Search Results: "Thorsten Alteholz"

12 July 2023

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

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

6 July 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 221 and rejected 33 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 221. Yeah, Bookworm was released this month. Thanks a lot to everybody who was involved in doing this. Debian LTS This was my hundred-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also did some work on security-master to inject missing dependencies for some packages and processed NEW. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties and took part in the LTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty ninth ELTS month. I also made some progress with the openssl1.0 update. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded some packages to fix one or the other issue: This month I even uploaded a new package c-munipack, which is more or less the successor of munipack, and can be used for example to analyse light curves of variable stars.
Another new package is virtualgps, where the name says it all. Debian Printing This month I did a security upload of cpdb-libs to fix a CVE in Unstable, Bookworm and Bullseye.
This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Mobcom This month I could upload a new version of: Other stuff This month I restarted DOPOM (Debian Orphaned Package Of the Month) and adopted: Hopefully this will result in a new upload of vdr-plugin-live. I would like to have this package for my personal VDR. I also did an upload of:

14 June 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

Debian LTS contributors In May, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 32.0h (out of 18.5h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 8.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 34.5h (out of 34.5h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.25h (out of 20.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Scarlett Moore did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 34.5h (out of 29.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 5.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 26.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In May, we have released 34 DLAs. Several of the DLAs constituted notable security updates to LTS during the month of May. Of particular note were the linux (4.19) and linux-5.10 packages, both of which addressed a considerable number of CVEs. Additionally, the postgresql-11 package was updated by synchronizing it with the 11.20 release from upstream. Notable non-security updates were made to the distro-info-data database and the timezone database. The distro-info-data package was updated with the final expected release date of Debian 12, made aware of Debian 14 and Ubuntu 23.10, and was updated with the latest EOL dates for Ubuntu releases. The tzdata and libdatetime-timezone-perl packages were updated with the 2023c timezone database. The changes in these packages ensure that in addition to the latest security updates LTS users also have the latest information concerning Debian and Ubuntu support windows, as well as the latest timezone data for accurate worldwide timekeeping. LTS contributor Anton implemented an improvement to the Debian Security Tracker Unfixed vulnerabilities in unstable without a filed bug view, allowing for more effective management of CVEs which do not yet have a corresponding bug entry in the Debian BTS. LTS contributor Sylvain concluded an audit of obsolete packages still supported in LTS to ensure that new CVEs are properly associated. In this case, a package being obsolete means that it is no longer associated with a Debian release for which the Debian Security Team has direct responsibility. When this occurs, it is the responsibility of the LTS team to ensure that incoming CVEs are properly associated to packages which exist only in LTS. Finally, LTS contributors also contributed several updates to packages in unstable/testing/stable to fix CVEs. This helps package maintainers, addresses CVEs in current and future Debian releases, and ensures that the CVEs do not remain open for an extended period of time only for the LTS team to be required to deal with them much later in the future.

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

10 June 2023

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

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

4 June 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in May 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 157 and rejected 22 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 160. Debian LTS This was my hundred-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: The CVEs for cups-filters and cups have been embargoed ones, so the work for cups was done in May but the uploads happen in June. I also did some work on security-master to inject missing dependencies for hugo and gitlab-workhose. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty eighth ELTS month. The CVEs for cups-filters and cups have been embargoed ones, so the work for cups was done in May but the uploads happen in June. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded some packages to fix RC bugs, that were
detected by one of many QA tools: Thanks a lot to all the hardworking people who run these tools! Debian Printing This month I could fix RC bugs in: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Mobcom This month I could fix RC bugs in: Other stuff Some other packages also had last minute RC bugs: I even did an upload of a new package force-ip-protocol. I finally had enough of people using IPv6 for their hosts but are unable to configure it. Now I can force firefox, or whatever software, to only use IPv4. One nuisance settled.

16 May 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

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

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

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

7 May 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in April 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 103 and rejected 11 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 103. Debian LTS This was my hundred-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also continued to work on ring in Buster and Bullseye, where some new CVEs appeared. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty seventh ELTS month. Unfortunately I couldn t use up all my allocated hours and I was only able to continue my work on openssl1.0. I plan to do an upload in May. Debian Astro Due to a change in numpy the planetary-system-stacker stopped working. I created a patch and uploaded a new package. Meanwhile it already arrived in testing and I could analyse some pictures of the sun again. Other stuff Looking at my notes, there is nothing to be reported here.

12 April 2023

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

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

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

2 April 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 78 and rejected 12 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 78. I still love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow. Debian LTS This was my hundred-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also participated in the monthly LTS-meeting. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties and took care of issues on security-master. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty sixth ELTS month. The duktape update in Stretch is more complicated than expected and I could not finish it this month. I also started to work on openssl1.0 Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties Debian Printing This month I uploaded new versions or improved packages of: The unblock bug for hplip was already processed, the unblock bug for cups is still waiting. Hopefully the last minute work of the translators was not wasted. Parts of this work is generously funded by Freexian! Other stuff Looking at my notes, there is nothing to be reported here.

20 March 2023

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

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

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

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

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

15 March 2023

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

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 March 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 284 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 286. I love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow. Debian LTS This was my hundred-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 8h. During that time I uploaded: As I added all missing ELA uploads to the git repository I also had a look at package-operations and added stuff to make my life a bit easier. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty fifth ELTS month. I also made myself familiar with the mandatory git workflow and committed all my packages of this years ELA to the corresponding repository. Debian Astro This month I uploaded improved packages or new versions of: Debian Printing This month I uploaded new versions or improved packages of: As ippsample does not build on i386, I filed a RM bug for this architecture. Maybe in a later upstream release it will be available again on all architectures. I could also close lots of bugs that happen to be fixed upstream, but have not been closed with the upload of the new version. Parts of this work is generously funded by Freexian! Other stuff This month I uploaded improved packages of: The upload of feynmf could only happen due to the help of several people (please see #1029439). Thanks a lot!

21 February 2023

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

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

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

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

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

8 February 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 419 and rejected 46 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 429. Looking at these numbers and comparing them to the previous month, one can see: the freeze is near. Everybody wants to get some packages into the archive and I hope nobody is disappointed. Debian LTS This was my hundred-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also attended the monthly LTS meeting and did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty fourth ELTS month. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded improved packages or new versions of: I also uploaded new packages: Debian IoT This month I uploaded improved packages of: Debian Printing This month I uploaded new versions or improved packages of: I also uploaded new packages:

16 January 2023

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

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

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

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

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

6 January 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in December 2022

FTP master This month I accepted 276 and rejected 27 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 288. Debian LTS This was my hundred-second month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h but due to Christmas I managed only to do 10h. During that time I uploaded: Debian ELTS This month was the fifty third ELTS month. During my allocated time I marked all CVEs of the multipath-tools as not-affected and started to work on another snapd update. As I spend more time than expected with my family, I also failed to accomplish my ELTS workload. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded improved packages or new versions of: I also updated almost all of the about 50 indi-3rdparty packages. Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded improved packages of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded improved packages of: Debian Printing This month I uploaded improved packages of: Other stuff This month I uploaded improved packages of: Further I uploaded new versions of a bunch of golang packages.

18 December 2022

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.5h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 20.25h (out of 0.75h assigned and 31.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.5h (out of 23.0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 41.0h (out of 32.5h assigned and 25.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we released 43 DLAs, fixing 183 CVEs. We currently have 63 packages in dla-needed.txt that are waiting for updates, which is 19 fewer than the previous month. We re excited to announce that two Debian Developers Tobias Frost and Guilhem Moulin, have completed the on-boarding process and will begin contributing to LTS as of December 2022. Welcome aboard!

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

7 December 2022

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2022

FTP master This month I accepted 292 and rejected 43 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 295. Debian LTS This was my hundred-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also started to work on ring, but this seems to be a pile of work. Not least because at the moment the package does not migrate to testing. Further I started to investigate what packages are really affected by CVE-2018-17942. It looks like some upstreams and their corresponding maintainers did not care about that CVE in the embedded gnulib. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty second ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded improved packages of: Other stuff This month I uploaded improved packages of:

19 November 2022

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2022 (by Rapha l Hertzog)

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

Debian LTS contributors In October, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 20.0h (out of 19.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 40.5h (out of 58.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 0.75h (out of 1.0h assigned and 31.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 31.25h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 12.5h (out of 9.0h assigned and 26.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 25.5h (out of 31.5h assigned and 28.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 34.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 35.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In October, we have released 42 DLAs, closing 106 CVEs. At the moment we have 82 packages in dla-needed.txt, waiting for update. We are continuously working on updating our infrastructure, trying to document all of our changes in the git-repo. Most of packages there are having continuous integration (CI) pipelines.

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

4 November 2022

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2022

FTP master This month I accepted 484 and rejected 55 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 492. Debian LTS This was my hundredth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. Woohoo, There is a party. (yes I am old). Unfortunately there are already 101 completed month listed in the debian-lts-announce archive, so I seem to have counted wrong once. *sigh*, yes I am old. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded: I also started to work on virglrenderer. Last but not least I took care of NEW packages on security-master. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty first ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: I also started to work on snapd. Last but not least I finally managed to become familiar with the git workflow and imported several packages to the salsa repository. Debian Astro This month I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of: I also uploaded a new package pysqm. This software supports the Sky Quality Meters made by Unihedron. I was kindly given an SQM-LU for USB and SQM-LE with network adapter. I plan to put a working Python3 version of the old PySQM software into Debian, package the UDM (Unihedron Device Manager) and finally check the support within Indi. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of: Debian Mobcom This month I finished the transition of the Osmocom packages, except
osmo-mgw and osmo-msc seem to have problems. I have no idea how I can solve this, so help is appreciated. Other stuff This month I uploaded new packages:

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