Debian Contributions: 2024-11 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.

Transition management, by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort Emilio has been helping finish the mpi-defaults switch to mpich on 32-bit architectures, and the openmpi transitions. This involves filing bugs for the reverse dependencies, doing NMUs, and requesting removals for outdated (Not Built from Source) binaries on 32-bit architectures where openmpi is no longer available. Those transitions got entangled with a few others, such as the petsc stack, and were blocking many packages from migrating to testing. These transitions were completed in early December.

cPython 3.12.7+ update uploads, by Stefano Rivera Python 3.12 had failed to build on mips64el, due to an obscure dh_strip failure. The mips64el porters never figured it out, but the missing build on mips64el was blocking migration to Debian testing. After waiting a month, enough changes had accumulated in the upstream 3.12 maintenance git branch that we could apply them in the hope of changing the output enough to avoid breaking dh_strip. This worked. Of course there were other things to deal with too. A test started failing due to a Debian-specific patch we carry for python3.x-minimal, and it needed to be reworked. And Stefano forgot to strip the trailing + from PY_VERSION, which confuses some python libraries. This always requires another patch when applying git updates from the maintenance branch. Stefano added a build-time check to catch this mistake in the future. Python 3.12.7 migrated.

Python 3.13 Transition, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson During November the Python 3.13-add transition started. This is the first stage of supporting a new version of Python in Debian archive (after preparatory work), adding it as a new supported but non-default version. All packages with compiled Python extensions need to be re-built to add support for the new version. We have covered the lead-up to this transition in the past. Due to preparation, many of the failures we hit were expected and we had patches waiting in the bug tracker. These could be NMUed to get the transition moving. Others had been known about but hadn t been worked on, yet. Some other packages ran into new issues, as we got further into the transition than we d been able to in preparation. The whole Debian Python team has been helping with this work. The rebuild stage of the 3.13-add transition is now over, but many packages need work before britney will let python3-defaults migrate to testing.

Limiting build concurrency based on available RAM, by Helmut Grohne In recent years, the concurrency of CPUs has been increasing as has the demand for RAM by linkers. What has not been increasing as quickly is the RAM supply in typical machines. As a result, we more frequently run into situations where the package builds exhaust memory when building at full concurrency. Helmut initiated a discussion about generalizing an approach to this in Debian packages. Researching existing code that limits concurrency as well as providing possible extensions to debhelper and dpkg to provide concurrency limits based on available system RAM. Thus far there is consensus on the need for a more general solution, but ideas are still being collected for the precise solution.

MiniDebConf Toulouse at Capitole du Libre The whole Freexian Collaborator team attended MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the Capitole du Libre event. Several members of the team gave talks:

• Santiago spoke on Linux Live Patching in Debian, presenting an update on the idea since DebConf 24. This includes the initial requirements for the livepatch package format, that would be used to distribute the livepatches.
• Stefano, Colin, Enrico, and Carles spoke on Using Debusine to Automate QA.
• Santiago and Roberto spoke on How LTS Goes Beyond LTS.
• Helmut spoke on Cross Building.
• Carles gave a lightning talk on po-debconf-manager.

Stefano and Anupa worked as part of the video team, streaming and recording the event s talks.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano looked into packaging the latest upstream python-falcon version in Debian, in support of the Python 3.13 transition. This appeared to break python-hug, which is sadly looking neglected upstream, and the best course of action is probably its removal from Debian.
• Stefano uploaded videos from various 2024 Debian events to PeerTube and YouTube.
• Stefano and Santiago visited the site for DebConf 2025 in Brest, after the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, to meet with the local team and scout out the venue. The on-going DebConf 25 organization work of last month also included handling the logo and artwork call for proposals.
• Stefano helped the press team to edit a post for bits.debian.org on OpenStreetMap s migration to Debian.
• Carles implemented multiple language support on po-debconf-manager and tested it using Portuguese-Brazilian during MiniDebConf Toulouse. The system was also tested and improved by reviewing more than 20 translations to Catalan, creating merge requests for those packages, and providing user support to new users. Additionally, Carles implemented better status transitions, configuration keys management and other small improvements.
• Helmut sent 32 patches for cross build failures. The wireplumber one was an interactive collaboration with Dylan A ssi.
• Helmut continued to monitor the /usr-move, sent a patch for lib64readline8 and continued several older patch conversations. lintian now reports some aliasing issues in unstable.
• Helmut initiated a discussion on the semantics of *-for-host packages. More feedback is welcome.
• Helmut improved the crossqa.debian.net infrastructure to fail running lintian less often in larger packages.
• Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap mostly dropping applied patches and continuing discussions of submitted patches.
• Helmut prepared a non-maintainer upload of gzip for several long-standing bugs.
• Colin came up with a plan for resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, and began work on converting reverse-dependencies.
• Colin upgraded 42 Python packages to new upstream versions. Some were complex: python-catalogue had some upstream version confusion, pydantic and rpds-py involved several Rust package upgrades as prerequisites, and python-urllib3 involved first packaging python-quart-trio and then vendoring an unpackaged test-dependency.
• Colin contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream.
• Lucas set up a machine to do a rebuild of all ruby reverse dependencies to check what will be broken by adding ruby 3.3 as an alternative interpreter. The tool used for this is mass-rebuild and the initial rebuilds have already started. The ruby interpreter maintainers are planning to experiment with debusine next time.
• Lucas is organizing a Debian Ruby sprint towards the end of January in Paris. The plan of the team is to finish any missing bits of Ruby 3.3 transition at the time, try to push Rails 7 transition and fix RC bugs affecting the ruby ecosystem in Debian.
• Anupa attended a Debian Publicity team meeting in-person during MiniDebCamp Toulouse.
• Anupa moderated and posted in the Debian Administrator group in LinkedIn.

Before I upload packages to Debian, I always do a full build from source under sbuild. This ensures that the package can build from source on a clean environment, implying that the set of build dependencies is complete. But when iterating on a non-trivial package locally, I will usually build the package directly on my Debian testing system, and I want to take advantage of ccache to cache native (C/C++) code compilation to speed things up. In Debian, the easiest way to enable ccache is to add /usr/lib/ccache to your $PATH. I do this by doing something similar to the following in my ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH

I noticed, however, that my Debian package builds were not using the cache. When building the same small package manually using make, the cache was used, but not when the build was wrapped with dpkg-buildpackage. I tracked it down to the fact that in compatibility level 13+, debhelper will set $HOME to a temporary directory. For what's it worth, I think that's a good thing: you don't want package builds reaching for your home directory as that makes it harder to make builds reproducible, among other things. This behavior, however, breaks ccache. The default cache directory is $HOME/.ccache, but that only gets resolved when ccache is actually used. So we end up starting with an empty cache on each build, get a 100% cache miss rate, and still pay for the overhead of populating the cache. The fix is to explicitly set $CCACHE_DIR upfront, so that by the time $HOME gets overriden, it doesn't matter anymore for ccache. I did this in my ~/.bashrc:

export CCACHE_DIR=$HOME/.ccache

This way, $HOME will be expanded right there when the shell starts, and by the time ccache is called, it will use the persistent cache in my home directory even though $HOME will, at that point, refer to a temporary directory.

It was 2013, and I was on a break from work between Christmas and New Year of 2013. I had been working at Linaro for well over a year, on the LAVA project. I was living and breathing automated testing infrastructure, mostly for testing low-level components such as kernels and bootloaders, on real hardware. At this point I was also a Debian contributor for quite some years, and had become an official project members two years prior. Most of my involvement was in the Ruby team, where we were already consistently running upstream test suites during package builds. During that break, I put these two contexts together, and came to the conclusion that Debian needed a dedicated service that would test the contents of the Debian archive. I was aware of the existance of autopkgtest, and started working on a very simple service that would later become Debian CI. In January 2014, debci was initially announced on that month's Misc Developer News, and later uploaded to Debian. It's been continuously developed for the last 10 years, evolved from a single shell script running tests in a loop into a distributed system with 47 geographically-distributed machines as of writing this piece, became part of the official Debian release process gating migrations to testing, had 5 Summer of Code and Outrechy interns working on it, and processed beyond 40 million test runs. In there years, Debian CI has received contributions from a lot of people, but I would like to give special credits to the following:

• Ian Jackson - created autopkgtest.
• Martin Pitt - was the maintainer of autopkgtest when Debian CI launched and helped a lot for some time.
• Paul Gevers - decided that he wanted Debian CI test runs to control testing migration. While at it, became a member of the Debian Release Team and the other half of the permanent Debian CI team together with me.
• Lucas Kanashiro - Google Summer of Code intern, 2014.
• Brandon Fairchild - Google Summer of Code intern, 2014.
• Candy Tsai - Outreachy intern, 2019.
• Pavit Kaur - Google Summer of Code intern, 2021
• Abiola Ajadi - Outreachy intern, December 2021-2022.

Em 2023 o tradicional Debian Day est sendo celebrado de forma especial, afinal no dia 16 de agostoo Debian completou 30 anos! Para comemorar este marco especial na vida do Debian, a comunidade Debian Brasil organizou uma semana de palestras online de 14 a 18 de agosto. O evento foi chamado de Debian 30 anos. Foram realizadas 2 palestras por noite, das 19h s 22h, transmitidas pelo canal Debian Brasil no YouTube totalizando 10 palestras. As grava es j est o dispon veis tamb m no canal Debian Brasil no Peertube. Nas 10 atividades tivemos as participa es de 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contribuidores(as). A audi ncia ao vivo variou bastante, e o pico foi na palestra sobre preseed com o Eriberto Mota quando tivemos 47 pessoas assistindo. Obrigado a todos(as) participantes pela contribui o que voc s deram para o sucesso do nosso evento.

• Antonio Terceiro
• Aquila Macedo
• Charles Melara
• Daniel Lenharo de Souza
• David Polverari
• Eriberto Mota
• Giovani Ferreira
• Jefferson Maier
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Sergio Durigan Junior
• Thais Araujo
• Thiago Andrade

Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade:
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event.

• Antonio Terceiro
• Aquila Macedo
• Charles Melara
• Daniel Lenharo de Souza
• David Polverari
• Eriberto Mota
• Giovani Ferreira
• Jefferson Maier
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Sergio Durigan Junior
• Thais Araujo
• Thiago Andrade

Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade:
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

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.

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

• tienne Mollier (emollier)
• Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)
• Athos Ribeiro (athos)
• Stuart Prescott (stuart)
• Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
• Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi)
• James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
• Emmanuel Arias (eamanu)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
• Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
• Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)

Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely:

• the addition of a "missing-cpython-extension" tag to flag packages that do not build CPython extensions for all the supported Python versions.
• fixing a false-positive in the "missing-prerequisite-for-pyproject-backend" tag.

I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as:

• improving existing packages (for example, adding or fixing autopkgtests)
• triaging and fixing Python 3.11 bugs
• updating packages to the latest upstream release
• sponsoring uploads

Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

Outreachy Wrap-up Project Improve Debian Continuous Integration UX
Project Link: https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-december-2021-internship-round/communities/debian/#improve-debian-continuous-integration-ux
Code Repository: https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debci
Mentors: Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Pavit Kaur

About the project Debci exist to make sure packages work currently after an update, How it does this is by testing all of the packages that have tests written in them to make sure it works and nothing is broken This project entails making improvements to the platform to make it easier to use and maintain.

Deliverables of the project:

• Package landing page displaying pending jobs
• web frontend: centralize job listings in a single template
• self-service: request test form forgets values when validation fails
• Improvement to status

Work done

Package landing page displaying pending jobs Previously, Jobs that were pending were not displayed on the package page. Working on this added a feature to display pending jobs on package landing. Working on this task made it known that the same block of codes was repeated in different files which led to the next task Merge request

web frontend: centralize job listings in a single template Jobs are listed in various landings such as status packages, Status alerts, status failing, History, and so on. The same Code was repeated in these pages to list the jobs, I worked on refactoring it and created a single template for job listing so it can be used anywhere it s needed. I also wrote a test for the feature I added.
Merge request

self service: request test form forgets values when validation fails When one tries to request for a test and it fails with an error, originally the form does not remember the values that were typed in the package name, suite field et. c. This fix ensures the form remembers the values inputted even when it throws an error. N/B: The form checks all architecture on the load of the page
merge request

Improvement to status Originally the Status pages were rendered as static HTML pages but I converted these pages to be generated dynamically, I wrote endpoints for each page. Since most of the status pages have a list of jobs I modified it to use the template I created for job-listing. Previously, the status pages had a mechanism to filter such as All, Latest 50 et.c which wasn t paginated. I removed this mechanism added a filter by architecture and suites to these pages and also add pagination. Last but not the least, I wrote tests for these implementations carried out on the status page. merge request:
first task
second task

Major take-aways I learnt a lot during my internship but most importantly I learnt how to:

• write Tests in Ruby and how writing tests is an important aspect of software development
• maintain good coding practice, Paying attending to commit messages, Indentation et.c are good areas I developed in writing code.
• make contributions in Ruby Programming Language.

Acknowledgement I can not end this without saying thank you to my mentors Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers, and Pavit Kaur for their constant support and guidance throughout the entire duration of this Internship. It has been a pleasure Interacting and learning from everyone.

Review Outreachy has helped me feel more confident about open-source, especially during the application phase. I had to reach out to the community I was interested in and ask questions on how to get started. The informal chats week was awesome I was able to build my network and have interesting conversations with amazing individuals in open-source. To round up, Always ask questions and do not be afraid of making a mistake, as one of the outreachy blog post topics says Everyone struggles!, but never give up!

The Ruby team is working now on transitioning to ruby 3.0. Even though most packages will work just fine, there is substantial amount of packages that require some work to adapt. We have been doing test rebuilds for a while during transitions, but usually triaged the problems manually. This time I decided to try collab-qa-tools, a set of scripts Lucas Nussbaum uses when he does archive-wide rebuilds. I'm really glad that I did, because those tols save a lot of time when processing a large number of build failures. In this post, I will go through how to triage a set of build logs using collab-qa-tools. I have some some improvements to the code. Given my last merge request is very new and was not merged yet, a few of the things I mention here may apply only to my own ruby3.0 branch. collab-qa-tools also contains a few tools do perform the builds in the cloud, but since we already had the builds done, I will not be mentioning that part and will write exclusively about the triaging tools. Installing collab-qa-tools The first step is to clone the git repository. Make sure you have the dependencies from debian/control installed (a few Ruby libraries). One of the patches I sent, and was already accepted, is the ability to run it without the need to install:

source /path/to/collab-qa-tools/activate.sh

This will add the tools to your $PATH. Preparation The first think you need to do is getting all your build logs in a directory. The tools assume .log file extension, and they can be named $ PACKAGE _*.log or just $ PACKAGE .log. Creating a TODO file

cqa-scanlogs   grep -v OK > todo

todo will contain one line for each log with a summary of the failure, if it's able to find one. collab-qa-tools has a large set of regular expressions for finding errors in the build logs It's a good idea to split the TODO file in multiple ones. This can easily be done with split(1), and can be used to delimit triaging sessions, and/or to split the triaging between multiple people. For example this will create todo into todo00, todo01, ..., each containing 30 lines:

split --lines=30 --numeric-suffixes todo todo

Triaging You can now do the triaging. Let's say we split the TODO files, and will start with todo01. The first step is calling cqa-fetchbugs (it does what it says on the tin):

cqa-fetchbugs --TODO=todo01

Then, cqa-annotate will guide you through the logs and allow you to report bugs:

cqa-annotate --TODO=todo01

I wrote myself a process.sh wrapper script for cqa-fetchbugs and cqa-annotate that looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
for todo in $@; do
  # force downloading bugs
  awk ' print(".bugs." $1) ' "$ todo "   xargs rm -f
  cqa-fetchbugs --TODO="$ todo "
  cqa-annotate \
    --template=template.txt.jinja2 \
    --TODO="$ todo "
done

The --template option is a recent contribution of mine. This is a template for the bug reports you will be sending. It uses Liquid templates, which is very similar to Jinja2 for Python. You will notice that I am even pretending it is Jinja2 to trick vim into doing syntax highlighting for me. The template I'm using looks like this:

From:   fullname   <  email  >
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject:   package  : FTBFS with ruby3.0:   summary  
Source:   package  
Version:   version   split:'+rebuild'   first  
Severity: serious
Justification: FTBFS
Tags: bookworm sid ftbfs
User: debian-ruby@lists.debian.org
Usertags: ruby3.0
Hi,
We are about to enable building against ruby3.0 on unstable. During a test
rebuild,   package   was found to fail to build in that situation.
To reproduce this locally, you need to install ruby-all-dev from experimental
on an unstable system or build chroot.
Relevant part (hopefully):
 % for line in extract % >   line  
 % endfor % 
The full build log is available at
https://people.debian.org/~kanashiro/ruby3.0/round2/builds/3/  package  /  filename   replace:".log",".build.txt"  

The cqa-annotate loop cqa-annotate will parse each log file, display an extract of what it found as possibly being the relevant part, and wait for your input:

######## ruby-cocaine_0.5.8-1.1+rebuild1633376733_amd64.log ########
--------- Error:
     Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
     FrozenError:
       can't modify frozen object: pid 2351759 exit 0
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  undef_method'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  singleton class'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:3:in  assuming_no_processes_have_been_run'
     # ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:55:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
Deprecation Warnings:
Using  should  from rspec-expectations' old  :should  syntax without explicitly enabling the syntax is deprecated. Use the new  :expect  syntax or explicitly enable  :should  with  config.expect_with(:rspec)    c  c.syntax = :should   instead. Called from /<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/spec/cocaine/command_line/runners/backticks_runner_spec.rb:19:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'.
If you need more of the backtrace for any of these deprecations to
identify where to make the necessary changes, you can configure
 config.raise_errors_for_deprecations! , and it will turn the
deprecation warnings into errors, giving you the full backtrace.
1 deprecation warning total
Finished in 6.87 seconds (files took 2.68 seconds to load)
67 examples, 1 failure
Failed examples:
rspec ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:54 # When an error happens does not blow up if running the command errored before execution
/usr/bin/ruby3.0 -I/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-support-3.9.3/lib:/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/lib /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/exe/rspec --pattern ./spec/\*\*/\*_spec.rb --format documentation failed
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:
----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i r f]:

You can then choose one of the options:

• s - skip this package and do nothing. You can run cqa-annotate again later and come back to it.
• i - ignore this package completely. New runs of cqa-annotate won't ask about it again. This is useful if the package only fails in your rebuilds due to another package, and would just work when that other package gets fixes. In the Ruby transition this happens when A depends on B, while B builds a C extension and failed to build against the new Ruby. So once B is fixed, A should just work (in principle). But even if A would even have problems of its own, we can't really know before B is fixed so we can retry A.
• r - report a bug. cqa-annotate will expand the template with the data from the current log, and feed it to mutt. This is currently a limitation: you have to use mutt to report bugs. After you report the bug, cqa-annotate will ask if it should edit the TODO file. In my opinion it's best to not do this, and annotate the package with a bug number when you have one (see below).
• f - view the full log. This is useful when the extract displayed doesn't have enough info, or you want to inspect something that happened earlier (or later) during the build.

When there are existing bugs in the package, cqa-annotate will list them among the options. If you choose a bug number, the TODO file will be annotated with that bug number and new runs of cqa-annotate will not ask about that package anymore. For example after I reported a bug for ruby-cocaine for the issue listed above, I aborted with a ctrl-c, and when I run my process.sh script again I then get this prompt:

----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
1: 996206 serious ruby-cocaine: FTBFS with ruby3.0: ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus  
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i 1 r f]:

Chosing 1 will annotate the TODO file with the bug number, and I'm done with this package. Only a few other hundreds to go.

Project: Incremental Improvements to Debian s CI platform
Project Link: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#6433686825730048
Code Repository: https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debci
Mentors: Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers

About the Project Debian Continuous Integration is Debian s CI platform. It runs tests on the packages published in the Debian archive, and today is used to control migration of packages from unstable, Debian s development area, to testing, the area of the archive where the next Debian release is being prepared. This makes it a crucial part of Debian s infrastructure. The web platform shows the results of all the tests executed. Debian CI provides developers both API and a GUI Self-Service section to request tests for the packages and get information on test history. This project involves implementing incremental improvements to the platform, making it easier to use and maintain.

Deliverables of the project:

• Migrating Logins to Salsa
• Adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS

Work done

Migrating Logins to Salsa

• Originally, Debian CI used Debian SSO client certificates for logging in, but since that was deprecated logins are migrated to Salsa, Debian s Gitlab instance and this is implemented with the help of OmniAuth, the ruby authentication framework.
• Another thing fixed as part of this task was that there exists a limitation in the existing database structure, where usernames were directly stored as the test requestor field, so that relationship was normalized with a proper foreign key to the users table.

Merge Requests:

• Migrate to logins using Salsa
• Update the jobs table to add real reference to users table

Adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS In this task, work was done to enable private tests in Debian CI for adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS. It includes tasks from adding the private field in the API and Self-Service section in requesting tests to adding an option to publish them when ready through both interfaces. Merge Requests:

• Add private jobs flag to jobs
• Submit private jobs via API
• Fix in migration file
• Submit private jobs via Self Service
• Add extra-apt-sources in API
• Add extra-apt-sources via Self Service
• Validate extra apt sources
• Publish private tests via API
• Update Self-Service Job History Page
• Add Publish and Retry in Self-Service

Others I worked on some issues to add usability improvements for the web interface:

• Change Retry link to point to the self-service interface
• Add a user menu in the self-service interface

Learning Takeaways I learned a lot throughout the entire journey. Some of the things to mention are:

• Writing tests: I learned about using Rspec for writing tests in ruby and understood how writing tests is an integral part of coding any project.
• Using good coding practices: By my merge requests reviews done by my mentor Antonio, I came to know about good coding practices which help in keeping the code both clean and concise.

Acknowledgement I owe huge thanks to my mentors Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers for their constant support and guidance throughout the entire duration. It is for them that I was able to get started with the code-base of the project in the first place. And while working on the project, they were extremely responsive to all my queries. My merge requests were all thoroughly reviewed which enables me to learn more and work more efficiently. It was a complete pleasure interacting with them on weekly meet calls. To sum up, my GSoC journey was awesome and I had a fun and productive summer with Debian

What s next? As part of a continuation of my project task Adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS, I would be working on Debian CI to facilitate the process of connecting the embargoed archive. It s the end of my GSoC journey but certainly not the end of my journey with Debian or Open-Source. I plan to stay an active contributor to Debian and get involve with more Open Source projects as well

Extras The link to my Salsa Profile for all my work activities can be found here.
To know more about my journey, my other GSoC blog posts can be found below:

• Journey to GSoC
• GSoC: About my Project and Community Bonding Period
• GSoC: First Phase of Coding Period
• GSoC: Second Phase of Coding Period

Hello there. So here we are near the end of GSoC 2021 and with that, I am sharing details of the work I completed in the second phase of the coding period. Continuing with details of the task I left on

Task: Adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS

• The extra-apt-sources parameter is added to both API and Self-Service section for the test request object and the part which took some time was deciding on its validation since if you ever deal with apt sources, you would know that there exist a lot of combinations of a valid apt source and in the end, the decision was taken to just add the minimal checks.
• Since, we have enough setup to request private tests, it made sense to have a way of looking them up in the Self-Service section. So a new column is added to the test records in Job-History marking the visibility of a test (private or public) and a new filter to filter out records based on the visibility.
• The option to retry tests is also added in Self-Service in the Job-History section so that private tests can also be retried. As earlier, this option was only available in Package History pages but those pages do not show the private tests.
• The next thing in the list was to publish these test results of private tests at some point. For the API section, a new endpoint is added to accept a string of run_ids which is ready to be published, and for the Self-Service , in the Job-History page a Publish button is added to be clicked after check boxing the required tests.

This ends the list of my planned work for the project.

Some more interesting stuff As we got some more time for the coding period to end, my mentor Antonio Terceiro suggested that I could pick any issue from the opened issues list to work on so I picked up the one to add a user menu for the Self-Service section and completed that. Antonio also gave me insights into Debian Packaging and even let me try packaging a newer upstream version of the package itamae which is one of the packages maintained by him. I also worked on creating a video about my GSoC project for DebConf21 and this was truly the hardest thing to do. From setting up everything to final editing, it took me about 2 days to create something sane to submit. Now, I am excited about DebConf21 That concludes my work in the second phase of the coding period and next, I will be sharing my Final Evaluation Submission real soon. Stay tuned!

If you have been involved in Debian packaging at all in the last few years, you are probably aware that autopkgtest is now an important piece of the Debian release process. Back in 2018, the automated testing migration process started considering autopkgtest test results as part of its decision making. Since them, this process has received several improvements. For example, during the bullseye freeze, non-key packages with a non-trivial autopkgtest test suite could migrate automatically to testing without their maintainers needing to open unblock requests, provided there was no regression in theirs autopkgtest (or those from their reverse dependencies). Since 2014 when ci.debian.net was first introduced, we have seen an amazing increase in the number of packages in Debian that can be automatically tested. We went from around 100 to 15,000 today. This means not only happier maintainers because their packages get to testing faster, but also improved quality assurance for Debian as a whole. However, the growth rate seems to be decreasing. Maybe the low hanging fruit have all been picked, or maybe we just need to help more people jump in the automated testing bandwagon. With that said, we would like to encourage and help more maintainers to add autopkgtest to their packages. To that effect, I just created the autopkgtest-help repository on salsa, where we will take help requests from maintainers working on autopkgtest for their packages. If you want help, please go ahead and create an issue in there. To quote the repository README:

Valid requests:

• "I want to add autopkgtest to package X. X is a tool that [...] and it works by [...]. How should I approach testing it?" It's OK if you have no idea where to start. But at least try to describe your package, what it does and how it works so we can try to help you.
• "I started writing autopkgtest for X, here is my current work in progress [link]. But I encountered problem Y. How to I move forward?" If you already have an autopkgtest but is having trouble making it work as you think it should, you can also ask here.

Invalid requests:

• "Please write autopkgtest for my package X for me". As with anything else in free software, please show appreciation for other people's time, and do your own research first. If you pose your question with enough details (see above) and make it interesting, it may be that whoever answers will write at least a basic structure for you, but as the maintainer you are still the expert in the package and what tests are relevant.

If you ask your question soon, you might get your answer recorded in video: we are going to have a DebConf21 talk next month, where we I and Paul Gevers (elbrus) will answer a few autopkgtest questions in video for posterity. Now, if you have experience enabling autopkgtest for you own packages, please consider watching that repository there to help us help our fellow maintainers.

Hello there. I still can t believe that the first half of GSoC period is almost over. So it s been about 5 weeks working on the project and that means I have a lot to share about it. So without further ado, let s get started. I will be listing up my work done in the respective tasks.

Task: Migrating Logins to Salsa The objective of this task was that the users could log in to their account on debci using their Debian Salsa account (collaborative development server for Debian based on the GitLab software) and this is implemented with the help of OmniAuth, the ruby authentication framework. At the beginning of this, I had to discuss quite a few issues with my mentors that I was bumping into, and by the end of it with multiple revisions and discussions, the following was implemented:

• The previous users' table schema of debci comprises the username field which contained mostly the emails of the users with some exceptions and to accommodate the Salsa logins, a new uid field is added to the table to store the Salsa uid of the logged-in user with the username field storing Salsa usernames now and as the Salsa users have the liberty to change their usernames, the updation of username as well as in debci database is also taken care of.
• For Salsa login, the ruby-omniauth-gitlab strategy has been used and for login in development mode, the developer strategy which comes with ruby-omniauth has been set up.
• Added a Login Page giving the option to log in using Salsa and an additional option to login in Developer Mode which is accessible only in Development Setup so that other contributors don t have to set up dummy Salsa applications for working.
• Added specs for the new login process. This was an interesting part, as I got the chance to understand RSpec and facilities provided by OmniAuth to mock the authentication for Integration Testing.
• One blocker that I dealt with was that the Debian release from where packages were pulled out for debci have the OmniAuth version 1.8, which was not working well with the developer strategy implementation for the application so to resolve that I did a minor change to the callback API for developer strategy until the time that release have the newer version of OmniAuth.
• Another thing we discussed in one of the meetings that in the existing database structure, the tests do not have a real reference to the users' table and rather the username is stored directly as a string for the requestor field, so this thing was fixed as part of this task.

The migration of the existing users' data for the new logins was handled by my mentor Antonio Terceiro and with this, our first task is concluded. All these changes are now part of Debian Continuous Integration platform and you can find the blogpost for same by Antonio here. This task also allowed me to write my first ever tutorial Tutorial: Integrating OmniAuth with Sinatra Application to help people looking to integrate their ruby application with OmniAuth. Moving further to the next task in progress.

Task: Adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS This is the next task I am working on enabling private tests in debci for adding support for testing security uploads and Debian LTS. Since it s a bigger task, it is broken down into about 6-7 steps and till now, the following has been done:

• The schema of jobs' (tests) table is updated to have a boolean field to store whether the job is private or not.
• The is_private parameter is added to both API and Self-Service section so the private test can be submitted through the API as well as through GUI form on the web platform.
• Another thing which comes up through discussion in meetings that a parameter is required to add extra-apt-sources for getting packages of security repository and this is the part in progress.

So that concludes my work till now. It has been an amazing journey with lots of learning and also the guidance from the wonderful mentors of my project and I am looking forward to more exciting parts ahead. That s all for now. See you next time!

I have just updated the Debian Continuous Integration platform with debci 3.1. This update brings a few database performance improvements, courtesy of adding indexes to very important columns that were missing them. And boy, querying a table with 13 million rows without the proper indexes is bad! :-) Now, the most user visible change in this update is the change from Debian SSO to Salsa Logins, which is part of Pavit Kaur's GSoC work. She has been working with me and Paul Gevers for a few weeks, and this was the first official task in the internship. For users, this means that you now can only log in via Salsa. If you have an existing session where you logged in with an SSO certificate, it will still be valid. When you log in with Salsa, your username will be changed to match the one in Salsa. This means that if your account on salsa gets renamed, it will automatically be renamed on Debian CI when you log in the next time. Unfortunately we don't have a logout feature yet, but in the meantime you can use the developer toolbar to delete any existing cookies you might have for ci.debian.net. Migrating to Salsa logins was in my TODO list for a while. I had the impression that it could do it pretty quick to do by using pre-existing libraries that provide gitlab authentication integration for Rack (Ruby's de facto standard web application interface, like uwsgi for Python). But in reality, the devil was in the details. We went through several rounds of reviews to get it right. During the entire process, Pavit demonstrated an excelent capacity for responding to feedback, and overall I'm very happy with her performance in the internship so far. While we were discussing the Salsa logins, we noted a limitation in the existing database structure, where we stored usernames directly as the test requestor field, and decided it was better to normalize that relationship with a proper foreign key to the users table, which she also worked on. This update also include the very first (and non-user visible) step of her next task, which is adding support for having private tests. Those will be useful for implementing testing for embargoed security updates, and other use cases. This was broken up into 7 or 8 seperate steps, so there is still some work to do there. I'm looking forward to the continuation of this work.

To start writing about updates regarding my GSoC project, the first obvious thing I need to do is to explain what my project really is. So let s get started.

About my project

What is debci? Directly stating from the official docs:

The Debian continuous integration (debci) is an automated system that coordinates the execution of automated tests against packages in the Debian system.

Let s try decoding it: Debian is a huge system with thousands of packages and within these packages exist inter-package dependencies. So if any package is updated, it is important to test if that package is working correctly but it is equally important to test that all the packages which are dependent on this updated package are working correctly too. Debci is a platform serving this purpose of automated testing for the entire Debian archive whenever a new version of the package, or of any package in its dependency chain is available. It comes with a UI that lets developers easily run tests and see their results if they pass or not. For my GSoC project, I am working to implement some incremental improvements to debci making it easier to use and maintain.

Community Bonding Period

The debci community Everyone I have come across till now in the community is very nice. The debci community in itself is a small but active community. It really feels good to be a part of conversations here.

Weekly call set up I have two mentors for this project Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers and they have set up a weekly sync call with me in which I will share my updates regarding the work done in the past week, any issues I am facing, and discuss the work for next week. In addition to this, I can always contact them on IRC for any issue I am stuck in.

Work till now The first thing I did in the community bonding period is setting up this blog. I wanted to have one for a long time and this seems to be a really nice opportunity to start. And the fact this has been added to Planet Debian too makes me happier to write. I am still trying to get a hang of this and definitely need to learn how to spend less time writing it. I also worked on my already opened merge requests during this period and got them merged. Since I am already familiar with the codebase, so I started with my first deliverable a bit earlier before the official coding period begins which is migrating the logins to Salsa, Debian s Gitlab Instance. Currently, debci uses Debian SSO client certificates for logging in, but that is deprecated so it needs to be migrated to use Salsa as an identity provider. The OmniAuth library is being used to implement this with help of ruby-omniauth-gitlab strategy. I explored a great deal about integrating OmniAuth with our application and bumped into so many issues too when I began implementing that. Once I am done integrating the Salsa Authentication with debci, I am planning to write a separate tutorial on that which could be helpful to other people using OmniAuth with their application. With that, the community bonding period has ended on 7th June and the coding period officially begins and for now, I will be continuing working on my first deliverable. That s all for now. See you next time!

I am really excited that my Google Summer of Code proposal with Debian for the project Debian Continuous Integration improvements has been accepted. Through this blog, I am here to share about my Pre-GSoC journey. I knew about GSoC since my first year of college but had this misconception that only great coders get selected for GSoC which did not let me apply to the program until my 3rd year of engineering. I applied this year not because I thought I have turned into one but because I actually wanted to give a fair try to this before the time I become ineligible to participate.

Finding Project Scrolling through the list of GSoC 2021 organizations, I was checking out projects of organizations I am familiar with. Debian is one of the huge Open Source communities that has always inspired developers around the world to contribute to Open Source. So as I checked through Debian projects, I got excited to find the Debian Continuous Integration improvements project (referred to as debci in this post) related to web development and more concerned with backend work which is something I am very much interested in. I joined the community, and as directed by the application tasks of the project I set up the debci on my machine and started with an issue labeled as a newcomer. Soon I was able to submit my first Merge Request and it was reviewed by Antonio Terceiro, the mentor of my GSoC Project. With his further guidance, I was able to turn MR into an acceptable patch, and voila it got merged! That really did boost my morale to contribute further to the project.

Student Application Period At the suggestion of the mentor, during the Student Application Period, I worked on more open issues which were helping me understand the codebase better and in turn the deliverables of the project for my proposal. For my every doubt, I first tried to tackle it myself, and if still not able to find a solution I turn to mentors who did their best to answer my queries and this is how I completed my proposal and got it reviewed by Antonio before finally submitting it on 13th April. I still cannot express that feeling of satisfaction I achieved on submitting the proposal. I finally successfully applied for GSoC.

After Proposal Submission I did not stop my contribution after the Student Application period ended and kept on working on more issues which helped me stay in touch with the project and also because I was enjoying it a lot. I had already made up my mind to contribute more in Open Source as I learned and enjoyed plenty during this process.

Day of Results On 17th May, I got my acceptance mail at around 11:30 pm at night and I remember screaming and waking everybody up in my home to announce the news to them. It was truly the happiest moment for me.

Moment of Truth I would admit that I got involved with GSoC because of the reputation associated with it but things I learned during this pre GSoC period have made me realize the fun and learning opportunities associated with working opensource and I am here to stay for sure. I plan to write more blogs regarding my project and keep you guys updated about my work. Stay tuned!

The Debian CI platform is comprised of 30+ (virtual) machines. Maintaining this many machines, and being able to add new ones with some degree of reliability requires one to use some sort of configuration management. Until about a week ago, we were using Chef for our configuration management. I was, for several years, the main maintainer of Chef in Debian, so using it was natural to me, as I had used it before for personal and work projects. But last year I decided to request the removal of Chef from Debian, so that it won't be shipped with Debian 11 (bullseye). After evaluating a few options, I believed that the path of least resistance was to migrate to itamae. itamae was inspired by chef, and uses a DSL that is very similar to the Chef one. Even though the itamae team claim it's not compatible with Chef, the changes that I needed to do were relatively limited. The necessary code changes might look like a lot, but a large part of them could be automated or done in bulk, like doing simple search and replace operations, and moving entire directories around. In the rest of this post, I will describe the migration process, starting with the infrastructure changes, the types of changes I needed to make to the configuration management code, and my conclusions about the process. Infrastructure changes The first step was to add support for itamae to chake, a configuration management wrapper tool that I wrote. chake was originally written as a serverless remote executor for Chef, so this involved a bit of a redesign. I thought it was worth it to do, because at that point chake had gained several interesting managements features that we no directly tied to Chef. This work was done a bit slowly over the course of the several months, starting almost exactly one year ago, and was completed 3 months ago. I wasn't in a hurry and knew I had time before Debian 11 is released and I had to upgrade the platform. After this was done, I started the work of migrating the then Chef cookbooks to itamae, and the next sections present the main types of changes that were necessary. During the entire process, I sent a few patches out:

• itamae #317 - Make output unbuffered
• itamae #325 - file: add support for sensitive files
• itamae #327 - file: improve diff output
• itamae #337 - package: add :upgrade action. This is work in progress at the moment, and wasn't merged yet.
• serverspec #727 - debian: add support for Debian testing and unstable

Code changes These are the main types of changes that were necessary in the configuration code to accomplish the migration to itamae. Replace cookbook_file with remote_file. The resource known as cookbook_file in Chef is called remote_file in itamae. Fixing this is just a matter of search and replace, e.g.:

-cookbook_file '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00updates' do
+remote_file '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00updates' do

Changed file locations The file structure assumed by itamae is a lot simpler than the one in Chef. The needed changes were:

• static files and templates moved from cookbooks/$ cookbook / files,templates /default to cookbooks/$ cookbook / files,templates
• recipes moved from cookbooks/$ cookbook /recipes/*.rb to cookbooks/$ cookbook /*.rb
• host-specific files and templates are not supported directly, but can be implemented just by using an explicit source statement, like this:

  remote_file "/etc/foo.conf" do
    source "files/host-# node['fqdn'] /foo.conf"
  end

Explicit file ownership and mode Chef is usually design to run as root on the nodes, and files created are owned by root and have move 0644 by default. With itamae, files are by default owned by the user that was used to SSH into the machine. Because of this, I had to review all file creation resources and add owner, group and mode explicitly:

-cookbook_file '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00updates' do
-  source 'apt.conf'
+remote_file '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00updates' do
+  source 'files/apt.conf'
+  owner   'root'
+  group   'root'
+  mode    "0644"
 end

In the end, I guess being explicit make the configuration code more understandable, so I take that as a win. Different execution context One of the major differences between Chef itamae comes down the execution context of the recipes. In both Chef and itamae, the configuration is written in DSL embedded in Ruby. This means that the recipes are just Ruby code, and difference here has to do with where that code is executed. With Chef, the recipes are always execute on the machine you are configuring, while with itamae the recipe is executed on the workstation where you run itamae, and that gets translated to commands that need to be executed on the machine being configured. For example, if you need to configure a service based on how much RAM the machine has, with Chef you could do something like this:

total_ram = File.readlines("/proc/meminfo").find do  l 
  l.split.first == "MemTotal:"
end.split[1]
file "/etc/service.conf" do
  # use 20% of the total RAM
  content "cache_size = # ram / 5 KB"
end

With itamae, all that Ruby code will run on the client, so total_ram will contain the wrong number. In the Debian CI case, I worked around that by explicitly declaring the amount of RAM in the static host configuration, and the above construct ended up as something like this:

file "/etc/service.conf" do
  # use 20% of the total RAM
  content "cache_size = # node['total_ram'] / 5 KB"
end

Lessons learned This migration is now complete, and there are a few points that I take away from it:

• The migration is definitely viable, and I'm glad I picked itamae after all.
• Of course, itamae is way simpler than Chef, and has less features. On the other hand, this means that it a simple package to maintain, with less dependencies and keeping it up to date is a lot easier.
• itamae is considerably slower than Chef. On my local tests, a noop execution (e.g. re-applying the configuration a second time) against local VMs with itamae takes 3x the time it takes with Chef.

All in all, the system is working just fine, and I consider this to have been a successful migration. I'm happy it worked out.

Here s my (eleventh) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 20th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/ Well, this month we had DebConf! \o/
(more about this later this week!) Anyway, here are the following things I did in Debian this month:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• rubocop (0.89.1+dfsg-1) - New upstream version for RuboCop::Packaging.
• ruby-rubocop-ast (0.3.0+dfsg-1) - New upstream version for RuboCop's latest version.
• ruby-rubocop-packaging (0.3.0-1) - Shouldn t check lib/ and gemspec file.
• bidi-clojure (2.1.3-1) - New upstream version for Puppet6.
• Source-only uploads for ruby-anima, ruby-uniform-notifier, ruby-unparser, ruby-morpher, and ruby-path-expander.

Other $things:

• Mentoring for newcomers.
• FTP Trainee reviewing.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored php-dasprid-enum and php-bacon-baconqrcode for William and ruby-unparser, ruby-morpher, and ruby-path-exapander for Cocoa.

---

Goodbye GSoC! \o/ In May, I got selected as a Google Summer of Code student for Debian again! \o/
I am working on the Upstream-Downstream Cooperation in Ruby project. The other 5 blogs can be found here:

• GSoC Phase 1 (part 1).
• GSoC Phase 1 (part 2).
• GSoC Phase 2 (part 1).
• GSoC Phase 2 (part 2).
• GSoC Phase 3 (part 1).
• And this is GSoC Phase 3 (part 2).

Also, I log daily updates at gsocwithutkarsh2102.tk. Since this is a wrap and whilst the daily updates are already available at the above site^, I ll quickly mention the important points and links here.

• The git repository is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/utkarsh2102/rubocop-packaging.
• It is a linter, an extension of RuboCop, focused on enforcing upstream best practices and coding conventions.
• There have been 5 releases in all, including 4 cops and other bug fixes (including false-positives and false-negatives).
• The entire source code is documented with a separate docs/ directory, which is hosted at https://docs.rubocop.org/rubocop-packaging.
• The packaging style guide is hosted at https://packaging.rubystyle.guide.
• At the time of writing this, it is being used by around 30 other projects ^.^
• Not only could you install this via gem install rubocop-packaging, but also via apt install ruby-rubocop-packaging.
• The total work consists of around 85 commits with 15 PRs, contributed by 4 amazing people (including me :P) in the last 3 months (June 20 to August 20).
• And finally, many thanks to two amazing people (the mentors for this project), Antonio Terceiro and David Rodr guez!

---

Continuation of GSoC for other Ruby related stuff!

Whilst working on Rubocop::Packaging, I contributed to more Ruby projects, refactoring their library a little bit and mostly fixing RuboCop issues and fixing issues that the Packaging extension reports as offensive .
Following are the PRs that I raised:

• PR #170 for autoprefixer-rails to drop git ls-files in gemspec.
• PR #479 for cucumber-rails to update RuboCop and RuboCop::Packaging.
• PR #1465 for cucumber-ruby for updating RuboCop to v0.89.
• PR #208 for cucumber-ruby-core to fix .rubocop.yml and add RuboCop::Packaging as a development dependency.
• PR #178 for webdrivers to update the RuboCop and RuboCop::RSpec version to the latest.
• PR #179 for webdrivers to drop git ls-files in gemspec.

---

Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my eleventh month as a Debian LTS and my second as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 21.75 hours for LTS and 14.25 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2304-1, fixing CVE-2015-9542, for libpam-radius-auth.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.3.16-5+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2305-1, fixing CVE-2018-10756, for transmission.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.92-2+deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2307-1, fixing CVE-2018-1000544, for ruby-zip.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.2.0-1.1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2308-1, fixing CVE-2019-17113, for libopenmpt.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.2.7386~beta20.3-3+deb9u4.
• Issued DLA 2317-1, fixing CVE-2020-10177, for pillow.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.0.0-4+deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2318-1, fixing CVE-2019-10064 and CVE-2020-12695, for wpa.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2:2.4-1+deb9u7.
• Started working on uwsgi update for CVE-2020-11984. It seems that src:apache2 wasn t affected by that, but src:uwsgi was.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 255-1, fixing CVE-2020-14344, for libx11.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2:1.6.2-3+deb8u3.
• Issued ELA 259-1, fixing CVE-2020-10177, for pillow.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.6.1-2+deb8u5.
• Issued ELA 269-1, fixing CVE-2020-11985, for apache2.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.10-10+deb8u17.
• Started working on clamAV update, it s a major bump from v0.101.5 to v0.102.4. There were lots of movings parts. Contacted upstream maintainers to help reduce the risk of regression. Came up with a patch to loosen the libcurl version requirement. Hopefully, the update could be rolled out soon!

Other (E)LTS Work:

• I spent an additional 11.15 hours working on compiling the responses of the LTS survey and preparing a gist of it for its presentation during the Debian LTS BoF at DebConf20.
• Triaged qemu, pillow, gupnp, clamav, apache2, and uwsgi.
• Marked CVE-2020-11538/pillow as not-affected for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-11984/apache2 as not-affected for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-10378/pillow as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-11538/pillow as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-3481/clamav as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-11984/apache2 as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020- 9490,11993 /apache2 as not-affected for Jessie.
• Hosted Debian LTS BoF at DebConf20. Recording here.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

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Until next time.
:wq for today.

As a response to Antonio Terceiro s blog post, I m publishing some FFmpeg commands I ve been using recently. Embedding subtitles Sometimes you have a video with subtitles in multiple languages and you don t want to clutter the directory with a lot of similarly-named files or maybe you want to be able to easily transfer the video and subtitles at once. In this case, it may be useful to embed to subtitles directly into the video container file. This commands recodes the subtitle file into a format appropriate for the MP4 container and embeds it with a metadata element telling the video player what language it is in. You can add multiple subtitles at once, or you can also transcode the audio to AAC while doing so (I found that a lot of Android devices can t play Ogg Vorbis streams): Hard subtitles Sometimes you need to play the video with subtitles on devices not supporting them. In that case, it may be useful to hardcode the subtitles directly into the video stream: Unfortunately, if you also want to apply more transformations to the video, it starts getting tricky, the -vf option is no longer enough: This command adds an overlay to the video stream (in my case I overlaid a full frame over the original video offering some explanations), increases the volume ten times and adds hard subtitles. P.S. You can see the practical application of the above in this video with a head of one of the electoral commissions in Belarus forcing the members of the staff to manipulate the voting results. I transcribed the video in both Russian and English and encoded the English subtitles into the video.

Following Antonio Terceiro s post on tips for using ffmpeg for editing video, I will also share a bit of my experience producing my video for my session in DebConf20. I recorded my talk today. As Terceiro mentioned, even though I m used to speaking in front of my webcam (i.e. for my classes and some smaller conferences I ve worked on during the COVID lockdown), it does feel a bit weird to present a live talk to nobody :- OK, one step back. Why are we doing this? Because our hardworking friends of the DebConf20 video team recommended so. In order to minimize connecitvity issues from the variety of speakers throughout the world, we were requested to pre-record the exposition part of our talks, send them to the video team (deadline: today 2020-08-16, in case you still owe yours!), and make sure to be present at the end of the talk for the Q&A session. Of course, for a 45 minute talk, I prepared a 30 minute presentation, saving time for said Q&A session. Anyway, I used the excellent OBS studiolive video mixing/editing program (of course, Debian packages are available. This allowed me to set up several predefined views (combinations and layouts of the presentation, webcam, and maybe some other sources) and professionally and elegantly switch between them on the fly. I am still a newbie with OBS, but I surely see it becoming a part of my day to day streaming. Of course, my setup still was obvious (me looking right every now and then to see or control OBS, as I work on a dual-monitor setup ) Anyway, the experience was very good, much smoother and faster than what I usually have to do when editing video. But just as I was finishing thanking the (future) audience and closing the recording I had to tell the camera, oh, fuck! The button labeled Start Recording Had not been pressed. So, did I just lose 30 minutes of my life, plus a half-decent delivered talk? No, fortunately not. I had previously been playing with OBS, and configured some things. The button I did press was Start Streaming . So, my talk (swearing included, of course) was dutifully streamed over to my YouTube channel. It seems up to five people got a sneak preview as to what will my DebConf participation be (of course, I ve de-listed the video). I pulled it with the always-handy youtube-dl, edited out my curses using kdenlive, and pushed it to the DebConf video server. Oh, make sure you follow the advice for recording presentations. It has all the relevant advice, the settings you should use, and much more welcome information if you are new to this. So Next week, DebConf20! Be there or be square!