funding contract, and filed the issues for the first milestone. Together with Enrico and Stefano, they established a workflow for the expanded team. Among the first steps of this milestone, Enrico started to work on a developer-friendly description of debusine that we can use when we reach out to the many Debian contributors that we will have to interact with. And Rapha l started the design work of the autopkgtest and lintian tasks, i.e. what s the interface to schedule such tasks, what behavior and what associated options do we support? At this point you might wonder what debusine is supposed to be let us try to answer this: Debusine manages scheduling and distribution of Debian-related build and QA tasks to a network of worker machines. It also manages the resulting artifacts and provides the results in an easy to consume way. We want to make it easy for Debian contributors to leverage all the great QA tools that Debian provides. We want to build the next generation of Debian s build infrastructure, one that will continue to reliably do what it already does, but that will also enable distribution-wide experiments, custom package repositories and custom workflows with advanced package reviews. If this all sounds interesting to you, don t hesitate to watch the project on salsa.debian.org and to contribute.

lpr/lpd in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz During Debconf23, Till Kamppeter presented CPDB (Common Print Dialog Backend), a new way to handle print queues. After this talk it was discussed whether the old lpr/lpd based printing system could be abandoned in Debian or whether there is still demand for it. So Thorsten asked on the debian-devel email list whether anybody uses it. Oddly enough, these old packages are still useful:
  • Within a small network it is easier to distribute a printcap file, than to properly configure cups clients.
  • One of the biggest manufacturers of WLAN router and DSL boxes only supports raw queues when attaching an USB printer to their hardware. Admittedly the CPDB still has problems with such raw queues.
  • The Pharos printing system at MIT is still lpd-based.
As a result, the lpr/lpd stuff is not yet ready to be abandoned and Thorsten will adopt the relevant packages (or rather move them under the umbrella of the debian-printing team). Though it is not planned to develop new features, those packages should at least have a maintainer. This month Thorsten adopted rlpr, an utility for lpd printing without using /etc/printcap. The next one he is working on is lprng, a lpr/lpd printer spooling system. If you know of any other package that is also needed and still maintained by the QA team, please tell Thorsten.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Discussion about lifting the file move moratorium has been initiated with the CTTE and the release team. A formal lift is dependent on updating debootstrap in older suites though. A significant number of packages can automatically move their systemd unit files if dh_installsystemd and systemd.pc change their installation targets. Unfortunately, doing so makes some packages FTBFS and therefore patches have been filed. The analysis tool, dumat, has been enhanced to better understand which upgrade scenarios are considered supported to reduce false positive bug filings and gained a mode for local operation on a .changes file meant for inclusion in salsa-ci. The filing of bugs from dumat is still manual to improve the quality of reports. Since September, the moratorium has been lifted.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l updated Django s backport in bullseye-backports to match the latest security release that was published in bookworm. Tracker.debian.org is still using that backport.
  • Helmut Grohne sent 13 patches for cross build failures.
  • Helmut Grohne performed a maintenance upload of debvm enabling its use in autopkgtests.
  • Helmut Grohne wrote an API-compatible reimplementation of autopkgtest-build-qemu. It is powered by mmdebstrap, therefore unprivileged, EFI-only and will soon be included in mmdebstrap.
  • Santiago continued the work regarding how to make it easier to (automatically) test reverse dependencies. An example of the ongoing work was presented during the Salsa CI BoF at DebConf 23.
    In fact, omniorb-dfsg test pipelines as the above were used for the omniorb-dfsg 4.3.0 transition, verifying how the reverse dependencies (tango, pytango and omnievents) were built and how their autopkgtest jobs run with the to-be-uploaded omniorb-dfsg new release.
  • Utkarsh and Stefano attended and helped run DebConf 23. Also continued winding up DebConf 22 accounting.
  • Anton Gladky did some science team uploads to fix RC bugs.

12 October 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

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

Debian LTS contributors In September, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 7.0h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 18.25h (out of 18.25h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 7.75h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 13.25h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 44 DLAs. The month of September was a busy month for the LTS Team. A notable security issue fixed in September was the high-severity CVE-2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow that allowed remote attackers to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted WebP file. This CVE was covered by the three DLAs of different packages: firefox-esr, libwebp and thunderbird. The libwebp backported patch was sent to upstream, who adapted and applied it to the 0.6.1 branch. It is also worth noting that LTS contributor Markus Koschany included in his work updates to packages in Debian Bullseye and Bookworm, that are under the umbrella of the Security Team: xrdp, jetty9 and mosquitto. As every month, there was important behind-the-scenes work by the Front Desk staff, who triaged, analyzed and reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities, to decide if they warrant a security update. This is very important work, since we need to trade-off between the frequency of updates and the stability of the LTS release.

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

10 September 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: /usr-merge updates, Salsa CI progress, DebConf23 lead-up, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

/usr-merge work, by Helmut Grohne, et al. Given that we now have consensus on moving forward by moving aliased files from / to /usr, we will also run into the problems that the file move moratorium was meant to prevent. The way forward is detecting them early and applying workarounds on a per-package basis. Said detection is now automated using the Debian Usr Merge Analysis Tool. As problems are reported to the bug tracking system, they are connected to the reports if properly usertagged. Bugs and patches for problem categories DEP17-P2 and DEP17-P6 have been filed. After consensus has been reached on the bootstrapping matters, debootstrap has been changed to swap the initial unpack and merging to avoid unpack errors due to pre-existing links. This is a precondition for having base-files install the aliasing symbolic links eventually. It was identified that the root filesystem used by the Debian installer is still unmerged and a change has been proposed. debhelper was changed to recognize systemd units installed to /usr. A discussion with the CTTE and release team on repealing the moratorium has been initiated.

Salsa CI work, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n August was a busy month in the Salsa CI world. Santiago reviewed and merged a bunch of MRs that have improved the project in different aspects: The aptly job got two MRs from Philip Hands. With the first one, the aptly now can export a couple of variables in a dotenv file, and with the second, it can include packages from multiple artifact directories. These MRs bring the base to improve how to test reverse dependencies with Salsa CI. Santiago is working on documenting this. As a result of the mass bug filing done in August, Salsa CI now includes a job to test how a package builds twice in a row. Thanks to the MRs of Sebastiaan Couwenberg and Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Last but not least, Santiago helped Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues to complete the support for arm64-only pipelines.

DebConf23 lead-up, by Stefano Rivera Stefano wears a few hats in the DebConf organization and in the lead up to the conference in mid-September, they ve all been quite busy. As one of the treasurers of DebConf 23, there has been a final budget update, and quite a few payments to coordinate from Debian s Trusted Organizations. We try to close the books from the previous conference at the next one, so a push was made to get DebConf 22 account statements out of TOs and record them in the conference ledger. As a website developer, we had a number of registration-related tasks, emailing attendees and trying to estimate numbers for food and accommodation. As a conference committee member, the job was mostly taking calls and helping the local team to make decisions on urgent issues. For example, getting conference visas issued to attendees required getting political approval from the Indian government. We only discovered the full process for this too late to clear some complex cases, so this required some hard calls on skipping some countries from the application list, allowing everyone else to get visas in time. Unfortunate, but necessary.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l Hertzog updated gnome-shell-extension-hamster to a new upstream git snapshot that is compatible with GNOME Shell 44 that was recently uploaded to Debian unstable/testing. This extension makes it easy to start/stop tracking time with Hamster Time Tracker. Very handy for consultants like us who are billing their work per hour.
  • Rapha l also updated zim to the latest upstream release (0.74.2). This is a desktop wiki that can be very useful as a note-taking tool to build your own personal knowledge base or even to manage your personal todo lists.
  • Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some uploads from mentors.debian.net.
  • Utkarsh helped the local team and the bursary team with some more DebConf activities and helped finalize the data.
  • Thorsten tried to update package hplip. Unfortunately upstream added some new compressed files that need to appear uncompressed in the package. Even though this sounded like an easy task, which seemed to be already implemented in the current debian/rules, the new type of files broke this implementation and made the package no longer buildable. The problem has been solved and the upload will happen soon.
  • Helmut sent 7 patches for cross build failures. Since dpkg-buildflags now defaults to issue arm64-specific compiler flags, more care is needed to distinguish between build architecture flags and host architecture flags than previously.
  • Stefano pushed the final bit of the tox 4 transition over the line in Debian, allowing dh-python and tox 4 to migrate to testing. We got caught up in a few unusual bugs in tox and the way we run it in Debian package building (which had to change with tox 4). This resulted in a couple of patches upstream.
  • Stefano visited Haifa, Israel, to see the proposed DebConf 24 venue and meet with the local team. While the venue isn t committed yet, we have high hopes for it.

12 July 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: /usr-merge updates, DebConf Bursary prep, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al The work on /usr-merge continues from May. The lengthy discussion was condensed into a still lengthy rewrite of DEP17 listing all known problems and proposed mitigations. An initial consensus call did not resolve all questions, but we now have rough consensus on finalizing the transition without relying on major changes to dpkg. Other questions still have diverging opinions and some matters such as how to not break backports are still missing satisfying answers.

DebConf Bursary prep, by Utkarsh Gupta DebCamp and DebConf is happening from 03rd September to 17th September in Kochi, India, and the DebConf Bursary team is gearing up for that. After extending the bursary deadline (catering to the requests coming in from various people), we ve finally managed to clock over 260 bursary requests. The team is set up and we re starting to review the applications. The team intends to roll out the result as soon as possible.

debci, by Helmut Grohne As Freexian is working on deploying autopkgtests for the LTS and ELTS services, debci and autopkgtests were improved in Debian to better deal with derivatives (e.g. by better supporting external package signing keyrings). Other aspects that are not deployed on ci.debian.net such as the qemu backend were also improved. We express thanks to the relevant maintainers Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Simon McVittie for their timely reviews and merges of our changes.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Following the release of Debian 12, Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to be aware of trixie. He also pushed some fixes to distro-tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org) and released version 1.2.0 (since the former release was lacking fixes to run on Debian 12 bookworm).
  • Following the release of Debian 12, Helmut Grohne updated crossqa.debian.net systems. He also sent 7 patches for cross build failures and continued adapting rebootstrap to changes in unstable.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n started to work on how to improve the robustness of Salsa CI s pipeline for some jobs failing frequently.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did security updates of cpdb-libs in Unstable and Bookworm.
  • Stefano Rivera upgraded pixelfed.debian.social to bookworm.
  • Stefano started an re2 library transition, and started preparation for the next transition.
  • Helmut Grohne updated debvm in unstable releasing changes that accumulated during the freeze.
  • Stefano did some work on the website and infrastructure for DebConf 23.
  • Utkarsh Gupta helped review and fix open redmine bugs and fix them all in unstable.

10 June 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: /usr-merge updates, tox 4 transition, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

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.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al Towards the end of April, the discussion on DEP 17 on debian-devel@l.d.o initiated by Helmut Grohne took off, trying to deal with the fact that while Debian bookworm has a merged /usr, files are still being distributed to / and /usr in Debian binary packages, and moving them currently has some risk of breakage. Most participants of the discussion agreed that files should be moved, and there are several competing design ideas for doing it safely. Most of the time was spent understanding the practical implications of lifting the moratorium and moving all the files from / to /usr in a coordinated effort. With help from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Enrico Zini, and Raphael Hertzog, Helmut Grohne performed extensive analysis of the various aspects, including quantitative analysis of the original file move problem, analysis of effects on dpkg-divert, dpkg-statoverride, and update-alternatives, analysis of effects on filesystem bootstrapping tools. Most of the problematic cases spawned plausible workarounds, such as turning Breaks into Conflicts in selected cases or adding protective diversions for the symbolic links that enable aliasing. Towards the end of May, Andreas Beckmann reported a new failure scenario which may cause shared resources to inadvertently disappear, such as directories and even regular files in case of Multi-Arch packages, and our work on analyzing these problems and proposing mitigations is on-going. While the quantitative analysis is funded by Freexian, we wouldn t be here without the extensive feedback and ideas of many voluntary contributors from multiple areas of Debian, which are too many to name here. Thank you.

Preparing for the tox 4 transition, by Stefano Rivera While Debian was in freeze for the bookworm release, tox 4 has landed in Debian experimental, and some packages are starting to require it, upstream. It has some backwards-incompatible behavior that breaks many packages using tox through pybuild. So Stefano had to make some changes to pybuild and to many packages that run build-time tests with tox. The easy bits of this transition are now completed in git / experimental, but a few packages that integrate deeply into tox need upstream work.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Just before the release of Bookworm, lots of QA tools were used to inspect packages. One of these tools found a systemd service file in a wrong directory. So, Thorsten did another upload of package lprint to correct this. Thanks a lot to all the hardworking people who run such tools and file bugs. Thorsten also participated in discussions about the new Common Printing Dialog Backends (CPDB) that will be introduced in Trixie and hopefully can replace the current printing architecture in Forky.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • DebConf 23 preparations by Stefano Rivera. Some work on the website, video team planning, accounting, and team documentation.
  • Utkarsh Gupta started to prep the work on the bursary team s side for DC23.
  • Stefano spun up a website for the Hamburg mini-DebConf so that the video team could have a machine-readable schedule and a place to stream video from the event.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n reviewed and sponsored four python packages of a prospective Debian member.
  • Helmut Grohne supported Timo Roehling and Jochen Sprickerhof to improve cross building in 15 ROS packages.
  • Helmut Grohne supported Jochen Sprickerhof with diagnosing an e2fsprogs RC bug.
  • Helmut Grohne continued to maintain rebootstrap and located an issue with lto in gcc-13.
  • Anton Gladky fixed some RC-Bugs and uploaded a new stravalib python library.

8 June 2023

Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer: Adventures in Debian's Qt land

Debian (I might as well say "we", this is the beauty of it) is about to release Debian 12 aka Bookworm. Let's take a quick look at what is new in Debian Qt land. Qt 5 Bookworm has Qt 5.15.8, which is nothing but great news. KDE will be switching to Qt 6 sooner than later and Qt 5 has been a fun ride, but Dmitry Shachnev and I needed a break, or at very least not handling two Qt versions. But in the end I need to be fair: you REALLY need to thank Dmitry for Qt 5. He has been the man power behind it in 99.5% of the cases. Qt 6 This will be the first Debian release to have official Qt 6 packages. NOTHING would have happened if it weren't for Patrick "Delta-One" Franz standing up to maintain it. BIG kudos to him! Well, there is a "little lie" in the paragraph above. Thanks to The Qt Company and ICS the current Qt 6 version, 6.4.2, is also available as Bullseye's backports. The Qt Company really also helped us here by providing us almost-to-be-released tarballs of Qt 6.4.2 so we were able to push them to unstable and do a transition in time for freeze, thanks a lot for that! So, what is the Qt 6 state? At the binary side all but OpenGL ES support should be there. Sadly this was discovered too late in the release process and we still might need help maintaining it (read the link to know why!). We are still not building the documentation. Properly building the whole documentation, as with Qt 5, would require all the Qt submodules' source code in one place, which we can't (easily?) do in Debian. So building the doc means hacking the build system and getting semi-linked documentation, much like with Qt 5. Now if you think you have an idea to solve this... we are happy to hear from you! Another great thing to know about Qt 6 is that, thanks to Helmut Grohne, pure Qt 6 applications should be able to cross compile. Applications using multi-arch enabled libraries ought to work too. Even more, many Qt submodules themselves should also cross compile! Not all of them, as we missed some patches in time, but hey, if you need to cross compile Qt, you surely can apply them yourselves! And finally tests, unit tests. In Qt 5 we had some of those, but none yet in Qt 6. This is one of the areas I would love to be able to put time... but time is scarce. The future? In my point of view the Debian 13 "Trixie" development cycle will see Qt 5 diminishing it's usage and Qt 6 becoming the major Qt version used, but from the Qt 4 experience I do not expect Qt 5 being dropped during this release cycle... let's see what the future brings us. Thanks! While I mentioned Dmitry and Patrick many more people helped us reach this place. I personally want to thank the people behind the KDE software, both upstream and, of course, the Debian maintainers. You should be thankful with them too, many hours of effort go into this. And thanks to you our dear users. We are normally overflowed with what we have in our hands and might not be up to the task sometimes, but hey, you are part of the reason we are doing this!

16 May 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2023 (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 April, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 16.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 4.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 5.0h (out of 2.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 31.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 12.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.5h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.0h (out of 0h assigned and 28.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.0h (out of 40.5h assigned), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 3.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 18.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 26.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In April, we have released 35 DLAs. The LTS team would like to welcome our newest sponsor, Institut Camille Jordan, a French research lab. Thanks to the support of the many LTS sponsors, the entire Debian community benefits from direct security updates, as well as indirect improvements and collaboration with other members of the Debian community. As part of improving the efficiency of our work and the quality of the security updates we produce, the LTS has continued improving our workflow. Improvements include more consistent tagging of release versions in Git and broader use of continuous integration (CI) to ensure packages are tested thoroughly and consistently. Sponsors and users can rest assured that we work continuously to maintain and improve the already high quality of the work that we do.

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

12 April 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Debian Developer Survey Results, DebConf updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

Results of the Debian Developer Survey, by Roberto C. S nchez In 2022, Freexian polled Debian Developers about the usage of money in Debian. More than 200 Debian Developers graciously participated, providing useful and constructive answers. Roberto and Utkarsh have worked on reviewing this feedback and summarizing it in a report recently published and announced to the project.

DebConf 23 Website, by Stefano Rivera In preparation for DebConf 23, Stefano did some work on the DebConf website s registration system. To support an expected large number of local registration requests, and a limited venue size, Stefano added a review system for registration requests. There was also some infrastructure work for the website framework. We use the same framework for miniconfs and DebConf, but without the full registration system. Since last DebConf, we have migrated from a pure-JS toolchain for the static assets, to django-compressor, to be friendlier to contributors and have a simpler dependency setup. This required some updates in the full-DebConf registration system that hadn t been noticed yet in miniDebConfs. Finally, with Utkarsh, we started to wind up the DebConf 22 travel bursary reimbursement process.

Debian Reimbursements Web App Progress, by Stefano Rivera In a project funded by Freexian s Project Funding initiative, Stefano made some more progress on the Debian Reimbursements Web App. The first rough implementation core request lifecycle is almost complete. Receipts can be collected and itemized, and the request can be submitted for a reimbursement request.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Due to the upcoming release, only bug fixing uploads are allowed in this part of the release cycle and Thorsten did uploads of three Debian Printing packages. The upload of hplip was rather straightforward and five bugs could be closed. cups-filters suddenly started to FTBFS and thus got an RC bug. It failed due to a compile error in a header file of some dependency. Luckily the maintainer of that dependency knew that his package now needed c++17, so the fix was to just remove an old compile flag that forced the compiler to use c++0x. This flag was once progressive but nowadays it is more of a hindrance than a help. The third package upload was for cups, which got some translation updates. Unfortunately this was the most tricky one as some translations did not appear in the binary packages. After debugging for some time, it turned out that the handling of links did not work properly. Now the version in Bookworm will be the cups version with the most translated man pages ever.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera updated a few Python modules in the Debian Python Team, to the latest upstream versions.
  • Stefano Rivera reviewed the current patch series applied to Python 3.12, as an Arch package maintainer had noticed that we dropped a patch by mistake, and reinstated it.
  • Anton Gladky prepared an upload of newer version (9.2.6) of vtk library and uploaded it into the experimental due to a freeze. VTK is the visualization kit - a library used mostly for scientific and engineering applications to visualize complex objects. Transition of dependent packages is planned on after-release phase.
  • Helmut Grohne, in the continual effort to improve Debian s cross-build support, provided 22 cross-build patches to packages in the archive.

20 March 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2023 (by LTS Team)

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

Debian LTS contributors In February, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 22.0h (out of 32.25h assigned), thus carrying over 10.25h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.75h (out of 11.5h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 26.25h (out of 0h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 26.75h (out of 19.75h assigned and 12.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 32.25h (out of 32.25h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 11.5h (out of 12.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 22.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 32.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 8.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 24.25h (out of 49.25h assigned), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 44 DLAs, which resolved 156 CVEs. We are glad to welcome some new contributors who will hopefully help us fix CVEs in the supported release even faster. However, we also experienced some setbacks as a few sponsors have stopped (or decreased) their support. If your company ever hesitated to sponsor Debian LTS, now might be a good time to join to ensure that we can continue this important work without having to scale down on the number of packages that we are able to support.

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

15 March 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Core python package, Redmine backports, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

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.

Core Python Packages, by Stefano Rivera Just before the freeze, pip added support for PEP-668. This is a scheme devised by Debian with other distributions and the Python Packaging Authority, to allow distributors to mark Python installations as being managed by a distribution package manager. When this EXTERNALLY-MANAGED flag is present, installers like pip will refuse to install packages outside a virtual environment. This protects users from breaking unrelated software on their systems, when installing packages with pip or similar tools. Stefano quickly got this version of pip into the archive, marked Debian s Python interpreters as EXTERNALLY-MANAGED, and worked with the upstream to add a mechanism to allow users to override the restriction. Debian bookworm will likely be the first distro release to implement this change. The transition from Python 3.10 to 3.11 was one of the last to complete before the bookworm freeze (as 3.11 only released at the end of October 2022). Stefano helped port some Python packages to 3.11, in January, and also kicked off the final transition to remove Python 3.10 support. Stefano did a big round of bug triage in the cPython interpreter (and related) packages, applying some provided patches, and fixing some long-standing minor bugs in the packaging. To allow Debian packages to more accurately reflect upstream-specified dependencies that only apply under specific Python interpreter versions, in the future, Stefano added more metadata to the python3 binary package. Python s unittest runner would successfully exit with 0 passed tests, if it couldn t find any tests. This means that configuration / layout changes can cause test failures to go unnoticed, because the tests aren t being run any more in Debian packages. Stefano proposed a change to Python 3.12 to change this behavior and treat 0 tests as a kind of failure.

debvm, by Helmut Grohne With support from Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues, and Jochen Sprickerhof, Helmut Grohne wrote debvm, a tool for quickly creating and running Debian virtual machine images for various architectures and Debian and Ubuntu releases. This is meant for development and testing purposes and has already identified a number of bugs in e.g. fakechroot (#1029490), Linux (#1029270), and runit (#1028181).

Rails 6 and Redmine 5 available in bullseye-backports, by Utkarsh Gupta Bullseye users can now upgrade to the latest 6.1 branch of Rails, v6.1.7, and the latest Redmine version, v5.0.4. The Ruby team received numerous requests to backport the latest version of Rails and Redmine, especially since there was no redmine shipped in the bullseye release itself. So this is big news for all users as we ve not only successfully backported both the packages, but also fixed all the CVEs and RC bugs in the process! This work was sponsored by Entrouvert.

Patches metadata in the Package Tracker, by Rapha l Hertzog Building on the great Ultimate Debian Database work of Lucas Nussbaum and on his suggestion, Rapha l enhanced the Debian Package Tracker to display action items when the patches metadata indicate that some patches were not forwarded upstream, or when the metadata were invalid. One can now also browse the patches metadata from the Links panel on the right.

Fixed kernel bug that broke debian-installer on computers with Mediatek wifi devices, by Helmut Grohne As part of our regular work on Kali Linux for OffSec, they funded Helmut s work to fix the MT7921e driver. When being loaded without firmware available, it would not register itself, but upon module release it would unregister itself causing a kernel oops. This was commonly observed in Kali Linux when reloading the module to add firmware. Helmut Grohne identified the cause and sent a patch, a different variant of which is now heading into Linux and available from Kali Linux.

Printing in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz There are about 40 packages in Debian that take care of sending output to printers, scan documents, or even send documents to fax machines. In the light of the upcoming/already ongoing freeze, these packages had to be updated to the latest version and bugs had to be fixed. Basically this applies to large packages like cups, cups-filters, hplip but also the smaller ones that shouldn t be neglected. All in all Thorsten uploaded 13 packages with new upstream versions or improved packaging and could resolve 14 bugs. Further triaging led to 35 bugs that could be closed, either because they were already fixed and not closed in an earlier upload or they could not be reproduced with current software versions. There is also work to do to prepare for the future. Historically, printing on Linux required finding a PPD file for your printer and finding some software that is able to render your documents with this PPD. These days, driverless printing is becoming more common and the use of PPD files has decreased. In the upcoming version 3.0 of cups, PPD files are no longer supported and so called printer applications need to be used. In order not to lose the ability to print documents, this big transition needs to be carefully planned. This started in the beginning of 2023 and will hopefully be finished with the release of Debian Trixie. More information can be found in this Debian Printing Wiki article. In preparation for this transition Thorsten created three new packages.

Yade update, by Anton Gladky Last month, Anton updated the yade package to the newest 2023.02a version, which includes new features. Yade is a software package for discrete element method (DEM) simulations, which are widely used in scientific and engineering fields for the simulation of granular systems. Yade is an open-source project that is being used worldwide for different tasks, such as geomechanics, civil engineering, mining, and materials science. The Yade package in Debian supports different precision levels for its simulations. This means that researchers and engineers can select the needed precision level without recompiling the package, saving time and effort.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut Grohne continues to improve cross building (mostly Qt) and architecture bootstrap (mostly loong64 and musl).

21 February 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2023 (by Anton Gladky)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. This is the first monthly report in 2023.

Debian LTS contributors In January, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS. which is possibly the highest number of active contributors per month! Their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 11.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 0h assigned and 43.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 17.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 7.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 10.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 3.75h (out of 18.75h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 32.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 28.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 23.5h (out of 0h assigned and 38.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Tobias Frost did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 43.25h (out of 26.25h assigned and 17.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation Furthermore, we released 46 DLAs in January, which resolved 146 CVEs. We are working diligently to reduce the number of packages listed in dla-needed.txt, and currently, we have 55 packages listed. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

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

16 January 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2022 (by Anton Gladky)

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

Debian LTS contributors In December, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 3.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h in December, 8.0h in November (out of 1.5h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned, 2.5h were taken from the extra-budget and worked on).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 24.5h (out of 20.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 20.5h assigned and 14.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.5h (out of 37.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 38.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 51.5h (out of 42.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 47 DLAs, closing 232 CVEs. In the same year, in total we released 394 DLAs, closing 1450 CVEs. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

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

6 January 2023

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 231 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 231. This version includes the following changes:
* Improve "[X] may produce better output" messages. Based on a patch by
  Helmut Grohne. (Closes: #1026982)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

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