12 May 2024

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. P.S. We ve completed over a year of writing these blogs. If you have any suggestions on how to make them better or what you d like us to cover, or any other opinions/reviews you might have, et al, please let us know by dropping an email to us. We d be happy to hear your thoughts. :)

Salsa CI updates & GSoC candidacy, by Santiago Ruano Rincon In the context of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Santiago continued the mentoring work, following the applications of three of the candidates. This work started in March, but Aquila Macedo, Ahmed Siam and Piyush Raj continued in April to propose and review MRs. For example, Update CI pipeline to utilize specific blhc image per release and Remove references to buster-backports by Aquila, or the reviews the candidates made to Document the structure of the different components of the pipeline (see below). Unfortunately, the Salsa CI project didn t get any slot from the GSoC program in the end. Along with the Salsa CI related work, Santiago improved the documentation of Salsa CI, to make it easier for newcomers (as the GSoC candidates) or people willing to fork the project to understand its internals. Documentation is an aspect where a lot of improvements can be made.

OpenSSH option review, by Colin Watson In light of last month s xz-utils backdoor, Colin did an extensive review of some of the choices in Debian s OpenSSH packaging. Some work on this has already been done (removing uses of libsystemd and reducing tcp-wrappers linkage); the next step is likely to be to start work on the plan to split out GSS-API key exchange again.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Utkarsh Gupta started to put together and kickstart the bursary team ahead of DebConf 24, to be held in Busan, South Korea.
• Utkarsh Gupta reviewed some MRs and docs for the bursary team for the DC24 website.
• Helmut Grohne sent patches for 19 cross build failures and submitted a gcc patch removing LIMITS_H_TEST upstream.
• Helmut sent 8 bug reports with 3 patches related to the /usr-move.
• Helmut diagnosed why /dev/stdout is not accessible in sbuild --mode=unshare.
• Helmut diagnosed the time64-induced glibc FTBFS.
• Helmut sent patches for fixing initramfs triggers on firmware removal.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded foo2zjs and fixed two bugs, one related to /usr-merge. Likewise the upload of cups-filters (from the 1.x branch) fixed three bugs. In order to fix an RC bug in cpdb-backends-cups, which was updated to the 2.x branch, the new package libcupsfilters has been introduced. Last but not least an upload of hplip fixed one RC bug and an upload of gutenprint fixed two of them. All of these RC bugs were more or less related to the time_t transition.
• Santiago continued to work in the DebConf organization tasks, including some for the DebConf 24 Content Team, and looking to build a local community for DebConf 25.
• Stefano Rivera made a couple of uploads of dh-python to Debian, and a few other general package update uploads.
• Stefano did some winding up of DebConf 23 finances, including closing bursary claims and recording the amounts spent on travel bursaries.
• Stefano opened DebConf 24 registration, which always requires some last-minute work on the website.
• Colin released man-db 2.12.1.
• Colin fixed a regression in groff s PDF output.
• In the Python team, Colin fixed build/autopkgtest failures in seven packages, and updated ten packages to new upstream versions.