Search Results: "tobi"

15 April 2024

Andreas R nnquist: Status update for Allegro packaging in Debian

I have mailed to a Debian bug on allegro4.4 describing my reasoning regarding the allegro libraries in short, allegro4.4 is pretty much dead upstream, and my interest was basically to keep alex4 (which is cool) in Debian, but since it migrated to non-free, my interest in allegro4.4 has waned. So, if anybody would like to still see allegro4.4 in Debian, please step up now and help out. Since it is dead upstream, my reasoning is that it is better to remove it from Debian if no maintainer who wants to help steps up. Previously Tobias Hansen has helped out, but now it is 8 (!) years since his last upload of either package. (Please don t interpret this as judgement, I am very happy for the help he has provided and all the work he has done on the packages). Allegro5 is another deal still active upstream, and I have kept it up to date in Debian, and while I have held the latest upload a short while because of the time_t transition, it will come sooner or later There I am also waiting on a final decision on this bug from upstream. Other than that allegro 5 is in a very good state, and I will keep maintaining it as long as I can. But help would of course be appreciated on allegro5 too.

12 April 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

Debian LTS contributors In March, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 59.5h (out of 47.5h assigned and 52.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 57.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 22.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 15.25h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 19.5h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.25h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 25.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 19.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 48.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 29.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs. Adrian Bunk was responsible for updating gtkwave not only in LTS, but also in unstable, stable, and old-stable as well. This update involved an upload of a new upstream release of gtkwave to each target suite to address 82 separate CVEs. Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt which was particularly notable, as it fixed multiple vulnerabilities which would lead to denial of service or information disclosure. In addition to the normal security updates, multiple LTS contributors worked at getting various packages updated in more recent Debian releases, including gross for bullseye/bookworm (by Adrian Bunk), imlib2 for bullseye, jetty9 and tomcat9/10 for bullseye/bookworm (by Markus Koschany), samba for bullseye, py7zr for bullseye (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n), cacti for bullseye/bookwork (by Sylvain Beucler), and libmicrohttpd for bullseye (by Thorsten Alteholz). Additionally, Sylvain actively coordinated with cacti upstream concerning an incomplete fix for CVE-2024-29894.

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14 March 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

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

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

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

12 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

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

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

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12 January 2024

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In December, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 16.0h (out of 26.25h assigned and 8.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 7.25h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 26.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 25.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 5.5h (out of 5.5h assigned).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 25.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 35.0h (out of 35.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.5h (out of 5.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.255h (out of 3.26h assigned and 12.745h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.75h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 4.25h (out of 3.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.5h (out of 21.25h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.25h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 18.75h (out of 11.25h assigned and 13.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.

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

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29 December 2023

Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet? - part 4

Read all parts of the series Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 I ve been wanting to write this post for over a year, but lacked energy and time. Before 2023 is coming to an end, I want to close this series and share some more insights with you and hopefully provide you with a smile here and there. For this round of interviews, four more kids around the ages of 8 to 13 were interviewed, 3 of them have a US background these 3 interviews were done by a friend who recorded these interviews for me, thank you! As opposed to the previous interviews, these four kids have parents who have a more technical professional background. And this seems to make a difference: even though none of these kids actually knew much better how the internet really works than the other kids that I interviewed, specifically in terms of physical infrastructures, they were much more confident in using the internet, they were able to more correctly name things they see on the internet, and they had partly radical ideas about what they would like to learn or what they would want to change about the internet! Looking at these results, I think it s safe to say that social reproduction is at work and that we need to improve education for kids who do not profit from this type of social and cultural wealth at home. But let s dive into the details.

The boy and the aliens (I ll be mostly transribing the interview, which was short, and which I find difficult to sum up because some of the questions are written in a way to encourage the kids to tell a story, and this particular kid had a thing going on with aliens.) He s a 13 year old boy living in the US. He has his own computer, which technically belongs to his school but can be used by him freely and he can also take it home. He s the first kid saying he s reading the news on the internet; he does not actually use social media, besides sometimes watching TikTok. When asked: Imagine that aliens land and come to you and say: We ve heard about this internet thing you all talk about, what is it? What do you tell them? he replied:
Well, I mean they re aliens, so I don t know if I wanna tell them much.
(Parents laughing in the background.) Let s assume they re friendly aliens.
Well, I would say you can look anything up and play different games. And there are alien games. But mostly the enemies are aliens which you might be a little offended by. And you can get work done, if you needed to spy on humans. There s cameras, you can film yourself, yeah. And you can text people and call people who are far away
And what would be in a drawing that would explain the internet? Google, an alien using Twitch, Google search results, and the interface of an IM software on an iPhone drawn by a 13 year old boy And here s what he explains about his drawing:
First, I would draw what I see when you open a new tab, Google.
On the right side of the drawing we see something like Twitch.
I don t wanna offend the aliens, but you can film yourself playing a game, so here is the alien and he s playing a game.
And then you can ask questions like: How did aliens come to the Earth? And the answer will be here (below). And there ll be different websites that you can click on.
And you can also look up Who won the alien contest? And that would be Usmushgagu, and that guy won the alien contest.
Do you think the information about alien intergalactic football is already on the internet?
Yeah! That s how fast the internet is.
On the bottom of the drawing we see an iPhone and an instant messaging software.
There s also a device called an iPhone and with it you can text your friends. So here s the alien asking: How was ur day? and the friend might answer IDK [I don t know].
Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about?
Is there a way you don t have to pay for any channels or subscriptions and you can get through any firewall?
Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?
Well you wouldn t have to pay for it [paywalls].
Can you describe what happens between your device and a website when you visit a website?
Well, it takes 0.025 seconds. [ ] It s connecting.
Wow, that s indeed fast! We were not able to obtain more details about what is that fast thing that s happening exactly

The software engineer s kid This kid identifies as neither boy nor girl, is 10 years old and lives in Germany. Their father works as a software engineer, or in the words of the child:
My dad knows everything.
The kid has a laptop and a mobile phone, both with parental control they don t think that the controlling is fair. This kid uses the internet foremostly for listening to music and watching prank channels on Youtube but also to work with Purple Mash (a teaching platform for the computing curriculum used at their school), finding 3d printing models (that they ask their father to print with them because they did not manage to use the printer by themselves yet). Interestingly, and very differently from the non-tech-parent kids, this kid insists on using Firefox and Signal - the latter is not only used by their dad to tell them to come downstairs for dinner, but also to call their grandmother. This kid also shops online, with the help of the father who does the actual shopping for them using money that the kid earned by reading books. If you would need to explain to an alien who has landed on Earth what the internet is, what would you tell them?
The internet is something where you search, for example, you can look for music. You can also watch videos from around the world, and you can program stuff.
Like most of the kids interviewed, this kid uses the internet mostly for media consumption, but with the difference that they also engage with technology by way of programming using Purple Mash. drawing of the internet by a 10 year old showing a Youtube prank channel, an external device trackpad, and headphones In their drawing we see a Youtube prank channel on a screen, an external trackpad on the right (likely it s not a touch screen), and headphones. Notice how there is no keyboard, or maybe it s folded away. If you could ask a nice and friendly dragon anything you d like to learn about the internet, what would it be?
How do I shutdown my dad s computer forever?
And what is it that he would do to improve the internet for everyone? Contrary to the kid living in the US, they think that
It takes too much time to load stuff!
I wonder if this kid experiences the internet as being slow because they use the mobile network or because their connection somehow gets throttled as a way to control media consumption, or if the German internet infrastructure is just so much worse in certain regions If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first? I d make a new Firefox app that loads the internet much faster.

The software engineer s daughter This girl is only 8 years old, she hates unicorns, and her dad is also a software engineer. She uses a smartphone, controlled by her parents. My impression of the interview is that at this age, kids slightly mix up the internet with the devices that they use to access the internet. drawing of the internet by an 8 year old girl, Showing Google and the interface to call and text someone In her drawing, we see again Google - it s clearly everywhere - and also the interfaces for calling and texting someone. To explain what the internet is, besides the fact that one can use it for calling and listening to music, she says:
[The internet] is something that you can [use to] see someone who is far away, so that you don t need to take time to get to them.
Now, that s a great explanation, the internet providing the possibility for communication over a distance :) If she could ask a friendly dragon something she always wanted to know, she d ask how to make her phone come alive:
that it can talk to you, that it can see you, that it can smile and has eyes. It s like a new family member, you can talk to it.
Sounds a bit like Siri, Alexa, or Furby, doesn t it? If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first? She d have the phone be able to decide over her free time, her phone time. That would make the world better, not for the kids, but certainly for the parents.

The antifascist kid This German boy s dad has a background in electrotechnical engineering. He s 10 years old and he told me he s using the internet a lot for searching things for example about his passion: the firefighters. For him, the internet is:
An invisible world. A virtual world. But there s also the darknet.
He told me he always watches that German show on public TV for kids that explains stuff: Checker Tobi. (In 2014, Checker Tobi actually produced an episode about the internet, which I d criticize for having only male characters, except for one female character: a secretary Google, a nice and friendly woman guiding the way through the huge library that s the internet ) This kid was the only one interviewed who managed to actually explain something about the internet, or rather about the hypertextual structure of the web. When I asked him to draw the internet, he made a drawing of a pin board. He explained:
Many items are attached to the pin board, and on the top left corner there s a computer, for example with Youtube and one can navigate like that between all the items, and start again from the beginning when done.
hypertext structure representing the internet drawn by a kid When I asked if he knew what actually happens between the device and a website he visits, he put forth the hypothesis of the existence of some kind of
Waves, internet waves - all this stuff somehow needs to be transmitted.
What he d like to learn:
How to get into the darknet? How do you become a Whitehat? I ve heard these words on the internet, the internet makes me clever.
And what would he change on the internet if he could?
I want that right wing extreme stuff is not accessible anymore, or at least, that it rains turds ( Kackw rste ) whenever people watch such stuff. Or that people are always told: This video is scum.
I suspect that his father has been talking with him about these things, and maybe these are also subjects he heard about when listening to punk music (he told me he does), or browsing Youtube.

Future projects To me this has been pretty insightful. I might share some more internet drawings by adults in the future, which I think are also really interesting, as they show very different things depending on the age of the person. I ve been using the information gathered to work on a children s book which I hope to be able to share with you next year.

19 December 2023

Antoine Beaupr : (Re)introducing screentest

I have accidentally rewritten screentest, an old X11/GTK2 program that I was previously using to, well, test screens.

Screentest is dead It was removed from Debian in May 2023 but had already missed two releases (Debian 11 "bullseye" and 12 "bookworm") due to release critical bugs. The stated reason for removal was:
The package is orphaned and its upstream is no longer developed. It depends on gtk2, has a low popcon and no reverse dependencies.
So I had little hope to see this program back in Debian. The git repository shows little activity, the last being two years ago. Interestingly, I do not quite remember what it was testing, but I do remember it to find dead pixels, confirm native resolution, and various pixel-peeping. Here's a screenshot of one of the screentest screens: screentest screenshot showing a white-on-black checkered background, with some circles in the corners, shades of gray and colors in the middle Now, I think it's safe to assume this program is dead and buried, and anyways I'm running wayland now, surely there's something better? Well, no. Of course not. Someone would know about it and tell me before I go on a random coding spree in a fit of procrastination... riiight? At least, the Debconf video team didn't seem to know of any replacement. They actually suggested I just "invoke gstreamer directly" and "embrace the joy of shell scripting".

Screentest reborn So, I naively did exactly that and wrote a horrible shell script. Then I realized the next step was to write an command line parser and monitor geometry guessing, and thought "NOPE, THIS IS WHERE THE SHELL STOPS", and rewrote the whole thing in Python. Now, screentest lives as a ~400-line Python script, half of which is unit test data and command-line parsing.

Why screentest Some smarty pants is going to complain and ask why the heck one would need something like that (and, well, someone already did), so maybe I can lay down a list of use case:
  • testing color output, in broad terms (answering the question of "is it just me or this project really yellow?")
  • testing focus and keystone ("this looks blurry, can you find a nice sharp frame in that movie to adjust focus?")
  • test for native resolution and sharpness ("does this projector really support 4k for 30$? that sounds like bullcrap")
  • looking for dead pixels ("i have a new monitor, i hope it's intact")

What does screentest do? Screentest displays a series of "patterns" on screen. The list of patterns is actually hardcoded in the script, copy-pasted from this list from the videotestsrc gstreamer plugin, but you can pass any pattern supported by your gstreamer installation with --patterns. A list of patterns relevant to your installation is available with the gst-inspect-1.0 videotestsrc command. By default, screentest goes through all patterns. Each pattern runs indefinitely until the you close the window, then the next pattern starts. You can restrict to a subset of patterns, for example this would be a good test for dead pixels: 
screentest --patterns black,white,red,green,blue
This would be a good sharpness test: 
screentest --patterns pinwheel,spokes,checkers-1,checkers-2,checkers-4,checkers-8
A good generic test is the classic SMPTE color bars and is the first in the list, but you can run only that test with: 
screentest --patterns smpte
(I will mention, by the way, that as a system administrator with decades of experience, it is nearly impossible to type SMPTE without first typing SMTP and re-typing it again a few times before I get it right. I fully expect this post to have numerous typos.)
Here's an example of the SMPTE pattern from Wikipedia: SMPTE color bars For multi-monitor setups, screentest also supports specifying which output to use as a native resolution, with --output. Failing that, it will try to look at the outputs and use the first it will find. If it fails to find anything, you can specify a resolution with --resolution WIDTHxHEIGHT. I have tried to make it go full screen by default, but stumbled a bug in Sway that crashes gst-launch. If your Wayland compositor supports it, you can possibly enable full screen with --sink waylandsink fullscreen=true. Otherwise it will create a new window that you will have to make fullscreen yourself. For completeness, there's also an --audio flag that will emit the classic "drone", a sine wave at 440Hz at 40% volume (the audiotestsrc gstreamer plugin. And there's a --overlay-name option to show the pattern name, in case you get lost and want to start with one of them again.

How this works Most of the work is done by gstreamer. The script merely generates a pipeline and calls gst-launch to show the output. That both limits what it can do but also makes it much easier to use than figuring out gst-launch. There might be some additional patterns that could be useful, but I think those are better left to gstreamer. I, for example, am somewhat nostalgic of the Philips circle pattern that used to play for TV stations that were off-air in my area. But that, in my opinion, would be better added to the gstreamer plugin than into a separate thing. The script shows which command is being ran, so it's a good introduction to gstreamer pipelines. Advanced users (and the video team) will possibly not need screentest and will design their own pipelines with their own tools. I've previously worked with ffmpeg pipelines (in another such procrastinated coding spree, video-proxy-magic), and I found gstreamer more intuitive, even though it might be slightly less powerful. In retrospect, I should probably have picked a new name, to avoid crashing the namespace already used by the project, which is now on GitHub. Who knows, it might come back to life after this blog post; it would not be the first time. For now, the project lives along side the rest of my scripts collection but if there's sufficient interest, I might move it to its own git repositories. Comments, feedback, contributions are as usual welcome. And naturally, if you know something better for this kind of stuff, I'm happy to learn more about your favorite tool! So now I have finally found something to test my projector, which will likely confirm what I've already known all along: that it's kind of a piece of crap and I need to get a proper one.

12 December 2023

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

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

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

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

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13 November 2023

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

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

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

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

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12 October 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In September, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 7.0h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 18.25h (out of 18.25h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 7.75h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 13.25h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 44 DLAs. The month of September was a busy month for the LTS Team. A notable security issue fixed in September was the high-severity CVE-2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow that allowed remote attackers to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted WebP file. This CVE was covered by the three DLAs of different packages: firefox-esr, libwebp and thunderbird. The libwebp backported patch was sent to upstream, who adapted and applied it to the 0.6.1 branch. It is also worth noting that LTS contributor Markus Koschany included in his work updates to packages in Debian Bullseye and Bookworm, that are under the umbrella of the Security Team: xrdp, jetty9 and mosquitto. As every month, there was important behind-the-scenes work by the Front Desk staff, who triaged, analyzed and reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities, to decide if they warrant a security update. This is very important work, since we need to trade-off between the frequency of updates and the stability of the LTS release.

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12 September 2023

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

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

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

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

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15 August 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

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

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17 July 2023

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in June 2023

15 July 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

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

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14 June 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In May, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 32.0h (out of 18.5h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 8.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 34.5h (out of 34.5h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.25h (out of 20.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Scarlett Moore did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 34.5h (out of 29.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 5.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 26.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In May, we have released 34 DLAs. Several of the DLAs constituted notable security updates to LTS during the month of May. Of particular note were the linux (4.19) and linux-5.10 packages, both of which addressed a considerable number of CVEs. Additionally, the postgresql-11 package was updated by synchronizing it with the 11.20 release from upstream. Notable non-security updates were made to the distro-info-data database and the timezone database. The distro-info-data package was updated with the final expected release date of Debian 12, made aware of Debian 14 and Ubuntu 23.10, and was updated with the latest EOL dates for Ubuntu releases. The tzdata and libdatetime-timezone-perl packages were updated with the 2023c timezone database. The changes in these packages ensure that in addition to the latest security updates LTS users also have the latest information concerning Debian and Ubuntu support windows, as well as the latest timezone data for accurate worldwide timekeeping. LTS contributor Anton implemented an improvement to the Debian Security Tracker Unfixed vulnerabilities in unstable without a filed bug view, allowing for more effective management of CVEs which do not yet have a corresponding bug entry in the Debian BTS. LTS contributor Sylvain concluded an audit of obsolete packages still supported in LTS to ensure that new CVEs are properly associated. In this case, a package being obsolete means that it is no longer associated with a Debian release for which the Debian Security Team has direct responsibility. When this occurs, it is the responsibility of the LTS team to ensure that incoming CVEs are properly associated to packages which exist only in LTS. Finally, LTS contributors also contributed several updates to packages in unstable/testing/stable to fix CVEs. This helps package maintainers, addresses CVEs in current and future Debian releases, and ensures that the CVEs do not remain open for an extended period of time only for the LTS team to be required to deal with them much later in the future.

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16 May 2023

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

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

Debian LTS contributors In April, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 16.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 4.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 5.0h (out of 2.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 31.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 12.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.5h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.0h (out of 0h assigned and 28.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.0h (out of 40.5h assigned), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 3.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 18.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 26.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In April, we have released 35 DLAs. The LTS team would like to welcome our newest sponsor, Institut Camille Jordan, a French research lab. Thanks to the support of the many LTS sponsors, the entire Debian community benefits from direct security updates, as well as indirect improvements and collaboration with other members of the Debian community. As part of improving the efficiency of our work and the quality of the security updates we produce, the LTS has continued improving our workflow. Improvements include more consistent tagging of release versions in Git and broader use of continuous integration (CI) to ensure packages are tested thoroughly and consistently. Sponsors and users can rest assured that we work continuously to maintain and improve the already high quality of the work that we do.

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

20 March 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2023 (by LTS Team)

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

Debian LTS contributors In February, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 22.0h (out of 32.25h assigned), thus carrying over 10.25h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.75h (out of 11.5h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 26.25h (out of 0h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 26.75h (out of 19.75h assigned and 12.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 32.25h (out of 32.25h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 11.5h (out of 12.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 22.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 32.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 8.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 24.25h (out of 49.25h assigned), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 44 DLAs, which resolved 156 CVEs. We are glad to welcome some new contributors who will hopefully help us fix CVEs in the supported release even faster. However, we also experienced some setbacks as a few sponsors have stopped (or decreased) their support. If your company ever hesitated to sponsor Debian LTS, now might be a good time to join to ensure that we can continue this important work without having to scale down on the number of packages that we are able to support.

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

21 February 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2023 (by Anton Gladky)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. This is the first monthly report in 2023.

Debian LTS contributors In January, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS. which is possibly the highest number of active contributors per month! Their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 11.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 0h assigned and 43.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 17.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 7.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 10.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 3.75h (out of 18.75h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 32.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 28.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 23.5h (out of 0h assigned and 38.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Tobias Frost did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 43.25h (out of 26.25h assigned and 17.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation Furthermore, we released 46 DLAs in January, which resolved 146 CVEs. We are working diligently to reduce the number of packages listed in dla-needed.txt, and currently, we have 55 packages listed. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

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

16 January 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2022 (by Anton Gladky)

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

Debian LTS contributors In December, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 3.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h in December, 8.0h in November (out of 1.5h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned, 2.5h were taken from the extra-budget and worked on).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 24.5h (out of 20.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 20.5h assigned and 14.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.5h (out of 37.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 38.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 51.5h (out of 42.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 47 DLAs, closing 232 CVEs. In the same year, in total we released 394 DLAs, closing 1450 CVEs. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

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

18 December 2022

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2022 (by Anton Gladky)

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

Debian LTS contributors In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.5h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 20.25h (out of 0.75h assigned and 31.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.5h (out of 23.0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 41.0h (out of 32.5h assigned and 25.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we released 43 DLAs, fixing 183 CVEs. We currently have 63 packages in dla-needed.txt that are waiting for updates, which is 19 fewer than the previous month. We re excited to announce that two Debian Developers Tobias Frost and Guilhem Moulin, have completed the on-boarding process and will begin contributing to LTS as of December 2022. Welcome aboard!

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

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