Search Results: "Utkarsh Gupta"

14 March 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 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 February, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 13.5h (out of 24.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 2.0h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 3.0h (out of 28.25h assigned and 31.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 7.25h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.75h to the next month.
  • Holger Levsen did 0.5h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 3.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 3.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 13.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 0.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 24.5h (out of 27.75h assigned and 32.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 11.25h (out of 26.75h assigned and 33.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 48.75 to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 17 DLAs. The number of DLAs published during February was a bit lower than usual, as there was much work going on in the area of triaging CVEs (a number of which turned out to not affect Debia buster, and others which ended up being duplicates, or otherwise determined to be invalid). Of the packages which did receive updates, notable were sudo (to fix a privilege management issue), and iwd and wpa (both of which suffered from authentication bypass vulnerabilities). While this has already been already announced in the Freexian blog, we would like to mention here the start of the Long Term Support project for Samba 4.17. You can find all the important details in that post, but we would like to highlight that it is thanks to our LTS sponsors that we are able to fund the work from our partner, Catalyst, towards improving the security support of Samba in Debian 12 (Bookworm).

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

13 March 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 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 January, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 10.0h (out of 14.75h assigned and 27.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 31.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 9.75h (out of 25.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Holger Levsen did 3.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.75h (out of 9.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 7.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 0.5h (out of 0.25h assigned and 5.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 9.5h (out of 23.25h assigned and 18.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 10.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 8.5h (out of 35.75h assigned), thus carrying over 24.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In January, we have released 25 DLAs. A variety of particularly notable packages were updated during January. Among those updates were the Linux kernel (both versions 5.10 and 4.19), mariadb-10.3, openjdk-11, firefox-esr, and thunderbird. In addition to the many other LTS package updates which were released in January, LTS contributors continue their efforts to make impactful contributions both within the Debian community.

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

11 February 2024

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

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

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

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

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

13 January 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 January 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 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 December, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 16.0h (out of 26.25h assigned and 8.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 7.25h assigned and 16.75h 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 8.0h (out of 26.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 25.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 5.5h (out of 5.5h assigned).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof 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 25.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 35.0h (out of 35.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.5h (out of 5.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.255h (out of 3.26h assigned and 12.745h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.75h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 4.25h (out of 3.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.5h (out of 21.25h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.25h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 18.75h (out of 11.25h assigned and 13.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 29 DLAs. A particularly notable update in December was prepared by LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n for the openssh package. The updated produced DLA-3694-1 and included a fix for the Terrapin Attack (CVE-2023-48795), which was a rather serious flaw in the SSH protocol itself. The package bluez was the subject of another notable update by LTS contributor Chris Lamb, which resulted in DLA-3689-1 to address an insecure default configuration which allowed attackers to inject keyboard commands over Bluetooth without first authenticating. The LTS team continues its efforts to have a positive impact beyond the boundaries of LTS. Several contributors worked on packages, preparing LTS updates, but also preparing patches or full updates which were uploaded to the unstable, stable, and oldstable distributions, including: Guilhem Moulin s update of tinyxml (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for stable and oldstable); Guilhem Moulin s update of xerces-c (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of libde265 (uploads to LTS and stable and additional patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of cjson (upload to LTS and patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); and Tobias Frost s update of opendkim (sponsor maintainer-prepared upload to LTS and additionally prepared updates for stable and oldstable). Going beyond Debian and looking to the broader community, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s was contacted by SUSE concerning an update he had prepared for zbar. He was able to assist by coordinating with the former organization of the original zbar author to secure for SUSE access to information concerning the exploits. This has enabled another distribution to benefit from the work done in support of LTS and from the assistance of Bastien in coordinating the access to information. Finally, LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n continued work relating to how updates for packages in statically-linked language ecosystems (e.g., Go, Rust, and others) are handled. The work is presently focused on more accurately and reliably identifying which packages are impacted in a given update scenario to enable notifications to be published so that users will be made aware of these situations as they occur. As the work continues, it will eventually result in improvements to Debian infrustructure so that the LTS team and Security team are able to manage updates of this nature in a more consistent way.

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

12 December 2023

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

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Some notable fixes which were made in LTS during the month of November include the gnutls28 cryptographic library and the freerdp2 Remote Desktop Protocol client/server implementation. The gnutls28 update was prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany and dealt with a timing attack which could be used to compromise a cryptographic system, while the freerdp2 update was prepared by LTS contributor Tobias Frost and is the result of work spanning 3 months to deal with dozens of vulnerabilities. In addition to the many ordinary LTS tasks which were completed (CVE triage, patch backports, package updates, etc), there were several contributions by LTS contributors for the benefit of Debian stable and old-stable releases, as well as for the benefit of upstream projects. LTS contributor Abhijith PA uploaded an update of the puma package to unstable in order to fix a vulnerability in that package while LTS contributor Thosten Alteholz sponsored an upload to unstable of libde265 and himself made corresponding uploads of libde265 to Debian stable and old-stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s developed patches for vulnerabilities in zbar and audiofile which were then provided to the respective upstream projects. Updates to packages in Debian stable were made by Markus Koschany to deal with security vulnerabilities and by Chris Lamb to deal with some non-security bugs. As always, the LTS strives to provide high quality updates to packages under the direct purview of the LTS team while also rendering assistance to maintainers, the stable security team, and upstream developers whenever practical.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 14.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 10.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 12.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 0.75h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 15.5h (out of 23.5h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 13.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 14.5h (out of 16.75h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.25h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 3.25h (out of 13.62h assigned and 2.375h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.745h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 3.25h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 17.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 23.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we have released 35 DLAs.

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

10 December 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 November 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 November 2023

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

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

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

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

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

20 October 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 September 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 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 August, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.5h (out of 18.5h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 7.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 18.5h (out of 9.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 24.0h (out of 22.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 2.5h (out of 8.5h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 18.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 28.5h (out of 28.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 18.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 8.75h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 12.25h (out of 0h assigned and 12.25h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In August, we have released 42 DLAs. The month of August turned out to be a rather quiet month for the LTS team. Three notable updates were to bouncycastle, openssl, and zabbix. In the case of bouncycastle a flaw allowed for the possibility of LDAP injection and the openssl update corrected a resource exhaustion bug that could result in a denial of service. Zabbix, while not widely used, was the subject of several vulnerabilities which while not individually severe did combine to result in the zabbix update being of particular note. Apart from those, the LTS team continued the always ongoing work of triaging, investigating, and fixing vulnerabilities, as well as making contributions to the broader Debian and Free Software communities.

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

10 September 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

15 August 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h 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 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 35 DLAs. LTS contributor Lee Garrett, has continued his hard work to prepare a testing framework for Samba, that can now provision bootable VMs with little effort, both for Debian and for Windows. This work included the introduction of a new package to Debian, rhsrvany, which allows turning any Windows program or script into a Windows service. As the Samba testing framework matures it will be possible to perform functional tests which cannot be performed with other available test mechanisms and aspects of this framework will be generalizable to other package ecosystems beyond Samba. July included a notable security update of bind9 by LTS contributor Chris Lamb. This update addressed a potential denial of service attack in this critical network infrastructure component.

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

10 August 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: PTS tracker, DebConf23 Bursary, 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.

tracker.debian.org work by Rapha l Hertzog Rapha l spent some time during his vacation to update distro-tracker to be fully compatible with Django 3.2 so that the codebase and the whole testsuite can run on Debian 12. There s one exception though with the functional test suite that still needs further work to cope with the latest version of Selenium. By dropping support of Django 2.2, Rapha l could also start to work toward support of Django 4.2 since Django helpfully emits deprecation warnings of things that will break in future versions. All the warnings have been fixed but the codebase still fails its testsuite in Django 4.2 because we have to get rid of the python3-django-jsonfield dependency (that is rightfully dead upstream since Django has native support nowadays). All the JSONField have been converted to use Django s native field, but the migration system still requires that dependency at this point. This will require either some fresh reboot of the migration history, or some other trickery to erase the jsonfield dependency from the history of migrations. If you have experience with that, don t hesitate to share it (mail at hertzog@debian.org, or reach out to buxy on IRC). At this point, tracker.debian.org runs with Django 3.2 on Debian 11 since Debian System Administrators are not yet ready to upgrade debian.org hosts to Debian 12.

DebConf 23 bursary work by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh led the bursary team this year. The bursary team got a ton of requests this time. Rolling out the results in 4 batches, the bursary team catered over 165 bursary requests - which is superb! The team managed to address all the requests and answered a bit over 120 emails in the process. With that, the bursaries are officially closed for DebConf 2023. The team also intends to roll out some of the statistics closer to DebConf.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano implemented meson support in pybuild, the tool for building Python packages in Debian against multiple Python versions.
  • Santiago did some work on Salsa CI to enhance the ARM support on the autopkgtest job and make Josch s branch work. MR to come soon.
  • Helmut sent patches for 6 cross build failures.
  • Stefano has been preparing for DebConf 23: Working on the website, and assisting the local teams.
  • Stefano attended the DebConf Video team sprint in Paris, mostly looking at new hardware and software options for video capture and live-mixing. Full sprint report.

15 July 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 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 June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h 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 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

Thanks to our sponsors

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.

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.

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.

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