This is to announce that finally all MATE Desktop 1.18 components have landed in Debian testing (aka buster). Credits Again a big thanks to the packaging team (esp. Vangelis Mouhtsis and Martin Wimpress, but also to Jeremy Bicha for constant advice and Aron Xu for joining the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team and merging all the Ubuntu zesty and artful branches back to master). Fully Available on all Debian-supported Architectures The very special thing about this MATE 1.18 release for Debian is that MATE is now available on all Debian hardware architectures. See "Buildd" column on our DDPO overview page [1]. Thanks to all the people from the Debian porters realm for providing feedback to my porting questions. References

• [1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-mate-team@lists.alioth.deb...

Changes

• gitk: colour of remote refs
• myrepos: accumulated patches
• check-all-the-things: fix the yamllint cmd, add TODO items for haxelint and Dockerfile checkers, add checks for dodgy stuff, dead code, GIFs, Ruby (rubocop, roodi), Mono CIL binaries, FITS images and TeX
• gnome-shell-extension-show-ip: came up with the idea to fix the main blocker to deforking it, cleanups, show the primary IP address and show IP addresses in the menu
• Spelling:
  • codespell: broser, optionnal, optionnaly, reuest, ressource (hi samba folks), swtich, assumme(s), checg(ed), workes, accidentially, uninitalized, permision(s), whe, gruop(s), determing, imilar, tigthly, standar, iff, nott, technlogy, playble, redeable, diagnotic, langauage, mor, soundard, firmwware, containt(s), mazilla (hi malware authors), mozila, cilyndre(s), sepatae
  • lintian: broser, optionnaly, kenrel, swtich, assumme(s), checg(ed), workes, whe, gruops, imilar, tigthly, standar, iff, nott, technlogy, playble, debia, redeable, diagnotic, mor, soundard, firmwware, containt, mazilla, mozila, cilyndre(s), sepatae
• Wikipedia: Message-ID
• Debian wiki: AndroidTools, AppArmor/Contribute/Upstream, BSP/2017/05/ch/Zurich, CrossCompiling, DateTime, DebianEdu/Status/Stretch, DebianEvents/br/2017/MiniDebconfCuritiba/Atividades/CFP, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, DebianMultimedia/FFmpeg (Unstripped), DebianRepository (Unofficial, UseThirdParty), DebianScience/UnofficialRepository, DebianUnofficial, dedup.debian.net, Derivatives/Census (QA (1, 2), Qubes, SparkyLinux), Exploits, fr/Simple-CDD, Games/Unsuitable, Hardening/RepoAndImages, Ideas/Ports, iMacG5, IRC, it/UltimateDebianDatabase, Merchandise, PaulWise/InterestingSoftware (1, 2), piuparts/FAQ, pkg-escience, qa.debian.org, QuickInstall, RepositoryLocal, Services/PublicUddMirror, Simple-CDD/Howto, SuitesAndReposExtension, SummerOfCode2006, SummerOfCode2014/Projects/DebianMetricsPortal, SummerOfCode2017/Projects/QA_BiologyApps, sv/IRC, SystemBuildTools, UltimateDebianDatabase, Vangelis Mouhtsis
• Debian website: Remove old unused and not working website hosting sponsor functionality (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), use correct SSL CA cert store, fix and https links to debian.ch and fix HTML entity escaping in the mirrors list (1 2)
• Debian ports: help rescue the #debian-ports IRC channel, remove dead mirror, update mirrors page, remove d-p.o reference, update bits.d.o and update packages.d.o
• Debian packages site: remove some git cruft
• Debian security tracker: remove NFU from webkit issue and add source link to DLAs
• Planet Debian derivatives: Add Qubes
• Debian package uploads: needrestart-session 0.3-4.1 and valgrind 1:3.10.0-4~bpo7+1

Issues

• Crashes in evolution, hexchat, gpaste, pidgin and eog
• Perl @INC issue in libthrift-perl
• Regression in samba-common-bin
• Debian migration unblocks of needrestart-session (1, 2)
• Debian Policy violation in selenium-firefoxdriver
• Important issue in needrestart-session
• Minor issues in gnupg and giflib-tools
• Features in file, debdelta, diffoscope, nss-passwords and linux

Review

• Spam: reported 5 Debian bug reports and 289 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved spectrwm (2), ranger, i3, kupfer, zathura (3), gimagereader, yubioath-desktop (3), fluxbox, libreoffice-writer, gtklp, terminator, wireshark-qt, wireshark-gtk, synaptic, empathy, gnome-control-center, shutter (2), gnome-online-accounts, gnome-documents, gnome-contacts, network-manager-openvpn-gnome, gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor, neofetch, octave-sparsersb, audacious, smplayer, bluefish, gpodder, delaboratory, geeqie, fracplanet and braillegraph
  • rejected hotssh (artefacts in screenshot), libsixel-bin (copied from elsewhere), spectrwm (not a screenshot) and geeqie (worse version of accepted image)
  • approved deletion (despite bogus reason) of snmp (screenshots site not a support forum, was a diagram not a screenshot)
  • rejected deletion of kupfer (we do not remove old versions), vlc (external UI in the screenshot is minimal), vokoscreen/fonts-ecolier-lignes-court (garbage in reason field), aptitude (discussing non-English screenshots with Christoph Haas), hydra-gtk (greetings are not valid reasons) and oxygen-icon-theme (the screenshot is not a reCAPTCHA)

Administration

• Debian systems: apply a patch to userdir-ldap, ask a local admin to reset a dead powerpc buildd, remove dead SH4 porterboxen from LDAP, fix perms on www.d.o OC static mirror, report false positives in an an automated abuse report, redirect 1 student to FAQs/support/DebianEdu, redirect 1 event organiser to partners/trademark/merchandise/DPL, redirect 1 guest account seeker to NM, redirect 1 @debian.org desirer to NM, redirect 1 email bounce to a changes@db.d.o user, redirect 2 people to the listmasters, redirect 1 person to Debian Pure Blends, redirect 1 user to a service admin and redirect 2 users to support
• Debian packages site: deploy my ports/cruft changes
• Debian wiki: poke at HP page history and advise a contributor, whitelist 13 email address, whitelist 1 domain, check out history of a banned IP, direct 1 hoster to DebConf17 sponsors team, direct 1 user to OpenStack packaging, direct 1 user to InstallingDebianOn and h-node.org, direct 2 users to different ways to help Debian and direct 1 emeritus DD on repository wiki page reorganisation
• Debian QA: fix an issue with the PTS news, remove some debugging cruft I left behind, fix the usertags on a QA bug and deploy some code fixes
• Debian mentors: security upgrades and service restarts
• Openmoko: security upgrades and reboots

Communication

• Invite GALPon MiniNo, Scibian, Roche Linux and ubilinux to the Debian derivatives census
• Welcome Qubes to the Debian derivatives census
• Start discussion about how many people contact the wrong part of Debian for their query

Sponsors The valgrind backport, samba and libthrift-perl bug reports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

I just did a bundle upload of all MATE 1.14 related packages to Debian unstable. Packages are currently building for the 23 architectures supported by Debian, build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian MATE Packaging Team [1] Credits Again a big thanks to the packaging team. Martin Wimpress again did a fabulous job in bumping all packages towards the 1.14 release series during the last weeks. During last week, I reviewed his work and uploaded all binary packages to a staging repository. Also a big thanks to Vangelis Mouhtsis, who recently added more hardening support to all those MATE packages that do some sort of C compilation at build time. After testing all MATE 1.14 packages on a Debian unstable system, I decided to do a bundle upload today. Packages should be falling out of the build daemons within the next couple of hours/days (depending on the architecture being built for). GTK2 -> GTK3 The greatest change for this release of MATE to Debian is the switch over from GTK2 to GTK3. People using the MATE desktop environment on Debian systems are invited to test the new MATE 1.14 packages and give feedback via the Debian bug tracker, esp. on the user experience regarding the switch over to GTK3. Thanks to all who help getting MATE 1.14 in Debian better every day!!! Known issues when running in NXv3 sessions The new GTK3 build of MATE works fine locally (against local X.org server). However, it causes some trouble (i.e. graphical glitches) when running in an NXv3 based remote desktop session. Those issues have to be addressed by me (while wearing my NXv3 upstream hat), I guess (sigh...). light+love,
Mike [1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-mate-team@lists.alioth.deb...

February 2016 has been a very active month regarding me contributing to the FLOSS world.

• Finalizing MATE uploads to Debian with regards to the Beta 1 Freeze of Ubuntu 16.04
• Work on RDP related packages in Debian
• Work on Debian Edu related packages
• Work on Debian LTS
• Work on nx-libs (NX v3)

Honouring my Sponsors I am happy to share that this month's FLOSS work has been sponsored by various sponsors.

• Work on the packages mate-dock-applet, topmenu-gtk and getting GIR-support back into libwnck has been sponsored by Martin Wimpress, the main driving force (AFAIK) behind Ubuntu MATE [1].
• Work on Debian LTS has been sponsored by the various Debian LTS sponsors proxied through Freexian SARL (thanks to Raphael Hertzog for organizing the paid LTS contributors team via his company) [2].
• Work on nx-libs has been sponsored by the Qindel Group [3].

Thanks to all people and companies sponsoring my work on FLOSS projects. This month's MATE uploads to Debian With regards to the Beta 1 Freeze date of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (18th Feb 2016), Martin Wimpress, Vangelis Mouhtsis and I performed quite some work on Debian MATE. Uploads to Debian unstable:

• caja 1.12.4-2 [4]
• mate-menu 5.6.8-1 [5]
• mate-panel 1.12.2-1 [6]
• mate-dock-applet 0.67-3 (NEW) [7]
• mate-polkit 1.12.0-3 [8]
• eom 1.12.2-1 [9]
• pluma 1.12.2-1 [10]
• topmenu-gtk 0.2.1+git20151210.8c6108f-2 (NEW) [11]
• mate-tweak 3.5.7-1 (latest upload on 2nd of March) [12]

The Debian MATE Packaging Team also took over maintenance of the GTK-2+ legacy package libwnck [13]. The first upload introducing some major changes and package clean-ups caused a slight wave [14] because of a missing dependency in libwnck-dev (that fell victim to some clean-ups in debian/control). Those issues have been addressed immediately and have now been settled. The main reason for working on a legacy package like libwnck was the need for having gir1.2-wnck-1.0 (back) in Debian. The new MATE dock applet requires the libwnck GIR package to be present at runtime. One of the novelties in Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS will be the option to adapt the look and feel of the MATE desktop to how a Unity-based desktop looks like. Martin Wimpress is giving intense work to providing a dock applet and topmenu support as one alternative among the various Ubuntu MATE desktop experiences provided. The alternative desktop layouts can be configured with the MATE Tweak tool. Work on RDP related packages Work on FreeRDP 1.1 as currently in Debian I finally managed to give some priority (and thus time) to fixing various issues in the freerdp package in Debian [15]. Many people had provided patches and solutions to open issues and I tried to honour as many of those, as possible. Please note that I had to disable the GStreamer support in FreeRDP for the recent uploads, as the currently used Git snapshot of FreeRDP only supports GStreamer 0.10's API whereas the security team is in the process of having gstreamer0.10-* packages removed from the Debian stretch/unstable archives. Work on FreeRDP 2.0, coming to Debian soon Furthermore, Bernhard Miklautz is currently working on a freerdp2 package, which will bring the latest Git snapshot of FreeRDP upstream into Debian (and also re-introduce GStreamer support, based on GStreamer 1.0). Bernhard invested a lot of time on pushing the current HEAD of FreeRDP upstream [16] towards a FreeRDP 2.x version. Starting with FreeRDP 2.x it will be possible to install different FreeRDP versions on one system without file naming conflicts. For March 2016, I have doing the final freerdp2 reviewing on my todo list (possibly together with H ctor Or n Mart nez who is highly interested in the RDP backend support in Wayland/Weston), so that we can provide first uploads to Debian experimental sometime the coming month. The packaging progress is continuously discussed on the #freerdp channel on Freenode and can also be viewed on Github [17]. Review of revised XRDP package Recently, Dominik George from Teckids e.V. [18] contacted me about reviewing their effort of updating the Debian package xrdp, which currently is in ITA state [19]. Feedback has been provided and I am waiting for a ping from his side so that I can take some (ideally) final looks at the package and sponsor the upload. Work on Debian Edu related packages This month, I spent a couple of hours of work on several Debian Edu related tasks, some of them induced by problems at local school sites we support.

• Fix the gosa package in Debian unstable [20]
• Document a switch-over to systemd-networkd for Debian Edu jessie notebooks [21]
• Help out in fixing outstanding issues in ldap2bind [22]
• Upload a new shutdown-at-night package version to Debian unstable [23]
• Fix some icon issues in the italc package [24]
• Take a first glance at packaging terminal-quest [25]
• Playing with the Lego Mindstorm (NXT) tools

Work on Debian LTS My 8h-portion of work for the Debian LTS Project, I performed at the very end of February. With the Debian squeeze LTS EOL date on 29th February, I saw to finalizing my personal open todos regarding Debian squeeze LTS, which basically was getting two CVE issues fixed in the lxc package [26]. The rest of the work hours has been spent on helping out the Security Team of Debian with open CVE issues in Debian wheezy packages:

• Providing a .debdiff for gosa in Debian wheezy (addressing CVE-2015-8771 and CVE-2014-9760)
• Investigating an open issue in smarty3 (CVE-2014-8350) and providing a recommendation on how to handle that (which is: pick the latest smarty3 3.1.21-1 from Debian jessie and provide that to users of Debian wheezy)
• Taking a first look at pdns regarding a fix for CVE-2014-7210 in Debian wheezy

The gosa .debdiff has been approved by a member of the Security Team, the upload will happen today. With my LTS frontdesk hat on (during week 9 / 2016) I also spent some time providing help regarding SVN checkout problems and raised a couple of questions on how to coordinate the work phase between the Debian squeeze LTS EOL and the official launch of the Debian wheezy LTS project phase [27]. Work on nx-libs At the end of February, I finally managed to propose a way of dropping the libNX_Xrender.so bundled library from the nx-libs code base. I filed a PR [28] against nx-libs that proposes its removal and provides a patch for using X.Org's libXrender.so version. As a preview for nx-libs work in March 2016... I have started with removing the complete libNX_X11.so library from nx-libs and using X.Org's X11 client library. This will introduce a code removal of around 160.000 lines of code to nx-libs. More to come on this later... light+love,
Mike [1] http://ubuntu-mate.org/
[2] https://www.freexian.com/
[3] http://www.qindel.com/ [4] (caja)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg00468.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02080.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02086.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02183.html [5] (mate-menu)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg00469.html [6] (mate-panel)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01900.html [7] (mate-dock-applet)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01935.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02481.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg03097.html [8] (mate-polkit)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01936.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02395.html [9] (eom)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02073.html [10] (pluma)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02128.html [11] (topmenu-gtk)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02399.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02501.html [12] (mate-tweak)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg03086.html [13] (libwnck)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01248.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01404.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01825.html [14] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814585
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814588
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814697 [15] (freerdp)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02487.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg02630.html [16] https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP
[17] https://github.com/bmiklautz/debian-freerdp2 [18] https://www.teckids.org/ [19] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=719624 [20] (gosa)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01554.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01954.html [21] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/34 [22] (ldap2zone)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01966.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01967.html [23] (shutdown-at-night)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg03605.html [24] (italc)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2016/02/msg01944.html [25] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815948 [26] (lxc, Debian squeeze LTS)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-changes/2016/02/msg00037.html [27] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts/2016/02/msg00155.html
(The thread continues in March 2016) [28] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/93

In January 2016 I was finally able to work on various FLOSS topics again (after two months of heavily focussed local customer work):

• Upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian unstable
• Debian LTS packaging and front desk work
• Other Debian activies
• Edu Workshop in Kiel
• Yet another OPSI Packaging Project

Upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian testing/unstable At the beginning of the new year, I finalized the bundle upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian unstable [1]. All uploaded packages are available in Debian testing (stretch) and Ubuntu xenial by now. MATE 1.12 will also be the version shipped in Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS. Additionally, I finally uploaded caja-dropbox to Debian unstable (non-free), thanks to Vangelis Mouhtsis and Martin Wimpress for doing first steps preparations. The package has already left Debian's NEW queue, but unfortunately has been removed from Debian testing (stretch) again due to build failures in one of its dependencies. Debian LTS work In January 2016 I did my first round of Debian LTS front desk work [2]. Before actually starting with my front desk duty, I worked myself through the documentation and found it difficult to understand the output of the lts-cve-triage.py script. So, I proposed various improvments to the output of that script (all committed by now). During the second week of January then, I triaged the following packages regarding known/open CVE issues:

• isc-dhcp (CVE-2015-8605)
• gosa (CVE-2015-8771, CVE-2014-9760)
• roundcube (CVE-2015-8770)
  

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