Search Results: "Lucas Kanashiro"

16 March 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2026 (by Thorsten Alteholz)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for February.

Activity summary During the month of February, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 35 DLAs fixing 527 CVEs. We also welcomed Arnaud Rebillout to the team and had to say farewell to Roberto, who left the team after more than nine years as part of it. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. Notable security updates:
  • Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA 4492-1 for gnutls28 to fix vulnerabilities which may lead to Denial of Service.
  • Utkarsh Gupta prepared DLA 4464-1 for xrdp, to fix a a vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target system.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort prepared DLA-4465-1 to replace ClamAV 1.0 with ClamAV 1.4. This latter is the current LTS version supported by upstream.
  • Markus Koschany prepared DLA 4468-1 for tomcat9, to fix a vulnerability that can be used to bypass security constraints.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared DLA 4471-1 to update package debian-security-support, the Debian security coverage checker.
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared DLA 4473-1 for zabbix, to fix a potential remote code execution vulnerability.
  • Paride Legovini prepared DLA 4478-1 for tcpflow, to fix a vulnerability that might result in DoS and potentially code execution.
  • Thorsten Alteholz prepared DLA 4477-1 for munge, to fix a vulnerability which may allow local users to leak the MUNGE cryptographic key and forge arbitrary credentials.
  • Ben Hutchings prepared DLA 4475-1 and DLA 4476-1 for Linux kernel updates.
  • Chris Lamb prepared DLA 4482-1 for ceph, to fix SSL certificate checking in the Python bindings.
  • Andreas Henriksson prepared DLA 4491-1 to fix vulnerabilities in glib2.0, which could result in denial of service, memory corruption or potentially arbitrary code execution.
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
  • The update of nova was prepared by the maintainer, Thomas Goirand. The corresponding DLA 4486-1 was published by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara.
  • The updates of thunderbird were prepared by the maintainer Christoph Goehre. The corresponding DLA 4466-1 and DLA 4495-1 was published by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.
The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:
  • Jochen prepared a point update of wireshark for bookworm (#1127945).
  • Jochen prepared point updates of erlang for trixie (#1127606) and bookworm (#1127607).
  • Bastien helped preparing DSA 6160-1 for netty and uploaded a fixed package to unstable.
  • Bastien prepared a point update of zabbix for trixie (#1127437).
  • Tobias prepared a point update of modsecurity-crs for bookworm (#1128655).
  • Tobias prepared a point update of busybox for bookworm (#1129503).
  • Tobias helped preparing DSA 6138-1 for libpng1.6.
  • Daniel prepared point updates of python-authlib for trixie (#1129477) and bookworm (#1129246).
  • Ben uploaded several Linux kernel packages to trixie-backports and bookworm-backports.
  • Ben prepared point updates of wireless-regdb for trixie and bookworm.
Other than the work related to updates, Sylvain made several improvements to the documentation and tooling used by the team. Some milestones in the lifecycle of two Debian releases are just around the corner. The support of Debian 12 will be handed over to the LTS team on June 11th 2026. After August 31st, support for Debian 11 will move from Debian LTS to ELTS managed by Freexian.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

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13 January 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: dh-python development, Python 3.14 and Ruby 3.4 transitions, Surviving scraper traffic in Debian CI and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-12 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.

dh-python development, by Stefano Rivera In Debian we build our Python packages with the help of a debhelper-compatible tool, dh-python. Before starting the 3.14 transition (that would rebuild many packages) we landed some updates to dh-python to fix bugs and add features. This started a month of attention on dh-python, iterating through several bug fixes, and a couple of unfortunate regressions. dh-python is used by almost all packages containing Python (over 5000). Most of these are very simple, but some are complex and use dh-python in unexpected ways. It s hard to avoid almost any change (including obvious bug fixes) from causing some unexpected knock-on behaviour. There is a fair amount of complexity in dh-python, and some rather clever code, which can make it tricky to work on. All of this means that good QA is important. Stefano spent some time adding type annotations and specialized types to make it easier to see what the code is doing and catch mistakes. This has already made work on dh-python easier. Now that Debusine has built-in repositories and debdiff support, Stefano could quickly test the effects of changes on many other packages. After each big change, he could upload dh-python to a repository, rebuild e.g. 50 Python packages with it, and see what differences appeared in the output. Reviewing the diffs is still a manual process, but can be improved. Stefano did a small test on what it would take to replace direct setuptools setup.py calls with PEP-517 (pyproject-style) builds. There is more work to do here.

Python 3.14 transition, by Stefano Rivera (et al.) In December the transition to add Python 3.14 as a supported version started in Debian unstable. To do this, we update the list of supported versions in python3-defaults, and then start rebuilding modules with C extensions from the leaves inwards. This had already been tested in a PPA and Ubuntu, so many of the biggest blocking compatibility issues with 3.14 had already been found and fixed. But there are always new issues to discover. Thanks to a number of people in the Debian Python team, we got through the first bit of the transition fairly quickly. There are still a number of open bugs that need attention and many failed tests blocking migration to testing. Python 3.14.1 released just after we started the transition, and very soon after, a follow-up 3.14.2 release came out to address a regression. We ran into another regression in Python 3.14.2.

Ruby 3.4 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro (et al.) The Debian Ruby team just started the preparation to move the default Ruby interpreter version to 3.4. At the moment, ruby3.4 source package is already available in experimental, also ruby-defaults added support to Ruby 3.4. Lucas rebuilt all reverse dependencies against this new version of the interpreter and published the results here. Lucas also reached out to some stakeholders to coordinate the work. Next steps are: 1) announcing the results to the whole team and asking for help to fix packages failing to build against the new interpreter; 2) file bugs against packages FTBFSing against Ruby 3.4 which are not fixed yet; 3) once we have a low number of build failures against Ruby 3.4, ask the Debian Release team to start the transition in unstable.

Surviving scraper traffic in Debian CI, by Antonio Terceiro Like most of the open web, Debian Continuous Integration has been struggling for a while to keep up with the insatiable hunger from data scrapers everywhere. Solving this involved a lot of trial and error; the final result seems to be stable, and consists of two parts. First, all Debian CI data pages, except the direct links to test log files (such as those provided by the Release Team s testing migration excuses), now require users to be authenticated before being accessed. This means that the Debian CI data is no longer publicly browseable, which is a bit sad. However, this is where we are now. Additionally, there is now a fail2ban powered firewall-level access limitation for clients that display an abusive access pattern. This went through several iterations, with some of them unfortunately blocking legitimate Debian contributors, but the current state seems to strike a good balance between blocking scrapers and not blocking real users. Please get in touch with the team on the #debci OFTC channel if you are affected by this.

A hybrid dependency solver for crossqa.debian.net, by Helmut Grohne crossqa.debian.net continuously cross builds packages from the Debian archive. Like Debian s native build infrastructure, it uses dose-builddebcheck to determine whether a package s dependencies can be satisfied before attempting a build. About one third of Debian s packages fail this check, so understanding the reasons is key to improving cross building. Unfortunately, dose-builddebcheck stops after reporting the first problem and does not display additional ones. To address this, a greedy solver implemented in Python now examines each build-dependency individually and can report multiple causes. dose-builddebcheck is still used as a fall-back when the greedy solver does not identify any problems. The report for bazel-bootstrap is a lengthy example.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne Due to the changes suggested by Loongson earlier, rebootstrap now adds debhelper to its final installability test and builds a few more packages required for installing it. It also now uses a variant of build-essential that has been marked Multi-Arch: same (see foundational work from last year). This in turn made the use of a non-default GCC version more difficult and required more work to make it work for gcc-16 from experimental. Ongoing archive changes temporarily regressed building fribidi and dash. libselinux and groff have received patches for architecture specific changes and libverto has been NMUed to remove the glib2.0 dependency.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano did some administrative work on debian.social and debian.net instances and Debian reimbursements.
  • Stefano did routine updates of python-authlib, python-mitogen, xdot.
  • Stefano spent several hours discussing Debian s Python package layout with the PyPA upstream community. Debian has ended up with a very different on-disk installed Python layout than other distributions, and this continues to cause some frustration in many communities that have to have special workarounds to handle it. This ended up impacting cross builds as Helmut discovered.
  • Rapha l set up Debusine workflows for the various backports repositories on debusine.debian.net.
  • Zulip is not yet in Debian (RFP in #800052), but Rapha l helped on the French translation as he is experimenting with that discussion platform.
  • Antonio performed several routine Salsa maintenance tasks, including fixing salsa-nm-sync, the service that synchronizes project members data from LDAP to Salsa, which had been broken since salsa.debian.org was upgraded to trixie .
  • Antonio deployed a new amd64 worker host for Debian CI.
  • Antonio did several DebConf technical and administrative bits, including but adding support for custom check-in/check-out dates in the MiniDebConf registration module, publishing a call for bids for DebConf27.
  • Carles reviewed and submitted 14 Catalan translations using po-debconf-manager.
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: added delete-package command, show-information now uses properly formatted output (YAML), it now attaches the translation on the bug reports for which a merge request has been opened too long.
  • Carles investigated why some packages appeared in po-debconf-manager but not in the Debian l10n list. Turns out that some packages had debian/po/templates.pot (appearing in po-debconf-manager) but not the POTFILES.in file as expected. Created a script to find out which packages were in this or similar situation and reported bugs.
  • Carles tested and documented how to set up voices (mbrola and festival) if using Orca speech synthesizer. Commented a few issues and possible improvements in the debian-accessibility list.
  • Helmut sent patches for 48 cross build failures and initiated discussions on how to deal with two non-trivial matters. Besides Python mentioned above, CMake introduced a cmake_pkg_config builtin which is not aware of the host architecture. He also forwarded a Meson patch upstream.
  • Thorsten uploaded a new upstream version of cups to fix a nasty bug that was introduced by the latest security update.
  • Along with many other Python 3.14 fixes, Colin fixed a tricky segfault in python-confluent-kafka after a helpful debugging hint from upstream.
  • Colin upstreamed an improved version of an OpenSSH patch we ve been carrying since 2008 to fix misleading verbose output from scp.
  • Colin used Debusine to coordinate transitions for astroid and pygments, and wrote up the astroid case on his blog.
  • Emilio helped with various transitions, and provided a build fix for opencv for the ffmpeg 8 transition.
  • Emilio tested the GNOME updates for trixie proposed updates (gnome-shell, mutter, glib2.0).
  • Santiago helped to review the status of how to test different build profiles in parallel on the same pipeline, using the test-build-profiles job. This means, for example, to simultaneously test build profiles such as nocheck and nodoc for the same git tree. Finally, Santiago provided MR !685 to fix the documentation.
  • Anupa prepared a bits post for Outreachy interns announcement along with T ssia Cam es Ara jo and worked on publicity team tasks.

29 November 2025

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

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for October.

Activity summary During the month of October, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 37 DLAs fixing 893 CVEs. The team has continued in its usual rhythm, preparing and uploading security updates targeting LTS and ELTS, as well as helping with updates to oldstable, stable, testing, and unstable. Additionally, the team received several contributions of LTS uploads from Debian Developers outside the standing LTS Team. Notable security updates:
  • https-everywhere, prepared by Markus Koschany, deals with a problem created by ownership of the https-rulesets.org domain passing to a malware operator
  • openjdk-17 and openjdk-11, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes XML external entity and certificate validation vulnerabilities
  • intel-microcode, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixes a variety of privilege escalation and denial of service vulnerabilities
Notable non-security updates:
  • distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, updates information concerning current and upcoming Debian and Ubuntu releases
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
  • Lukas M rdian, a Debian Developer, provided an update of log4cxx
  • Andrew Ruthven, one of the request-tracker4 maintainers, provided an update of request-tracker4
  • Christoph Goehre, co-maintainer of thunderbird, provided an update of thunderbird
Beyond the typical LTS updates, the team also helped the Debian community more broadly:
  • Guilhem Moulin prepared oldstable/stable updates of libxml2, and an unstable update of libxml2.9
  • Bastien Roucari s prepared oldstable/stable updates of imagemagick
  • Daniel Leidert prepared an oldstable update of python-authlib, oldstable update of libcommons-lang-java and stable update of libcommons-lang3-java
  • Utkarsh Gupta prepared oldstable/stable/testing/unstable updates of ruby-rack
The LTS Team is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to making LTS a high quality for sponsors and users. We are also particularly grateful for the collaboration from others outside the time; their contributions are important to the success of the LTS effort.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

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13 October 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 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 September, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Andreas Henriksson did 1.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 20.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 20.0h (out of 21.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 10.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 21.0h (out of 21.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 39.75h (out of 40.0h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 12.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 13.5h (out of 21.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 8.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 15.0h (out of 3.25h assigned and 17.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Paride Legovini did 6.0h (out of 8.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 7.25h (out of 7.75h assigned and 13.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.25h (out of 13.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 17.0h (out of 7.75h assigned and 13.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 21.0h (out of 21.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 5.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 16.5h (out of 14.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In September, we released 38 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • modsecurity-apache prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes a cross-site scripting vulnerability
    • cups, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixes authentication bypass and denial of service vulnerabilities
    • jetty9, prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes the MadeYouReset vulnerability (a recent, well-known denial of service vulnerability)
    • python-django, prepared by Chris Lamb, fixes a SQL injection vulnerability
    • firefox-esr and thunderbird, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, were updated from the 128.x ESR series to the 140.x ESR series, fixing a number of vulnerabilities as well
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • wireless-regdb prepared by Ben Hutchings, updates information reflecting changes to radio regulations in many countries
There was one package update contributed by a Debian Developer outside of the LTS Team: an update of node-tar-fs, prepared by Xavier Guimard (a member of the Node packaging team). Finally, LTS Team members also contributed updates of the following packages:
  • libxslt (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin, to address a regression introduced in a previous security update
  • libphp-adodb (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Abhijith PA
  • cups (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
  • u-boot (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert and Jochen Sprickerhof
  • libcommongs-lang3-java (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
  • python-internetarchive (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
One other notable contribution by a member of the LTS Team is that Sylvain Beucler proposed a fix upstream for CVE-2025-2760 in gimp2. Upstream no longer supports gimp2, but it is still present in Debian LTS, and so proposing this fix upstream is of benefit to other distros which may still be supporting the older gimp2 packages.

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11 September 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 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 August, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 12.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 19.75h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 22.75h (out of 16.5h assigned and 6.25h from previous period).
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 23.25h (out of 23.25h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.25h (out of 23.25h assigned).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 11.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 16.25h from previous period).
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 20.0h (out of 1.25h assigned and 18.75h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 5.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.75h to the next month.
  • Paride Legovini did 8.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 7.5h (out of 11.75h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 7.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 23.25h assigned), thus carrying over 13.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 16.0h (out of 22.75h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In August, we released 27 DLAs. The month of August marked the release of Debian 13 (codename trixie ). This is worth noting because it brought with it the return of the customary fast development pace of Debian unstable, which included several contributions from LTS Team members. More on that below. Of the many security updates which were published (and a few non-security updates as well), some notable ones are highlighted here.
  • Notable security updates:
    • gnutls28 prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes several potential denial of service vulnerabilities
    • apache2, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes several vulnerabilities including a potential denial of service and SSL/TLS-related access control
    • mbedtls (original update, regression update) prepared by Andrej Shadura, fixes several potential denial of service and information disclosure vulnerabilities
    • openjdk-17, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes several vulnerabilities which could result in denial of service, information disclosure or weakened TLS connections
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, adds information concerning future Debian and Ubuntu releases
    • ca-certificates-java, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes some bugs which could disrupt future updates
The LTS Team continues to welcome the collaboration of maintainers from across the Debian community. The contributions of maintainers from outside the LTS Team include: postgresql-13 (Christoph Berg), sope (Jordi Mallach), thunderbird (Carsten Schoenert), and iperf3 (Roberto Lumbreras). Finally, LTS Team members also contributed updates of the following packages:
  • redis (to stable), prepared by Chris Lamb
  • firebird3.0 (to oldstable and stable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • node-tmp (to oldstable, stable, and unstable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • openjpeg2 (to oldstable, stable, and unstable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • apache2 (to oldstable), prepared by Bastien Roucari s
  • unbound (to oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin
  • luajit (to oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin
  • golang-github-gin-contrib-cors (to oldstable and stable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libcoap3 (to stable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libcommons-lang-java and libcommons-lang3-java (both to unstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
  • python-flask-cors (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
The LTS Team would especially like to thank our many longtime friends and sponsors for their support and collaboration.

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2 September 2025

Debian Outreach Team: Spaarsh Gsoc Report

layout: post title: GSoC 2025 Report: Enhancing Debian packages with ROCm GPU acceleration date: 2025-09-01 categories: gsoc debian ROCm debian-packaging author: Spaarsh Thakkar

GitLab Salsa: @Spaarsh

GitHub: Spaarsh

Introduction I am Spaarsh Thakkar, a final-year Computer Science Engineering undergrad from India. My interests lie in research and systems. My recent work has been in and around Graphics Processing Units and I also hold a keen interest in Computer Networks. At the time of writing, I have been an open-source contributor for almost a year.

Proposal Description (as shown on GSoC Project Profile1) Due to Debian s open-source nature, no Debian package in main can have a proprietary GPU package listed as a dependency. While AI and HPC workloads increasingly rely on GPU acceleration, many Debian packages still focus solely on CUDA, which is proprietary. With the advent of ROCm, an open-source GPU computing platform, we can now integrate full-fledged AMD GPU support into Debian packages. This will improve the experience of developers working in AI/ML and HPC while positioning Debian as a strong OS choice for GPU-driven workloads. The proposal aims to aid in solving the aforementioned program by packaging several ROCm packages for debian and add ROCm support to some existing debian packages. The deliverables are as follows:
  1. New Debian packages with GPU support
  2. Enhanced GPU support within existing Debian packages
  3. More autopackagetests running on the Debian ROCm CI

Key Objectives Enable ROCm in:
  1. dbcsr
  2. gloo
  3. cp2k
Publish the following packages to debian apt archive:
  1. hipblas-common
  2. hipBLASlt

Work Report

1. Publishing hipblas-common to apt This objective was successfully completed, resulting in hipblas-common being published in the apt repository2. The process involved the following steps:
  1. Filing a Intent-To-Package (ITP)3
  2. Pulling the upstream source code repository from GitHub
  3. Adding the debian/ packaging files
  4. Testing the package locally
  5. Creating the corresponding project under rocm-team4
  6. Applying the necessary changes
  7. Building the package
  8. Testing it using sbuild
  9. Signing the package files
  10. Uploading the package to the mentors.debian.net archive(now in official archive)5
  11. Addressing review feedback and making changes
  12. Requesting sponsorship6
  13. Securing sponsorship, which led to the package being accepted into the experimental branch of apt
Since the beginning of GSoC, the package has also been promoted to the unstable branch2.

2. DBCSR ROCm and Multi-Arch Support During my GSoC project, I worked on extending the DBCSR (Distributed Block Compressed Sparse Row)7 package to improve its ROCm/HIP support, and handling multi-architecture GPU kernels in a way that is both practical for upstream maintainers and debian package developers. The code changes can be found at my dbcsr fork here8.

ROCm/HIP Enablement
  • Enabled ROCm backend support to DBCSR, allowing GPU acceleration beyond CUDA by enabling HIP-based builds.
  • Investigated and resolved build issues specific to HIP kernels within DBCSR.

Multi-Architecture GPU Kernel Handling (The following content was presented in greater detail at DebConf 25 as well. The presentation video can be found here9 and the presentation slide can be found here10).
  • DBCSR contains GPU kernels that are heavily optimized for specific architectures. By default, these are built for a single target architecture, which poses challenges for packaging where binaries need to support multiple possible GPU targets.
  • Explored different strategies for solving the multi-arch GPU kernel distribution problem, including:
    • Option 1: Fat binaries (embedding multiple GPU architectures into a single binary, with runtime dispatch). This is ideal for end-users but requires deeper changes upstream and is not straightforward with HIP/ROCm.
    • Option 2: Arch-specific libraries (e.g., libdbcsr.gfxXXX.a), where the alternatives system or explicit user selection would determine which one is used. This solves the problem but pushes complexity downstream into packaging and user configuration.
    • Option 3: Prefixed functions inside a single file, where kernels are compiled separately per architecture, functions are renamed with an arch prefix, and runtime logic in DBCSR decides which kernel to invoke. This shifts complexity upstream but could give a clean downstream experience.
  • I critically analyzed these options in the context of Debian packaging and upstream maintainability. Arch-specific .a files introduce exponential dependency complexity. The prefixed-function approach seemed like a plausible way forward, though it requires upstream buy-in.
  • After consulting with my mentor, these concerns were raised in the dbcsr repository as a discussion here11

Summary My work involved:
  • Enabling HIP/ROCm support in DBCSR.
  • Prototyping strategies for handling GPU multi-arch builds.
  • Evaluating the trade-offs between upstream maintainability and downstream packaging complexity.

3. gloo, hipification and source code issues One of the other packages that were targeted was gloo12. It is a collective communications library and has the implementations of different Machine Learning communication algorithms. The code changes can be found at my gloo fork here13 (some changes have not be committed at the time of writing).

HIP/ROCm Enablement
  1. Fixing old ROCm CMake functions The upstream Gloo codebase still used old ROCm CMake functions that began with the hip_ prefix (for example, hip_add_executable). These functions have since been deprecated/removed. I updated the build system to use the modern ROCm CMake equivalents so that the package can build properly in a current ROCm environment.
  2. Debian packaging changes I modified debian/control to add a new package, libgloo-rocm, in addition to the existing packages. This allows proper separation and handling of ROCm-enabled builds in Debian.
  3. First successful library build After these changes, I was able to successfully build the library. However, I ran into issues when trying to produce the shared library: there were undefined symbol errors at link time.

Source Code Issue On investigating the undefined symbol errors, I identified that these came from a lack of explicit template instantiation for some Gloo classes. Since C++ templates only get compiled when explicitly used or instantiated, this resulted in missing symbols in the shared library. To solve this, I explored the source code and noticed that the HIP backend code was not natively written it was generated from the CUDA backend using a custom hipification script maintained by the repo.
  • I experimented with modifying the HIPification process itself, trying out hipify-perl14 instead of the repository s custom Python script.
  • I also tried tweaking the source code in places where template instantiations were missing, so that the ROCm build would correctly export the needed symbols.

Summary The issue is still unresolved. The core problem lies in how the source code is structured: the HIP backend is almost entirely auto-generated from CUDA code, and the process does not handle template instantiations correctly. Because of this, the Debian package for Gloo with ROCm support is not yet ready for release, and further source-level fixes are required to make the ROCm build reliable.

4. cp2k CP2K15 is a quantum chemistry and solid state physics software package that can perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems.

HIP/ROCm Enablement cp2k depends on dbcsr and hence, HIP/ROCm enablement in this package required the dbcsr16 package to get through. Even though dbcsr isn t ready yet, it was worthwhile to plan how it shall be built with HIP/ROCm once we have dbcsr in place. Upon doing this, it was realized that the architecture-wise libraries provided by the dbcsr package will result in a complicated building process for cp2k. No changes have been made to this package yet and more concrete steps shall be taken once the dbcsr package work is completed.

Summary The multi-arch build process for cp2k maybe complicated by the one static-library-per-architecture method used in the dependent package, dbcsr.

Auxiliary Work & Activities While working on the aformentioned GSoC Goals, there were a few other things that were also done.
  1. libamdhip64-dev bug file17 While trying to enable HIP/ROCm in dbcsr, CMakeDetermineHIPCompiler.cmake was unable to find HIP runtime CMake package. After going through some similar issues faced by other developers earlier, it was decided to file a bug report under the libamdhip64-dev package. After discussions with and trying the changes suggested by Cory (my mentor) under the bug, the issue was resolved. Turns out, the wrong compiler was being used by me! The gcc compiler was supposed to be used and I was using hipcc. The bug was closed since it was not due an issue with the package. Cory suggested that I add this info under the ROCm wiki page. It is yet to be done and hopefully I get it done soon.
  2. DebConf25 Talk After facing the multi-arch build dilemma with dbcsr (and also getting to know about the issues faced by other fellow package developers), I came to realise that this was more than a packaging, build or programming issue. GPU-packaging was facing a policy issue. Hence, I decided to cover this problem in greater detail at my DebConf25 Virtual Presentation under the Outreach Session. Shoutout to Cory for his support and Lucas Kanashiro for encouraging me to present my work!
  3. Bi-Weekly AMD ROCm Meetings Shortly after the Coding period started, Cory began the initiative of Bi-Weekly AMD ROCm Meetings18. Being a part of the meetings (participated in all but one!), seeing the work the other folks are doing and being able to discuss my own problems was a delight.
  4. (Upcoming) IndiaFOSS 2025 Talk After understanding the nuances and beauty of the debian packaging ecosystem in these months, I decided to spread the work about debian packaging and packaging software in general. My talk19 for the same got accepted in the upcoming IndiaFOSS 202520 conference! I hope this beings more people towards the packaging ecosystem and to the debian developer ecosystem.

Conclusion My GSoC time was fantastic! I plan to complete the work that I have started during my GSoC and beyond. Working with Cory21 and Utkarsh22 (a fellow GSoC 25 contributor under Cory) has been a very positive experience. HIP/ROCm GPU-packaging is in a nascent stage. It is an exciting time to be in this space right now. The problems are new and never encountered before (CPU packaging isn t architecture specific!). The problems were shall face in the coming time, and our solutions to them will set a precendent for the future.

References 1 : https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/9s4jUjV0 2 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hipblas-common 3 : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1105114 4 : https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team 5 : https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/hipblas-common 6 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2025/05/msg00088.html 7 : https://www.cp2k.org/dbcsr 8 : https://salsa.debian.org/Spaarsh/dbcsr/ 9 : https://drive.google.com/file/d/14WQuTMcI-L0lbi3zkUc9pT6RGwwVY0j1/view?usp=sharing 10 : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p-nkHPgg5C5jKGy7ySZ8rts5G2vNFQpQJQ8UySOWgVE 11 : https://github.com/cp2k/dbcsr/discussions/933 12 : https://github.com/pytorch/gloo 13 : https://salsa.debian.org/Spaarsh/gloo 14 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hipify 15 : https://www.cp2k.org/ 16 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dbcsr 17 : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025bug=1108159 18 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2025/05/msg00113.html 19 : https://fossunited.org/c/indiafoss/2025/cfp/dpq0b26ece 20 : https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025 21 : https://salsa.debian.org/cgmb 22 : https://salsa.debian.org/utk4r-sh

12 August 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf 25, OpenSSH upgrades, Cross compilation collaboration and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-07 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, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n In July, DebConf 25 was held in Brest, France. Freexian was a gold sponsor and most of the Freexian team attended the event. Many fruitful discussions were had amongst our team and within the Debian community. DebConf itself was organized by a local team in Brest, that included Santiago (who now lives in Uruguay). Stefano was also deeply involved in the organization, as a DebConf committee member, core video team, and the lead developer for the conference website. Running the conference took an enormous amount of work, consuming all of Stefano and Santiago s time for most of July. Lucas Kanashiro was active in the DebConf content team, reviewing talks and scheduling them. There were many last-minute changes to make during the event. Anupa Ann Joseph was part of the Debian publicity team doing live coverage of DebConf 25 and was part of the DebConf 25 content team reviewing the talks. She also assisted the local team to procure the lanyards. Recorded sessions presented by Freexian collaborators, often alongside other friends in Debian, included:

OpenSSH upgrades, by Colin Watson Towards the end of a release cycle, people tend to do more upgrade testing, and this sometimes results in interesting problems. Manfred Stock reported No new SSH connections possible during large part of upgrade to Debian Trixie , which would have affected many people upgrading from Debian 12 (bookworm), with potentially severe consequences for people upgrading remote systems. In fact, there were two independent problems that each led to much the same symptom:
  • As part of hardening the OpenSSH server, OpenSSH 9.8 split the monolithic sshd listener process into two pieces: a minimal network listener (still called sshd), and an sshd-session process dealing with each individual session. Before this change, when sshd received an incoming connection, it forked and re-executed itself with some special parameters to deal with it; after this change, it forks and executes sshd-session instead, and sshd no longer accepts the parameters it used to accept for this.

    Debian package upgrades happen (roughly) in two phases: first we unpack the new files onto disk, and then we run some configuration steps which usually include things like restarting services. Normally this is fine, because the old service keeps on working until it s restarted. In this case, unpacking the new files onto disk immediately stopped new SSH connections from working: the old sshd received the connection and tried to hand it off to a freshly-executed copy of the new sshd binary on disk, which no longer supports this. This wasn t much of a problem when upgrading OpenSSH on its own or with a small number of other packages, but in release upgrades it left a large gap when you can t SSH to the system any more, and if anything fails in that interval then you could be in trouble.

    After trying a couple of other approaches, Colin landed on the idea of having the openssh-server package divert /usr/sbin/sshd to /usr/sbin/sshd.session-split before the unpack step of an upgrade from before 9.8, then removing the diversion and moving the new file into place once it s ready to restart the service. This reduces the period when new connections fail to a minimum.
  • Most OpenSSH processes, including sshd, check for a compatible version of the OpenSSL library when they start up. This check used to be very picky, among other things requiring both the major and minor part of the version number to match. OpenSSL 3 has a better versioning policy, and so OpenSSH 9.4p1 relaxed this check.

    Unfortunately, bookworm shipped with OpenSSH 9.2p1, so as soon as you unpacked the new OpenSSL library during an upgrade, sshd stopped working. This couldn t be fixed by a change in trixie; we needed to change bookworm in advance of the upgrade so that it would tolerate newer versions of OpenSSL, and time was tight if we wanted this to be available before the release of Debian 13.

    Fortunately, there s a stable-updates mechanism for exactly this sort of thing, and the stable release managers kindly accepted Colin s proposal to fix this there.
The net result is that if you apply updates to bookworm (including stable-updates / bookworm-updates, which is enabled by default) before starting the upgrade to trixie, everything should be fine.

Cross compilation collaboration, by Helmut Grohne Supporting cross building in Debian packages touches lots of areas of the archive and quite some of these matters reside in shared responsibility between different teams. Hence, DebConf was an ideal opportunity to settle long-standing issues. The cross building bof sparked lively discussions as a significant fraction of developers employ cross builds to get their work done. In the trixie release, about two thirds of the packages can satisfy their cross Build-Depends and about half of the packages actually can be cross built.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to remove references to Debian 10 which was moved to archive.debian.org, and had many fruitful discussions related to Debusine during DebConf 25.
  • Carles Pina prepared some data, questions and information for the DebConf 25 l10n and i18n BoF.
  • Carles Pina demoed and discussed possible next steps for po-debconf-manager with different teams in DebConf 25. He also reviewed Catalan translations and sent them to the packages.
  • Carles Pina started investigating a django-compressor bug: reproduced the bug consistently and prepared a PR for django-compressor upstream (likely more details next month). Looked at packaging frictionless-py.
  • Stefano Rivera triaged Python CVEs against pypy3.
  • Stefano prepared an upload of a new upstream release of pypy3 to Debian experimental (due to the freeze).
  • Stefano uploaded python3.14 RC1 to Debian experimental.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of sane-airscan to experimental. He also started to work on a new upstream version of hplip.
  • Colin backported fixes for CVE-2025-50181 and CVE-2025-50182 in python-urllib3, and fixed several other release-critical or important bugs in Python team packages.
  • Lucas uploaded ruby3.4 to experimental as a starting point for the ruby-defaults transition that will happen after Trixie release.
  • Lucas coordinated with the Release team the fix of the remaining RC bugs involving ruby packages, and got them all fixed.
  • Lucas, as part of the Debian Ruby team, kicked off discussions to improve internal process/tooling.
  • Lucas, as part of the Debian Outreach team, engaged in multiple discussions around internship programs we run and also what else we could do to improve outreach in the Debian project.
  • Lucas joined the Local groups BoF during DebConf 25 and shared all the good experiences from the Brazilian community and committed to help to document everything to try to support other groups.
  • Helmut spent significant time with Samuel Thibault on improving architecture cross bootstrap for hurd-any mostly reviewing Samuel s patches. He proposed a patch for improving bash s detection of its pipesize and a change to dpkg-shlibdeps to improve behavior for building cross toolchains.
  • Helmut reiterated the multiarch policy proposal with a lot of help from Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Rhonda D Vine and Stuart Prescott.
  • Helmut finished his work on the process based unschroot prototype that was the main feature of his talk (see above).
  • Helmut analyzed a multiarch-related glibc upgrade failure induced by a /usr-move mitigation of systemd and sent a patch and regression fix both of which reached trixie in time. Thanks to Aurelien Jarno and the release team for their timely cooperation.
  • Helmut resurrected an earlier discussion about changing the semantics of Architecture: all packages in a multiarch context in order to improve the long-standing interpreter problem. With help from Tollef Fog Heen better semantics were discovered and agreement was reached with Guillem Jover and Julian Andres Klode to consider this change. The idea is to record a concrete architecture for every Architecture: all package in the dpkg database and enable choosing it as non-native.
  • Helmut implemented type hints for piuparts.
  • Helmut reviewed and improved a patch set of Jochen Sprickerhof for debvm.
  • Anupa was involved in discussions with the Debian Women team during DebConf 25.
  • Anupa started working for the trixie release coverage and started coordinating release parties.
  • Emilio helped coordinate the release of Debian 13 trixie.

12 July 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 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 June, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Adrian Bunk did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 3.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 2.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 22.0h (out of 22.5h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.5h (out of 16.75h assigned and 6.75h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 14.0h (out of 11.5h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 21.0h (out of 0.5h assigned and 22.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Markus Koschany did 23.25h (out of 17.0h assigned and 6.25h from previous period).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 21.25h (out of 20.75h assigned and 3.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 12.75h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 1.0h (out of 4.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 2.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we released 35 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • mariadb-10.5, prepared by Otto Kek l inen, fixes vulnerabilities which could result in denial of service, information disclosure, or unauthorized data modification
    • python-django, prepared by Chris Lamb, fixes vulnerabilities which would result in log injection or denial of service
    • webkit2gtk, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes many vulnerabilities which could results in a wide range of issues
    • xorg-server, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes multiple vulnerabilities which may result in privilege escalation
    • sudo, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixes a vulnerability which could result in privilege escalation
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • debian-security-support, prepared by Santiago Ruano Rinc n, updates status of packages which receive limited security support or which have reached the end of security support
    • dns-root-data, prepared by Sylvain Beucler, updates the DNSSEC trust anchors
This month s contributions from outside the regular team include the mariadb-10.5 update mentioned above, prepared by Otto Kek l inen (the package maintainer); an update to libfile-find-rule-perl, prepared by Salvatore Bonaccorso (a member of the Debian Security Team); an update to activemq, prepared by Emmanuel Arias (a maintainer of the package). Additionally, LTS Team members contributed stable updates of the following packages:
  • curl, prepared by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara
  • python-tornado, prepared by Daniel Leidert
  • python-flask-cors, prepared by Daniel Leidert
  • common-vfs, prepared by Daniel Leidert
  • cjson, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • icu, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • node-tar-fs, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • rar, prepared by Adrian Bunk
Something of particular noteworthiness is that LTS contributor Carlos Henrique Lima Melara discovered a regression in the upstream fix for CVE-2023-2753 in curl. The corrective action which he took included providing a patch to upstream, uploading a stable update of curl, and further updating the version of curl in LTS. DebConf, the annual Debian Conference, is coming up in July and, as is customary each year, the week preceding the conference will feature an event called DebCamp. The DebCamp week provides an opportunity for teams and other interested groups/individuals to meet together in person in the same venue as the conference itself, with the purpose of doing focused work, often called sprints . LTS coordinator Roberto C. S nchez has announced that the LTS Team is planning to hold a sprint primarily focused on the Debian security tracker and the associated tooling used by the LTS Team and the Debian Security Team.

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

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: unschroot, DebConf 25 preparations and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-06 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.

unschroot, by Helmut Grohne Quite a while back, the sbuild maintainers added the unshare backend to enable better isolation of builds, but in doing so sbuild now effectively bundles a container runtime. unschroot is an attempt to separate containment from sbuild by implementing the same features and more in a schroot-compatible way. Last year, vague feature parity was achieved, but going beyond required changing the model from keeping state in the filesystem to keeping Linux namespaces as session state. A proof of concept is now available. While it still has sharp corners, it enables building packages on a squashfs with an overlayfs or id-mapped bind mounting of your ccache neither of which is possible with sbuild s unshare backend. There shall be a DebConf25 presentation about this work.

DebConf 25, by Stefano Rivera, Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Lucas Kanashiro DebConf 25 is now under way in Brest, France. Santiago is part of the local team running the event, and Stefano Rivera is part of the DebConf committee, supporting the event, as well as the video team. Both have spent considerable time in the last month, getting things ready for DebConf. Lucas Kanashiro built the schedule for DebConf 25. Also followed-up on multiple requests from speakers and stakeholders.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles did general maintenance on simplemonitor, qnetload and qdacco packages; provided simplemonitor upstream feedback on new feature.
  • Carles s updates about po-debconf-manager: prepared for DebCamp/DebConf, used it for reviewing and merging different packages. Also fixed multispeech po-debconf templates.
  • Colin Watson found a crash in pterm (PuTTY s terminal emulator) when running in a Wayland session, and backported the resulting upstream fix to trixie.
  • Colin responded to an upstream groff bug report about URLs being dropped from PDF output in some cases on Debian, and backported the fix to trixie.
  • Helmut dealt with issues related to /usr-move. Most prominently Christian Hofstaedler reported an upgrade failure. /usr-move is a contributing factor here as that s what caused systemd to upgrade a number of Breaks and Replaces to Conflicts. dumat needed some help with dropping mips64el from testing and Theodore Ts o forwarded a fuse2fs upgrade failure.
  • Helmut sent patches for 25 cross build failures.
  • Helmut debugged rebootstrap failures and worked around build failures related to gcc-15 when they had patches and sent ones otherwise.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups to fix a FTBFS-bug. This bug was introduced by a change in systemd, which bumped the maximum number of open files. This resulted in a longer test duration that triggered a timeout so that the build failed. Thorsten also uploaded mtink and lprng, which got new translation files.
  • Lucas Kanashiro followed-up on multiple unblock requests for ruby packages due to reproducible builds fixes. All of them were accepted into trixie.
  • Lucas Kanashiro discussed license issues with upstream involving Redis 8 new license and the possibility of backporting patches to old versions with a different license. Outcome is that upstream is adding a new paragraph to their license to allow the backport for security fixes.
  • Lucas Kanashiro fixed multiple CVEs reported against valkey in unstable and trixie.
  • Lucas Kanashiro gave a Debian packaging course of 8 hours for students at a free software development course at the University of Sao Paulo.
  • Lucas Kanashiro fixed a couple of cross building issues in the ruby ecosystem with Helmut s help.
  • Lucas Kanashiro is working on a debci fix for #1107645 (ongoing).
  • Stefano Rivera updated python-mitogen to the latest beta releases with upstream support for Ansible 12.
  • Stefano Rivera spent some time winding up DebConf 24 books.
  • Stefano Rivera fixed packages that were blocking cPython 3.13.5 from migrating to trixie, and filed an unblock request.
  • Stefano Rivera investigated a regression in cPython 3.13 that was breaking OpenStack Nova. There is a patch in progress for cPython, but it is not ready for use, yet.
  • Santiago reviewed different MRs in Salsa CI. For example, the MR !605 proposed by Aquila that aims to introduce a new debdiff job, as well as the autopkgtest MR !33 to extend the support to architectures other than amd64. Also reviewed MR !611 by Aayush Raj that fixes the autopkgtest images cleanup. And the MR !614, prepared by Charles, to change the suffix name used to bump the version used in the pipeline.
  • Anupa procured supplies needed for the DebConf ID tag for the DebConf registration team and co-ordinated its transport to the venue.
  • Anupa joined Nattie to complete the registration team tasks.

11 June 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 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 May, 22 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 8.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Adrian Bunk did 26.0h (out of 26.0h assigned).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 1.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 3.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 12.0h (out of 11.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 15.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 15.5h from previous period).
  • Daniel Leidert did 25.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 21.0h (out of 16.75h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 11.5h (out of 8.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 3.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.75h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 26.0h (out of 12.75h assigned and 13.25h from previous period).
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 20.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 20.0h (out of 26.25h assigned), thus carrying over 6.25h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 20.75h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 15.0h (out of 12.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 6.25h (out of 6.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In May, we released 54 DLAs. The LTS Team was particularly active in May, publishing a higher than normal number of advisories, as well as helping with a wide range of updates to packages in stable and unstable, plus some other interesting work. We are also pleased to welcome several updates from contributors outside the regular team.
  • Notable security updates:
    • containerd, prepared by Andreas Henriksson, fixes a vulnerability that could cause containers launched as non-root users to be run as root
    • libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, prepared by Moritz Schlarb, fixes a vulnerability which could allow an attacker to crash an Apache web server with libapache2-mod-auth-openidc installed
    • request-tracker4, prepared by Andrew Ruthven, fixes multiple vulnerabilities which could result in information disclosure, cross-site scripting and use of weak encryption for S/MIME emails
    • postgresql-13, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes an application crash vulnerability that could affect the server or applications using libpq
    • dropbear, prepared by Guilhem Moulin, fixes a vulnerability which could potentially result in execution of arbitrary shell commands
    • openjdk-17, openjdk-11, prepared by Thorsten Glaser, fixes several vulnerabilities, which include denial of service, information disclosure or bypass of sandbox restrictions
    • glibc, prepared by Sean Whitton, fixes a privilege escalation vulnerability
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • wireless-regdb, prepared by Ben Hutchings, updates information reflecting changes to radio regulations in many countries
This month s contributions from outside the regular team include the libapache2-mod-auth-openidc update mentioned above, prepared by Moritz Schlarb (the maintainer of the package); the update of request-tracker4, prepared by Andrew Ruthven (the maintainer of the package); and the updates of openjdk-17 and openjdk-11, also noted above, prepared by Thorsten Glaser. Additionally, LTS Team members contributed stable updates of the following packages:
  • rubygems and yelp/yelp-xsl, prepared by Lucas Kanashiro
  • simplesamlphp, prepared by Tobias Frost
  • libbson-xs-perl, prepared by Roberto C. S nchez
  • fossil, prepared by Sylvain Beucler
  • setuptools and mydumper, prepared by Lee Garrett
  • redis and webpy, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • xrdp, prepared by Abhijith PA
  • tcpdf, prepared by Santiago Ruano Rinc n
  • kmail-account-wizard, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
Other contributions were also made by LTS Team members to packages in unstable:
  • proftpd-dfsg DEP-8 tests (autopkgtests) were provided to the maintainer, prepared by Lucas Kanashiro
  • a regular upload of libsoup2.4, prepared by Sean Whitton
  • a regular upload of setuptools, prepared by Lee Garrett
Freexian, the entity behind the management of the Debian LTS project, has been working for some time now on the development of an advanced CI platform for Debian-based distributions, called Debusine. Recently, Debusine has reached a level of feature implementation that makes it very usable. Some members of the LTS Team have been using Debusine informally, and during May LTS coordinator Santiago Ruano Rinc n has made a call for the team to help with testing of Debusine, and to help evaluate its suitability for the LTS Team to eventually begin using as the primary mechanism for uploading packages into Debian. Team members who have started using Debusine are providing valuable feedback to the Debusine development team, thus helping to improve the platform for all users. Actually, a number of updates, for both bullseye and bookworm, made during the month of May were handled using Debusine, e.g. rubygems s DLA-4163-1. By the way, if you are a Debian Developer, you can easily test Debusine following the instructions found at https://wiki.debian.org/DebusineDebianNet. DebConf, the annual Debian Conference, is coming up in July and, as is customary each year, the week preceding the conference will feature an event called DebCamp. The DebCamp week provides an opportunity for teams and other interested groups/individuals to meet together in person in the same venue as the conference itself, with the purpose of doing focused work, often called sprints . LTS coordinator Roberto C. S nchez has announced that the LTS Team is planning to hold a sprint primarily focused on the Debian security tracker and the associated tooling used by the LTS Team and the Debian Security Team.

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

29 May 2025

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process: 
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%: 
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process: 
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%: 
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

16 May 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 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 April, 22 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 56.25h (out of 56.25h assigned).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 15.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 10.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 31.5h (out of 31.5h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 11.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 26.0h (out of 26.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.0h (out of 39.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.5h (out of 3.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 12.5h (out of 20.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 26.25h (out of 7.75h assigned and 31.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 50.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 52.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 39.5h (out of 39.5h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 12.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Stefano Rivera did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 39.5h (out of 39.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 2.0h (out of 2.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In April, we released 46 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • jetty9, prepared by Markus Koschany, fixes an information disclosure and potential remote code execution vulnerability
    • zabbix, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixes several vulnerabilities, encompassing denial of service, information disclosure or remote code inclusion
    • glibc, prepared by Sean Whitton, fixes a buffer overflow vulnerability
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • tzdata, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, brings the latest timezone database release
    • php-horde-editor and php-horde-imp, prepared by Sylvain Beucler, have been updated to switch from CKEditor v3, which is EOL, to CKEditor v4; this builds upon work done last month by Sylvain and Bastien for the complete removal of ckeditor3
    • distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, adds information concerning future Debian and Ubuntu releases
The LTS team continues to welcome the collaboration of maintainers and other interested parties from outside the regular team. In April, we had external updates contributed by: Yadd - lemonldap-ng and Moritz Schlarb - libapache2-mod-auth-openidc A point release of the current stable Debian 12 (codename bookworm ) is planned for mid-May and several LTS contributors have prepared packages for this update, many of them prepared in conjunction with related LTS updates of the same packages:
  • glib2.0, haproxy, imagemagick, poppler, and python-h11, prepared by Adrian Bunk
  • rubygems, prepared by Lucas Kanashiro
  • ruby3.1 (in collaboration with Lucas Kanashiro), twitter-bootstrap3, twitterboot-strap4, wpa, and erlang, prepared by Bastien Roucari s (corresponding updates of twitter-bootstrap3 and twitter-bootstrap4 were also uploaded to Debian unstable)
  • abseil, prepared by Tobias Frost (a corresponding update was also uploaded to Debian unstable)
  • vips, prepared by Guilhem Moulin
Additional updates of ruby3.3 and rubygems were prepared for Debian unstable by Lucas Kanashiro. And finally, a highlight of our continued commitment to enhancing long term support efforts in upstream projects. Freexian, as the primary entity behind the management and execution of the LTS project, has partnered with Invisible Things Lab to extend the upstream security support of Xen 4.17, which is shipped in Debian 12 bookworm (the current stable release). This partnership will result in significantly improved lifecycle support for users of Xen on bookworm, and members of the LTS team will play a part in this endeavour. The Freexian announcement has additional details.

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

28 April 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 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 March, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 51.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 51.5h from previous period).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Andrej Shadura did 6.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h 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 26.0h (out of 23.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 37.0h (out of 36.5h assigned and 0.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.25h (out of 11.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 18.0h (out of 24.25h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 10.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 42.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 31.75h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 56.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 27.25h (out of 27.25h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.25h (out of 7.0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 17.5h (out of 19.75h assigned and 5.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 32.0h (out of 31.0h assigned and 1.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 7.75h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.25h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • linux-6.1 (1 2)and linux, prepared by Ben Hutchings, fixed an extensive list of vulnerabilities
    • firefox-esr, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixed a variety of vulnerabilities
    • intel-microcode, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixed several local privilege escalation, denial of service, and information disclosure vulnerabilities
    • vim, prepared by Sean Whitton, fixed a multitude of vulnerabilities, including many application crashes, buffer overflows, and out-of-bounds reads
The recent trend of contributions from contributors external to the formal LTS team has continued. LTS contributor Sylvain Beucler reviewed and facilitated an update to openvpn proposed by Aquila Macedo, resulting in the publication of DLA 4079-1. Thanks a lot to Aquila for preparing the update. The LTS Team continues to make contributions to the current stable Debian release, Debian 12 (codename bookworm ). LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s prepared a stable upload of krb5 to ensure that fixes made in the LTS release, Debian 11 (codename bullseye ) were also made available to stable users. Additional stable updates, for tomcat10 and jetty9, were prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany. And, finally, LTS contributor Utkarsh Gupta prepared stable updates for rails and ruby-rack. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has continued his ongoing improvements to the Debian security tracker and its associated tooling, making the data contained in the tracker more reliable and easing interaction with it. The ckeditor3 package, which has been EOL by upstream for some time, is still depended upon by the PHP Horde packages in Debian. Sylvain, along with Bastien, did monumental work in coordinating with maintainers, security team fellows, and other Debian teams, to formally declare the EOL of the ckeditor3 package in Debian 11 and in Debian 12. Additionally, as a result of this work Sylvain has worked towards the removal of ckeditor3 as a dependency by other packages in order to facilitate the complete removal of ckeditor3 from all future Debian releases.

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.

1 March 2025

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil

title: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil description: by Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls) published: true date: 2025-03-01T17:39:03.284Z tags: blog, english editor: markdown dateCreated: 2023-08-25T16:00:00.000Z In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event. Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

14 February 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 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 January, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 8.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 36.5h (out of 47.75h assigned and 52.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 63.5h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 9.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 22.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 20.0h (out of 23.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 34.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 27.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 3.25h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 23.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Lee Garrett did 15.75h (out of 8.5h assigned and 51.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 8.0h (out of 32.0h assigned and 32.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 56.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 14.75h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 21.75h (out of 18.75h assigned and 6.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 8.5h (out of 8.5h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 39.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In January, we have released 33 DLAs. There were numerous security and non-security updates to Debian 11 (codename bullseye ) during January.
  • Notable security updates:
    • rsync, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixed several CVEs (including information leak and path traversal vulnerabilities)
    • tomcat9, prepared by Markus Koschany, fixed several CVEs (including denial of service and information disclosure vulnerabilities)
    • ruby2.7, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixed several CVEs (including denial of service vulnerabilities)
    • tiff, prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixed several CVEs (including NULL ptr, buffer overflow, use-after-free, and segfault vulnerabilities)
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • linux-6.1, prepared by Ben Hutchings, has been packaged for bullseye (this was done specifically to provide a supported upgrade path for systems that currently use kernel packages from the bullseye-backports suite)
    • debian-security-support, prepared by Santiago Ruano Rinc n, which formalized the EOL of intel-mediasdk and node-matrix-js-sdk
In addition to the security and non-security updates targeting bullseye , various LTS contributors have prepared uploads targeting Debian 12 (codename bookworm ) with fixes for a variety of vulnerabilities. Abhijith PA prepared an upload of puma; Bastien Roucari s prepared an upload of node-postcss with fixes for data processing and denial of service vulnerabilities; Daniel Leidert prepared updates for setuptools, python-asyncssh, and python-tornado; Lee Garrett prepared an upload of ansible-core; and Guilhem Moulin prepared updates for python-urllib3, sqlparse, and opensc. Santiago Ruano Rinc n also worked on tracking and filing some issues about packages that need an update in recent releases to avoid regressions on upgrade. This relates to CVEs that were fixed in buster or bullseye, but remain open in bookworm. These updates, along with Santiago s work on identifying and tracking similar issues, underscore the LTS Team s commitment to ensuring that the work we do as part of LTS also benefits the current Debian stable release. LTS contributor Sean Whitton also prepared an upload of jinja2 and Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared an upload of openjpeg2 for Debian unstable (codename sid ), as part of the LTS Team effort to assist with package uploads to unstable.

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

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.

13 January 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2024 (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 December, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Adrian Bunk did 47.75h (out of 53.0h assigned and 47.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.25h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 6.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and -7.0h from previous period after hours given back), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 22.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 15.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 18.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 23.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 32.25h (out of 40.5h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 22.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 12.75h from previous period).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 2.0h (out of 3.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 8.5h (out of 14.75h assigned and 45.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 51.5h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 32.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 54.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 20.0h from previous period).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 6.75h assigned and 17.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 18.75h (out of 24.75h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 6.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 21.5h assigned and 38.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 49.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 29 DLAs. The LTS Team has published updates to several notable packages. Contributor Guilhem Moulin published an update of php7.4, a widely-used open source general purpose scripting language, which addressed denial of service, authorization bypass, and information disclosure vulnerabilities. Contributor Lucas Kanashiro published an update of clamav, an antivirus toolkit for Unix and Linux, which addressed denial of service and authorization bypass vulnerabilities. Finally, contributor Tobias Frost published an update of intel-microcode, the microcode for Intel microprocessors, which well help to ensure that processor hardware is protected against several local privilege escalation and local denial of service vulnerabilities. Beyond our customary LTS package updates, the LTS Team has made contributions to Debian s stable bookworm release and its experimental section. Notably, contributor Lee Garrett published a stable update of dnsmasq. The LTS update was previously published in November and in December Lee continued working to bring the same fixes (addressing the high profile KeyTrap and NSEC3 vulnerabilities) to the dnsmasq package in Debian bookworm. This package was accepted for inclusion in the Debian 12.9 point release scheduled for January 2025. Addititionally, contributor Sean Whitton provided assistance, via upload sponsorships, to the Debian maintainers of xen. This assistance resulted in two uploads of xen into Debian s experimental section, which will contribute to the next Debian stable release having a version of xen with better longterm support from the upstream development team.

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

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.

Next.