Search Results: "Thorsten Alteholz"

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.

7 January 2025

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in December 2024

Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I worked on updates for ffmpeg and haproxy in all releases. Along the way I marked more CVEs as not-affected than I had to fix. So finally there was no upload needed for haproxy anymore. Unfortunately testing ffmpeg was not as easy, as the recommended just look whether mpv can play random videos is not really satisfying. So the upload will happen only in January. I also wonder whether fixing glewlwyd is really worth the effort, as the software is already EOL upstream. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-seventhth ELTS month. During my allocated time I worked on ffmpeg, haproxy, amanda and kmail-account-wizzard. Like LTS, all CVEs of haproxy and some of ffmpeg could be marked as not-affected and testing of the other packages was/is not really straight forward. So the final upload will only happen in January as well. Debian Printing Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Matomo Thanks a lot to William Desportes for all fixes of my bad PHP packaging. Debian Astro This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: I again sponsored an upload of calceph. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: I also sponsored uploads of emacs-lsp-docker, emacs-dape, emacs-oauth2, gpgmngr, libjs-jush. FTP master This month I accepted 330 and rejected 13 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 335.

13 December 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 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 November, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Adrian Bunk did 53.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 85.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 47.0h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 1.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 0.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 17.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 40.5h (out of 60.0h assigned), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 7.25h (out of 7.5h assigned and 12.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.75h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 3.5h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 14.75h (out of 15.25h assigned and 44.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 45.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 54.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 54.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 20.0h (out of 40.0h assigned), thus carrying over 20.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 6.75h (out of 9.75h assigned and 14.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 24.75h (out of 23.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 2.0h (out of 6.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 21.5h (out of 9.5h assigned and 50.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 38.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 10.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In November, we have released 38 DLAs. The LTS coordinators, Roberto and Santiago, delivered a talk at the Mini-DebConf event in Toulouse, France. The title of the talk was How LTS goes beyond LTS . The talk covered work done by the LTS Team during the past year. This included contributions related to individual packages in Debian (such as tomcat, jetty, radius, samba, apache2, ruby, and many others); improvements to tooling and documentation useful to the Debian project as a whole; and contributions to upstream work (apache2, freeimage, node-dompurify, samba, and more). Additionally, several contributors external to the LTS Team were highlighted for their contributions to LTS. Readers are encouraged to watch the video of the presentation for a more detailed review of various ways in which the LTS team has contributed more broadly to the Debian project and to the free software community during the past year. We wish to specifically thank Salvatore (of the Debian Security Team) for swiftly handling during November the updates of needrestart and libmodule-scandeps-perl, both of which involved arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities. We are happy to see increased involvement in LTS work by contributors from outside the formal LTS Team. The work of the LTS Team in November was otherwise unremarkable, encompassing the customary triage, development, testing, and release of numerous DLAs, along with some associated contributions to related packages in stable and unstable.

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

9 December 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2024

Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also continued to work on a fix for glewlwyd, which is more difficult than expected. Besides I started to work on ffmpeg and haproxy. Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also started to work on a fix for kmail-account-wizzard. Unfortunately preparing a testing environment takes some time and I did not finish testing this month. Besides I started to work on ffmpeg and haproxy. Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Matomo Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Astro This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: I also sponsored an upload of calceph. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: I also did some NMU of opensta, kdrill, glosstex, irsim, pagetools, afnix, cpm, to fix some RC bugs. FTP master This month I accepted 266 and rejected 16 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 269.

2 December 2024

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

This is bits from DPL for November. MiniDebConf Toulouse I had the pleasure of attending the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, which featured a range of engaging talks, complementing those from the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge. Both events were preceded by a DebCamp, which provided a valuable opportunity for focused work and collaboration. DebCamp During these events, I participated in numerous technical discussions on topics such as maintaining long-neglected packages, team-based maintenance, FTP master policies, Debusine, and strategies for separating maintainer script dependencies from runtime dependencies, among others. I was also fortunate that members of the Publicity Team attended the MiniDebCamp, giving us the opportunity to meet in person and collaborate face-to-face. Independent of the ongoing lengthy discussion on the Debian Devel mailing list, I encountered the perspective that unifying Git workflows might be more critical than ensuring all packages are managed in Git. While I'm uncertain whether these two questions--adopting Git as a universal development tool and agreeing on a common workflow for its use--can be fully separated, I believe it's worth raising this topic for further consideration. Attracting newcomers In my own talk, I regret not leaving enough time for questions--my apologies for this. However, I want to revisit the sole question raised, which essentially asked: Is the documentation for newcomers sufficient to attract new contributors? My immediate response was that this question is best directed to new contributors themselves, as they are in the best position to identify gaps and suggest improvements that could make the documentation more helpful. That said, I'm personally convinced that our challenges extend beyond just documentation. I don't get the impression that newcomers are lining up to join Debian only to be deterred by inadequate documentation. The issue might be more about fostering interest and engagement in the first place. My personal impression is that we sometimes fail to convey that Debian is not just a product to download for free but also a technical challenge that warmly invites participation. Everyone who respects our Code of Conduct will find that Debian is a highly diverse community, where joining the project offers not only opportunities for technical contributions but also meaningful social interactions that can make the effort and time truly rewarding. In several of my previous talks (you can find them on my talks page just search for "team," and don't be deterred if you see "Debian Med" in the title; it's simply an example), I emphasized that the interaction between a mentor and a mentee often plays a far more significant role than the documentation the mentee has to read. The key to success has always been finding a way to spark the mentee's interest in a specific topic that resonates with their own passions. Bug of the Day In my presentation, I provided a brief overview of the Bug of the Day initiative, which was launched with the aim of demonstrating how to fix bugs as an entry point for learning about packaging. While the current level of interest from newcomers seems limited, the initiative has brought several additional benefits. I must admit that I'm learning quite a bit about Debian myself. I often compare it to exploring a house's cellar with a flashlight you uncover everything from hidden marvels to things you might prefer to discard. I've also come across traces of incredibly diligent people who have invested their spare time polishing these hidden treasures (what we call NMUs). The janitor, a service in Salsa that automatically updates packages, fits perfectly into this cellar metaphor, symbolizing the ongoing care and maintenance that keep everything in order. I hadn't realized the immense amount of silent work being done behind the scenes--thank you all so much for your invaluable QA efforts. Reproducible builds It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I'd like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar's contributions and legacy. Personally, I've encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work. Advent calendar bug squashing I d like to promote an idea originally introduced by Thorsten Alteholz, who in 2011 proposed a Bug Squashing Advent Calendar for the Debian Med team. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of an Advent Calendar, you can find an explanation on Wikipedia.) While the original version included a fun graphical element which we ve had to set aside due to time constraints (volunteers, anyone?) we ve kept the tradition alive by tackling one bug per day from December 1st to 24th each year. This initiative helps clean up issues that have accumulated over the year. Regardless of whether you celebrate the concept of Advent, I warmly recommend this approach as a form of continuous bug-squashing party for every team. Not only does it contribute to the release readiness of your team s packages, but it s also an enjoyable and bonding activity for team members. Best wishes for a cheerful and productive December
Andreas.

29 November 2024

Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes its new Outreachy interns

Outreachy logo Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2024 - March 2025 round. Patrick Noblet Appiah will work on Automatic Indi-3rd-party driver update, mentored by Thorsten Alteholz. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work on Making the Debian main website more attractive by switching to HuGo as site generator, mentored by Carsten Schoenert, Subin Siby and Thomas Lange.
Congratulations and welcome Patrick Noblet Appiah and Divine Attah-Ohiemi! From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science. The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes its new Outreachy interns

Outreachy logo Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2024 - March 2025 round. Patrick Noblet Appiah will work on Automatic Indi-3rd-party driver update, mentored by Thorsten Alteholz. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work on Making the Debian main website more attractive by switching to HuGo as site generator, mentored by Carsten Schoenert, Subin Siby and Thomas Lange.
Congratulations and welcome Patrick Noblet Appiah and Divine Attah-Ohiemi! From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science. The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

12 November 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 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 October, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 87.0h assigned and 13.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 85.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 29.0h (out of 26.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 60.0h (out of 23.5h assigned and 36.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 7.5h (out of 19.75h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 15.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.75h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 14.5h (out of 6.5h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.75h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 23.5h (out of 25.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 6.25h (out of 1.0h assigned and 5.25h from previous period).
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 9.5h (out of 16.0h assigned and 44.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 50.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In October, we have released 35 DLAs. Some notable updates prepared in October include denial of service vulnerability fixes in nss, regression fixes in apache2, multiple fixes in php7.4, and new upstream releases of firefox-esr, openjdk-17, and opendk-11. Additional contributions were made for the stable Debian 12 bookworm release by several LTS contributors. Arturo Borrero Gonzalez prepared a parallel update of nss, Bastien Roucari s prepared a parallel update of apache2, and Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared updates of activemq for both LTS and Debian stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s undertook a code audit of the cacti package and in the process discovered three new issues in node-dompurity, which were reported upstream and resulted in the assignment of three new CVEs. As always, the LTS team continues to work towards improving the overall sustainability of the free software base upon which Debian LTS is built. We thank our many committed sponsors for their ongoing support.

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

10 November 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 398 and rejected 22 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 441. In case your RM bug is not closed within a month, you can assume that either the conversion of the subject of the bug email to the corresponding dak command did not work or you still need to take care of reverse dependencies. The dak command related to your removal bug can be found here. Unfortunately the bahavior of some project members caused a decline of motivation of team members to work on these bugs. When I look at these bugs, I just copy and paste the above mentioned dak commands. If they don t work, I don t have the time to debug what is going wrong. So please read the docs and take care of it yourself. Please also keep in mind that you need to close the bug or set a moreinfo tag if you don t want anybody to act on your removal bug. Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-fifth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Matomo Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Astro Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

11 October 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 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 September, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 51.75h (out of 9.25h assigned and 55.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 10.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 20.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 23.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.5h (out of 22.25h assigned and 37.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 22.25h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 24.75h (out of 21.0h assigned and 3.75h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
  • Sean Whitton did 0.75h (out of 4.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 42.0h assigned and 18.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 17.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 52 DLAs. September marked the first full month of Debian 11 bullseye under the responsibility of the LTS Team and the team immediately got to work, publishing more than 4 dozen updates. Some notable updates include ruby2.7 (denial-of-service, information leak, and remote code execution), git (various arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities), firefox-esr (multiple issues), gnutls28 (information disclosure), thunderbird (multiple issues), cacti (cross site scripting and SQL injection), redis (unauthorized access, denial of service, and remote code execution), mariadb-10.5 (arbitrary code execution), cups (arbitrary code execution). Several LTS contributors have also contributed package updates which either resulted in a DSA (a Debian Security Announcement, which applies to Debian 12 bookworm) or in an upload that will be published at the next stable point release of Debian 12 bookworm. This list of packages includes cups, cups-filters, booth, nghttp2, puredata, python3.11, sqlite3, and wireshark. This sort of work, contributing fixes to newer Debian releases (and sometimes even to unstable), helps to ensure that upgrades from a release in the LTS phase of its lifecycle to a newer release do not expose users to vulnerabilities which have been closed in the older release. Looking beyond Debian, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s has worked with the upstream developers of apache2 to address regressions introduced upstream by some recent vulnerability fixes and he has also reached out to the community regarding a newly discovered security issue in the dompurify package. LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n has undertaken the work of triaging and reproducing nearly 4 dozen CVEs potentially affecting the freeimage package. The upstream development of freeimage appears to be dormant and some of the issues have languished for more than 5 years. It is unclear how much can be done without the aid of upstream, but we will do our best to provide as much help to the community as we can feasibly manage. Finally, it is sometimes necessary to limit or discontinue support for certain packages. The transition of a release from being under the responsibility of the Debian Security Team to that of the LTS Team is an occasion where we assess any pending decisions in this area and formalize them. Please see the announcement for a complete list of packages which have been designated as unsupported.

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

10 October 2024

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

Debian Contributions: 2024-09 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

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

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

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

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

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

8 October 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 441 and rejected 29 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 448. I couldn t believe my eyes, but this month I really accepted the same number of packages as last month. Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: Despite the announcement the package libppd in Debian is not affected by the CVEs related to CUPS. By pure chance there is an unrelated package with the same name in Debian. I also answered some question about the CUPS related uploads. Due to the CUPS issues, I postponed my work on other packages to October. Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-fourth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also started to work on updates for cups in Buster, Stretch and Jessie, but their uploads will happen only in October. I also did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded Last but not least I tried to prepare an update for hplip. Unfortunately this is a nerve-stretching task and I need some more time. This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Matomo This month I even found some time to upload packages that are dependencies of Matomo This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: Most of the uploads were related to package migration to testing. As some of them are in non-free or contrib, one has to build all binary versions. From my point of view handling packages in non-free or contrib could be very much improved, but well, they are not part of Debian Anyway, starting in December there is an Outreachy project that takes care of automatic updates of these packages. So hopefully it will be much easier to keep those package up to date. I will keep you informed. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I did source uploads of all the packages that were prepared last month by Nathan and started the transition. It went rather smooth except for a few packages where the new version did not propagate to the tracker and they got stuck in old failing autopkgtest. Anyway, in the end all packages migrated to testing. I also uploaded new upstream releases or fixed bugs in: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Most of those uploads were needed to help packages to migrate to testing.

11 September 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 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 August, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 44.5h (out of 46.5h assigned and 53.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 55.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 21.0h 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 12.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 22.25h (out of 6.5h assigned and 53.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 37.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 11.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 11.5h (out of 58.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 48.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 14.5h (out of 4.0h assigned and 20.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.25h (out of 5.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 21.5h (out of 11.5h assigned and 10.0h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 4.0h (out of 2.25h assigned and 3.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 42.0h (out of 46.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 2.5h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In August, we have released 1 DLAs. During the month of August Debian 11 "bullseye" officially transitioned to the responsibility of the LTS team (on 2024-08-15). However, because the final point release (11.11) was not made until 2024-08-31, LTS contributors were prevented from uploading packages to bullseye until after the point release had been made. That said, the team was not at all idle, and was busy at work on a variety of tasks which impacted both LTS and the broader Debian community, as well as preparing uploads which will be released during the month of September. Of particular note, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s prepared updates of the putty and cacti packages for bookworm (1 2) and bullseye (1 2), which were accepted by the old-stable release managers for the August point releases. He also analysed several security regressions in the apache2 package. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort worked on the Rust toolchain in bookworm and bullseye, which will be needed to support the upcoming Firefox ESR and Thunderbird ESR releases from the Mozilla project. Additionally, LTS contributor Thorsten Alteholz prepared bookworm and bullseye updates of the cups package (1 2), which were accepted by the old-stable release managers for the August point releases. LTS contributor Markus Koschany collaborated with Emmanuel Bourg, co-maintainer of the tomcat packages in Debian. Regressions in a proposed security fix necessitated the updating of the tomcat10 package in Debian to the latest upstream release. LTS contributors Bastien and Santiago Ruano Rinc n collaborated with the upstream developers and the Debian maintainer (Bernhard Schmidt) of the FreeRADIUS project towards addressing the BlastRADIUS vulnerability in the bookworm and bullseye versions of the freeradius package. If you use FreeRADIUS in Debian bookworm or bullseye, we encourage you to test the packages following the instructions found in the call for testers to help identifying any possible regression that could be introduced with these updates. Testing is an important part of the work the LTS Team does, and in that vein LTS contributor Sean Whitton worked on improving the documentation and tooling around creating test filesystems which can be used for testing a variety of package update scenarios.

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8 September 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in August 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 441 and rejected 15 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 442. I am ashamed of some occurrences that happened this month and I apologize for this. Unfortunately I have no idea how to prevent this in the future without becoming a solo entertainer. Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-second month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. Unfortunately Bullseye was not handed over to LTS in August. So I only prepared new packages of asterisk, libvirt and tinyproxy and will upload them next month. Last but not least I did a week of FD this month. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-third ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also did a week of FD. Debian Printing This month I uploaded This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: Debian Mobcom The following packages have been prepared by the GSoC student Nathan: It was so much fun working with Nathan. Unfortunately GSoC is over now, but Nathan will continue working in Debian and become a Debian Maintainer. misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: I also filed an RM bug against meep-openmpi. As Adrian made me ware, this package is no longer needed.

12 August 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, July 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 July, 13 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 5.0h (out of 4.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.75h (out of 4.5h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.25h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 51.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 43.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 5.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 6.0h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 2.25h (out of 6.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 39.5h (out of 2.5h assigned and 51.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 1 DLA. August will be the month that Debian 11 makes the transition to LTS. Our contributors have already been hard at work with preparatorty tasks and also with making contributions to packages in Debian 11 in close collaboration with the Debian security team and package maintainers. As a result, users and sponsors should not observe any especially notable differences as the transition occurs. While only one DLA was released in July (as a result of the transitional state of Debian 11 bullseye ), there were some notable highlights. LTS contributor Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt for Debian 11 (in collaboration with the Old-Stable Release Managers and the Debian Security Team) to fix a number of outstanding CVEs which did not rise to the level of a DSA by the Debian Security Team. The update prepared by Guilhem will be included in Debian 11 as part of the final point release at the end of August, one of the final transition steps by the Release Managers as Debian 11 moves entirely to the LTS Team s responsibility. Notable work was also undertaken by contributors Lee Garrett (fixes on the ansible test suite and a bullseye update), Lucas Kanashiro (Rust toolchain, utilized by the clamav, firefox-esr, and thunderbird packages), and Sylvain Beucler (fixes on the ruby2.5/2.7 test suites and CI infrastructure), which will help improve the quality of updates produced during the next LTS cycle. June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for customers of the Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right away if you still have Debian 10 systems which must be kept secure (and which cannot yet be upgraded).

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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: autopkgtest/incus builds, live-patching, Salsa CI, Python 3.13 (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-07 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.

autopkgtest/Incus build streamlining, by Colin Watson Colin contributed a change to allow maintaining Incus container and VM images in parallel. Both of these are useful (containers are faster, but some tests need full machine isolation), and the build tools previously didn t handle that very well. This isn t yet in unstable, but once it is, keeping both flavours of unstable images up to date will be a simple matter of running this regularly:
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus images:debian/trixie
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus --vm images:debian/trixie

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago continued the work on the support for applying security fixes to the Linux kernel in Debian, without the need to reboot the machine. As mentioned in the previous month report, kpatch 0.9.9-1 (and 0.9.9-2 afterwards) was uploaded to unstable in July, closing the Intent to Salvage (ITS) bug. With this upload, the remaining RC bugs were solved, and kpatch was able to transition to Debian testing recently. Kpatch is expected to be an important component in the live-patching support, since it makes it easy to build a patch as a kernel module. Emmanuel and Santiago continued to work on the design for Linux live-patching and presented the current status in the DebConf24 presentation.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n To be able to add RISC-V support and to avoid using tools not packaged in Debian (See #331), the Salsa CI pipeline first needed to move away from kaniko to build the images used by the pipeline. Santiago created a merge request to use buildah instead, and it was merged last month. Santiago also prepared a couple of more MRs related to how the images are built: initial RISC-V support, that should be merged after improving how built images are tested. The switch to buildah introduced a regression in the work-in-progress MR that adds new build image so the build job can run sbuild. Santiago hopes to address this regression and continue with the sbuild-related MRs in August. Additionally, Santiago also contributed to the install docker-cli instead of docker.io in the piuparts image MR, and reviewed others such as reprotest: Add append-build-command option, fix failure at manual pipeline run when leaving RELEASE variable empty and Fix image not found error on image building stage.

Python 3.13 Betas, by Stefano Rivera As Python 3.13 is approaching the first release, Stefano has been uploading the beta releases to Debian unstable. Most of these have uncovered small bugs that needed to be investigated and fixed. Stefano also took the time to review the current patch set against cPython in Debian. Python 3.13 isn t marked as a supported Python release in Debian s Python tooling, yet, so nothing has been built against it, yet. Now that the Python 3.12 transition has completed, the next task will be to start trying to build Debian s Python module packages against Python 3.13, to estimate the work required to transition to 3.13 in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles Pina updated the packages python-asyncclick, python-pyaarlo and prepared updates for python-ring-doorbell and simplemonitor.
  • Carles Pina updated (reviewing or translating) Catalan translations for adduser, apt-listchanges, debconf and shadow.
  • Colin merged OpenSSH 9.8, and prepared a corresponding release note for DSA support now being disabled. This version included some substantial changes to split the server into a listener binary and a per-session binary, and those required some corresponding changes in the GSS-API key exchange patch. Sorting out the details of this and getting it to work again took some time.
  • Colin upgraded 11 Python packages to new upstream versions, and modernized the build process and/or added non-superficial autopkgtests to several more.
  • Rapha l Hertzog tweaked tracker.debian.org s debci task to work around changes in the JSON output. He also improved tracker.debian.org s ability to detect bounces due to spam to avoid unsubscribing emails that are not broken, but that are better than Debian at rejecting spam.
  • Helmut Grohne monitored the /usr-move transition with few incidents. A notable one is that some systems have ended up with aliasing links that don t match the ones installed by base-files which could lead to an unpack error from dpkg. This is now prevented by having base-files.preinst error out.
  • Helmut investigated toolchain bootstrap failures with gcc-14 in rebootstrap but would only discover the cause in August.
  • Helmut sent a MR for the cross-exe-wrapper requested by Simon McVittie for gobject-introspection. It is a way of conditionally requesting qemu-user when emulation is required for execution during cross compilation.
  • Helmut sent three patches for cross build failures.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded packages lprint and magicfilter to fix RC-bugs that appeared due to the introduction of gcc-14.
  • Santiago continued to work on activities related to the DebConf24 Content Team, including reviewing the schedule and handling updates on it.
  • Santiago worked on preparations for the DebConf25, to be held in Brest, France, next year. A video of the BoF presented during DebConf24 can be found here.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf24, and helped to run the event.

10 August 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in July 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 502 and rejected 40 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 515. In case you want to upload dozens of packages, it would be nice to give some heads-up before. It is kind of a shock to see a full NEW queue in the morning, though it was much shorter in the evening before. Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I finished the new version of tiff for Bullseye (and Bookworm). The upload will follow, when Bullseye has been handed over to the LTS team in August. Last but not least I attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-second ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: For whatever reason, I had trouble with the CI again. The new tiff package wanted to run the autopkgtest of cups but never did it. So the corresponding ELA will appear only in August. I also continued to work on an update for libvirt. There really is a reason why some packages don t get much attention. Nevertheless someone has to take care of them. I also did a week of FD and attended the LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded The following packages have been prepared by the GSoC student Nathan: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

12 July 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 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 June, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 47.0h (out of 74.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 39.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 15.5h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 4.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.25h (out of 49.5h assigned and 10.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 4.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 25.0h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 5.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 6.5h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.25h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 22.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 6.5h (out of 6.0h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • 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 9.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 51.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 31 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included:
  • git: multiple vulnerabilities, which may result in privilege escalation, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution
  • sendmail: SMTP smuggling allowed remote attackers bypass SPF protection checks
  • cups: arbitrary remote code execution
Looking further afield to the broader Debian ecosystem, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s also patched sendmail in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the previously mentioned SMTP smuggling vulnerability. Furthermore, LTS contributor Thorsten Alteholz provided fixes for the cups packages in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the aforementioned arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability. Additionally, LTS contributor Ben Hutchings has commenced work on an updated backport of Linux kernel 6.1 to Debian 11 (bullseye), in preparation for bullseye transitioning to the responsibility of the LTS (and the associated closure of the bullseye-backports repository). LTS Lucas Kanashiro also began the preparatory work of backporting parts of the rust/cargo toolchain to Debian 11 (bullseye) in order to make future updates of the clamav virus scanner possible. June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right away if you sill have Debian 10 which must be kept secure (and which cannot yet be upgraded).

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10 July 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: YubiHSM packaging, unschroot, live-patching, and more! (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-06 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.

YubiHSM packaging, by Colin Watson Freexian is starting to use YubiHSM devices (hardware security modules) as part of some projects, and we wanted to have the supporting software directly in Debian rather than needing to use third-party repositories. Since Yubico publish everything we need under free software licences, Colin packaged yubihsm-connector, yubihsm-shell, and python-yubihsm from https://developers.yubico.com/, in some cases based partly on the upstream packaging, and got them all into Debian unstable. Backports to bookworm will be forthcoming once they ve all reached testing.

unschroot by Helmut Grohne Following an in-person discussion at MiniDebConf Berlin, Helmut attempted splitting the containment functionality of sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare into a dedicated tool interfacing with sbuild as a variant of --chroot-mode=schroot providing a sufficiently compatible interface. While this seemed technically promising initially, a discussion on debian-devel indicated a desire to rely on an existing container runtime such as podman instead of using another Debian-specific tool with unclear long term maintenance. None of the existing container runtimes meet the specific needs of sbuild, so further advancing this matter implies a compromise one way or another.

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is working on the development of linux live-patching for Debian. For the moment, this is in an exploratory phase, that includes how to handle the different patches that will need to be provided. kpatch could help significantly in this regard. However, kpatch was removed from unstable because there are some RC bugs affecting the version that was present in Debian unstable. Santiago packaged the most recent upstream version (0.9.9) and filed an Intent to Salvage bug. Santiago is waiting for an ACK by the maintainer, and will upload to unstable after July 10th, following the package salvaging rules. While kpatch 0.9.9 fixes the main issues, it still needs some work to properly support Debian and the Linux kernel versions packaged in our distribution. More on this in the report next month.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n The work by Santiago in Salsa CI this month includes a merge request to ease testing how the production images are built from the changes introduced by future merge requests. By default, the pipelines triggered by a merge request build a subset of the images built for production, to reduce the use of resources, and because most of the time the subset of staging images is enough to test the proposed modifications. However, sometimes it is needed to test how the full set of production images is built, and the above mentioned MR helps to do that. The changes include documentation, so hopefully this will make it easier to test future contributions. Also, for being able to include support for RISC-V, Salsa CI needs to replace kaniko as the tool used to build the images. Santiago tested buildah, but there are some issues when pushing built images for non-default platform architectures (i386, armhf, armel) to the container registry. Santiago will continue to work on this to find a solution.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera prepared updates for a number of Python modules.
  • Stefano uploaded the latest point release of Python 3.12 and the latest Python 3.13 beta. Both uncovered upstream regressions that had to be addressed.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf 24.
  • Stefano helped SPI to reconcile their financial records for DebConf 23.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 36 packages to new upstream versions (including fixes for four CVEs in python-aiohttp), fixing RC bugs in ipykernel, ipywidgets, khard, and python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, and packaging zope.deferredimport which was needed for a new upstream version of python-persistent.
  • Colin removed the user_readenv option from OpenSSH s PAM configuration (#1018260), and prepared a release note.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cups.
  • Nicholas Skaggs updated xmacro to support reproducible builds (#1014428), DEP-3 and DEP-5 compatibility, along with utilizing hardening build flags. Helmut supported and uploaded package.
  • As a result of login having become non-essential, Helmut uploaded debvm to unstable and stable and fixed a crossqa.debian.net worker.
  • Santiago worked on the Content Team activities for DebConf24. Together with other DebConf25 team members, Santiago wrote a document for the head of the venue to describe the project of the conference.

8 July 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 270 and rejected 23 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 279.

Debian LTS This was my hundred-twentieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: This month handling of the CVE of cups was a bit messy. After lifting the embargo of the CVE, a published patch did not work with all possible combinations of the configuration. In other words, in cases of having only one local domain socket configured, the cupsd did not start and failed with a strange error. Anyway, upstream published a new set of patches, which made cups work again. Unfortunately this happended just before the latest point release for Bullseye and Bookworm, so that the new packages did not make it into the release, but stopped in the corresponding p-u-queues: stable-p-u and old-p-u. I also continued to work on tiff and last but not least did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-first ELTS month. During my allocated time I tried to upload a new version of cups for Jessie and Stretch. Unfortunately this was stopped due to an autopkgtest error, which I could not reproduce yet. I also wanted to finally upload a fixed version of exim4. Unfortunately this was stopped due to lots of CI-jobs for Buster. Updates for Buster are now also availble from ELTS, so some stuff had to prepared before the actual switch end of June. Additionally everything was delayed due to a crash of the CI worker. All in all this month was rather ill-fated. At least the exim4 upload will happen/already happened in July. I also continued to work on an update for libvirt, did a week of FD and attended the LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: All of those uploads are somehow related to /usr-move. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom The following packages have been prepared by the GSoC student Nathan: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Here as well all uploads are somehow related to /usr-move

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