My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 21.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:

• From November 2nd to November 8th, I was handling the LTS frontdesk, triaging new CVE, filing bugs, and ensuring timely answers on the mailing list. I pushed 26 commits to the security tracker. While investigating CVE-2015-7183 I discovered more embedded copies of nspr (which resulted in #804058). I also commented on the upstream fix for CVE-2015-5602 which looked like insufficient.
• Prepared and released DLA-339-1 on libhtml-scrubber-perl fixing one CVE.
• Prepared and released DLA-350-1 on eglibc with a non-trivial backport fixing one CVE.
• Prepared and released DLA-353-1 on imagemagick fixing two security issues without CVE yet (and marking one as not-affecting squeeze).
• Added a third patch after review by the upstream author on my still pending bouncycastle update. The upstream author asked me to further defer the update as they have some related fixes coming up.
• I did preparatory work for DLA-352-1 by identifying the upstream commits that fixed the security issue.
• I spent some time checking issues that have been assigned for a long time without any visible progress being made in the hope to unblock them (libvncserver, pound, quassel).

The Debian Administrator s Handbook Now that the English version has been finalized for Debian 8 Jessie (I uploaded the package to Debian Unstable), I concentrated my efforts on the French version. The book has been fully translated and we re now finalizing the print version that Eyrolles will again edit. Paris Open Source Summit On November 18th and 19th, I was in Paris for the Paris Open Source Summit. I helped to hold a booth for Debian France during two days (with the help of Fran ois-R gis and several others).

Fran ois-R gis Vuillemin, Juliette Belin and Rapha l Hertzog

On the booth, we had the visit of Juliette Belin who created the theme and the artwork of Debian 8 Jessie. We lacked goodies but we organized a lottery to win 12 copies of my French book. Debian packaging work Django. After two weeks of preparation for revers dependencies, I uploaded Django 1.8 to unstable and raised the severity of remaining bugs. Later I uploaded a new upstream point release (1.8.6). I also handled a release critical bug first by opening a ticket upstream and then by writing a patch and submitting it upstream. I uploaded 1.8.7-2 to Debian with my patch. I also submittted another small fix which has been rejected because the manual page is generated via Sphinx and I thus had to file a bug against Sphinx (which I did). A work-around has been found in the mean time. apt-xapian-index NMU. A long time ago, I filed a release critical bug against that package (#793681) but the maintainer did not handle it. Fortunately Sven Joachim prepared an NMU and I just uploaded his work. This resulted in another problem due bash-completion changes that Sven promptly fixed and I uploaded a second NMU a few days later. Gnome-shell-timer. I forwarded #805347 to gnome-shell-timer issue #29 but gnome-shell-timer is abandoned upstream. On a suggestion of Paul Wise, I tried to get this nice extension integrated into gnome-shell-extensions but the request has been turned down. Is there anyone with javascript skills who would like to adopt this project as an upstream developer? It s a low maintenance project with a decent and loyal user base. Misc. I fixed bug #804763 in zim which was the result of a bad Debian-specific patch.
I sponsored pylint-plugin-utils_0.2.3-2.dsc for Joseph Herlant to fix a release critical bug. I filed 806237 against lintian. I filed more tickets upstream, related to my Kali packaging work: one against sddm, one against john Other Debian-related work Distro-Tracker. I finally merged the work of Orestis Ioannou on bug #756766 which added the possibility to browse old news of each package. Debian Installer. I implemented two small features that we wanted in Kali: I fixed #647405 to have a way to disable deb-src lines in generated sources.list files. I also filed #805291 to see how to allow kernel command line preseeding to override initrd preseeding the fix is trivial and it works in Kali. I just have to commit it in Debian, I was hoping to get an ack from someone in charge before doing it. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (65.55 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Distro Tracker Even though I was officially in vacation during 3 of the 4 weeks of August, I spent many nights working on Distro Tracker. I m pleased to have managed to bring back Python 3 compatibility over all the (tested) code base. The full test suite now passes with Python 3.4 and Django 1.6 (or 1.7). From now on, I ll run tox on all code submitted to make sure that we won t regress on this point. tox also runs flake8 for me so that I can easily detect when the submitted code doesn t respect the PEP8 coding style. It also catches other interesting mistakes (like unused variable or too complex functions). Getting the code to pass flake8 was also a major effort, it resulted in a huge commit (89 files changed, 1763 insertions, 1176 deletions). Thanks to the extensive test suite, all those refactoring only resulted in two regressions that I fixed rather quickly. Some statistics: 51 commits over the last month, 41 by me, 3 by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, 3 by Christophe Siraut, 3 by Joseph Herlant and 1 by Simon Kainz. Thanks to all of them! Their contributions ported some features that were already available on the old PTS. The new PTS is now warning of upcoming auto-removals, is displaying problems with uptream URLs, includes a short package description in the page title, and provides a link to screenshots (if they exist on screenshots.debian.net). We still have plenty of bugs to handle, so you can help too: check out https://tracker.debian.org/docs/contributing.html. I always leave easy bugs for others to handle, so grab one and get started! I ll review your patch with pleasure. Tryton After my last batch of contributions to Tryton s French Chart of Accounts (#4108, #4109, #4110, #4111) C dric Krier granted me commit rights to the account_fr mercurial module. Debconf 14 I wasn t able to attend this year but thanks to awesome work of the video team, I watched some videos (and I still have a bunch that I want to see). Some of them were put online the day after they had been recorded. Really amazing work! Django 1.7 After the initial bug reports, I got some feedback of maintainers who feared that it would be difficult to get their packages working with Django 1.7. I helped them as best as I can by providing some patches (for horizon, for django-restricted-resource, for django-testscenarios). Since I expected many maintainers to be not very pro-active, I rebuilt all packages with Django 1.7 to detect at least those that would fail to build. I tagged as confirmed all the corresponding bug reports. Looking at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=python-django@packages.debian.org;tag=django17, one can see that some progress has been made with 25 packages fixed. Still there are at least 25 others that are still problematic in sid and 35 that have not been investigated at all (except for the automatic rebuild that passed). Again your help is more than welcome! It s easy to install python-django 1.7 from experimental and they try to use/rebuild the packages from the above list. Dpkg translation With the freeze approaching, I wanted to ensure that dpkg was fully translated in French. I thus pinged debian-l10n-french@lists.debian.org and merged some translations that were done by volunteers. Unfortunately it looks like nobody really stepped up to maintain it in the long run so I did myself the required update when dpkg 1.17.12 got uploaded. Is there anyone willing to manage dpkg s French translation? With the latest changes in 1.17.13, we have again a few untranslated strings:
$ for i in $(find . -name fr.po); do echo $i; msgfmt -c -o /dev/null --statistics $i; done
./po/fr.po
1083 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 1 untranslated message.
./dselect/po/fr.po
268 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations.
./scripts/po/fr.po
545 translated messages.
./man/po/fr.po
2277 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 3 untranslated messages.
Misc stuff I made an xsane QA upload (it s currently orphaned) to drop the (build-)dependency on liblcms1 and avoid getting it removed from Debian testing (see #745524). For the record, how-can-i-help warned me of this after one dist-upgrade. With the Django 1.7 work and the need to open up an experimental branch, I decided to switch python-django s packaging to git even though the current team policy is to use subversion. This triggered (once more) the discussion about a possible switch to git and I was pleased to see more enthusiasm this time around. Barry Warsaw tested a few workflows, shared his feeling and pushed toward a live discussion of the switch during Debconf. It looks like it might happen for good this time. I contributed my share in the discussions on the mailing list. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (548.59 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Distro Tracker Now that tracker.debian.org is live, people reported bugs (on the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package that I requested) faster than I could fix them. Still I spent many, many hours on this project, reviewing submitted patches (thanks to Christophe Siraut, Joseph Herlant, Dimitri John Ledkov, Vincent Bernat, James McCoy, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio who all submitted some patches!), fixing bugs, making sure the code works with Django 1.7, and started the same with Python 3. I added a tox.ini so that I can easily run the test suite in all 4 supported environments (created by tox as virtualenv with the combinations of Django 1.6/1.7 and Python 2.7/3.4). Over the month, the git repository has seen 73 commits, we fixed 16 bugs and other issues that were only reported over IRC in #debian-qa. With the help of Enrico Zini and Martin Zobel, we enabled the possibility to login via sso.debian.org (Debian s official SSO) so that Debian developers don t even have to explicitly create their account. As usual more help is needed and I ll gladly answer your questions and review your patches. Misc packaging work Publican. I pushed a new upstream release of publican and dropped a useless build-dependency that was plagued by a difficult to fix RC bug (#749357 for the curious, I tried to investigate but it needs major work for make 4.x compatibility). GNOME 3.12. With gnome-shell 3.12 hitting unstable, I had to update gnome-shell-timer (and filed an upstream ticket at the same time), a GNOME Shell extension to start some run-down counters. Django 1.7. I packaged python-django 1.7 release candidate 1 in experimental (found a small bug, submitted a ticket with a patch that got quickly merged) and filed 85 bugs against all the reverse dependencies to ask their maintainers to test their package with Django 1.7 (that we want to upload before the freeze obviously). We identified a pain point in upgrade for packages using South and tried to discuss it with upstream, but after closer investigation, none of the packages are really affected. But the problem can hit administrators of non-packaged Django applications. Misc stuff. I filed a few bugs (#754282 against git-import-orig uscan, #756319 against wnpp to see if someone would be willing to package loomio), reviewed an updated package for django-ratelimit in #755611, made a non-maintainer upload of mairix (without prior notice) to update the package to a new upstream release and bring it to modern packaging norms (Mako failed to make an upload in 4 years so I just went ahead and did what I would have done if it were mine). Kali work resulting in Debian contributions Kali wants to switch from being based on stable to being based on testing so I did try to setup britney to manage a new kali-rolling repository and encountered some problems that I reported to debian-release. Niels Thykier has been very helpful and even managed to improve britney thanks to the very specific problem that the kali setup triggered. Since we use reprepro, I did write some Python wrapper to transform the HeidiResult file in a set of reprepro commands but at the same time I filed #756399 to request proper support of heidi files in reprepro. While analyzing britney s excuses file, I also noticed that the Kali mirrors contains many source packages that are useless because they only concern architectures that we don t host (and I filed #756523 against reprepro). While trying to build a live image of kali-rolling, I noticed that libdb5.1 and db5.1-util were still marked as priority standard when in fact Debian already switched to db5.3 and thus should only be optional (I filed #756623 against ftp.debian.org). When doing some upgrade tests from kali (wheezy based) to kali-rolling (jessie based) I noticed some problems that were also affecting Debian Jessie. I filed #756629 against libfile-fcntllock-perl (with a patch), and also #756618 against texlive-base (missing Replaces header). I also pinged Colin Watson on #734946 because I got a spurious base-passwd prompt during upgrade (that was triggered because schroot copied my unstable s /etc/passwd file in the kali chroot and the package noticed a difference on the shell of all system users). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (168.17 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian LTS After having put in place the infrastructure to allow companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS, I spent quite some time to draft the announce of the launch of Debian LTS (on a suggestion of Moritz M hlenhoff who pointed out to me that there was no such announce yet). I m pretty happy about the result because we managed to mention a commercial offer without generating any pushback from the community. The offer is (in my necessarily biased opinion) clearly in the interest of Debian but still the money doesn t go to Debian so we took extra precautions. When I got in touch with the press officers, I included the Debian leader in the discussion and his feedback has been very helpful to improve the announce. He also officially acked the press release to give some confidence to the press officers that they were doing the right thing. Lucas also pushed me to seek public review of the draft press release, which I did. The discussion was constructive and the draft got further improved. The news got widely relayed, but on the flip side, the part with the call for help got almost no attention from the press. Even Linux Weekly News skipped it! On the Freexian side, we just crossed 10% of a full-time position (funded by 6 companies) and we are in contact with a few other companies in discussion. But we re far from our goal yet so we will have to actively reach out to more companies. Do you know companies who are still running Debian 6 servers ? If yes, please send me the details (name + url + contact info if possible) to deblts@freexian.com so that I can get in touch and invite them to contribute to the project. Distro Tracker In the continuation of the Debian France game, I continued to work together with Joseph Herlant and Christophe Siraut on multiple improvements to distro tracker in order to prepare for its deployment on tracker.debian.org (which I just announced \o/). Debian France Since the Debian France game was over, I shipped the rewards. 5 books have been shipped to:

• Joseph Herlant and Christophe Siraut for their distro-tracker work
• Dylan Aissi for his help within the Debian Med team
• Samuel Dorsaz and Thomas Debesse for their work towards better support of Brother printers

Misc Debian work I orphaned sql-ledger and made a last upload to change the maintainer to Debian QA (with a new upstream version). After having been annoyed a few times by dch breaking my name in the changelog, I filed #750855 which got quickly fixed. I disabled a broken patch in quilt to fix RC bug #751109. I filed #751771 when I discovered an incorrect dependency on ruby-uglifier (while doing packaging work for Kali Linux). I tested newer versions of ruby-libv8 on armel/armhf on request of the upstream author. I had reported him those build failures (github ticket here). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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