Debian Contributions: 2025-02

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.

Debian.Social administration, by Stefano Rivera

Over the last year, the Debian.social services outgrew the infrastructure that was supporting them. The matrix bridge in particular was hosted on a cloud instance backed by a large expensive storage volume. Debian.CH rented a new large physical server to host all these instances, earlier this year. Stefano set up Incus on the new physical machine and migrated all the old debian.social LXC Containers, libvirt VMs, and cloud instances into Incus-managed LXC containers.

Stefano set up Prometheus monitoring and alerts for the new infrastructure and a Grafana dashboard. The current stack of debian.social services seem to comfortably fit on the new machine, with good room to grow.

DebConf 25, by Santiago Ruano Rincón and Stefano Rivera

DebConf 25 preparations continue. The team is currently finalizing a budget. Stefano helped to review the current budget proposals and suggest approaches for balancing it.

Stefano installed a Zammad instance to organize queries from attendees, for the registration and visa teams.

Santiago continued discussions with possible caterers so we can have options for the different diet requirements and that could fit into the DebConf budget. Also, in collaboration with Anupa, Santiago pushed the first draft changes to document the venue information in the DebConf 25 website and how to get to Brest.

Time-based test failure in requests, by Colin Watson

Colin fixed a fun bug in the Python requests package. Santiago Vila has been running tests of what happens when Debian packages are built on a system in which time has been artificially set to somewhere around the end of the support period for the next Debian release, in order to make it easier to do things like issuing security updates for the lifetime of that release. In this case, the failure indicated an expired test certificate, and since the repository already helpfully included scripts to regenerate those certificates, it seemed natural to try regenerating them just before running tests. However, this failed for more obscure reasons and Colin spent some time investigating. This turned out to be because the test CA was missing the CA constraint and so recent versions of OpenSSL reject it; Colin sent a pull request to fix this.

Priority list for outdated packages, by Santiago Ruano Rincón

Santiago started a discussion on debian-devel about packages that have a history of security issues and that are outdated regarding new upstream releases. The goal of the mentioned effort is to have a prioritized list of packages needing some work, from a security point of view. Moreover, the aim of publicly sharing the list of packages with the Debian Developers community is to make it easier to look at the packages maintained by teams, or even other maintainers’ where help could be welcome. Santiago is planning to take into account the feedback provided in debian-devel and to propose a tooling that could help to regularly bring collective awareness of these packages.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles worked on English to Catalan po-debconf translations: reviewed translations, created merge requests and followed up with developers for more than 30 packages using po-debconf-manager.
• Carles helped users, fixed bugs and implemented downloading updated templates on po-debconf-manager.
• Carles packaged a new upstream version of python-pyaarlo.
• Carles improved reproducibility of qnetload (now reported as reproducible) and simplemonitor (followed up with upstream and pending update of Debian package).
• Carles collaborated with debian-history package: fixed FTBFS from master branch, enabled salsa-ci and investigated reproducibility.
• Emilio improved support for automatically marking CVEs as NOT-FOR-US in the security-tracker, closing #1073012.
• Emilio updated xorg-server and xwayland in unstable, fixing the last round of security vulnerabilities.
• Stefano prepared a few PyPy and cPython uploads, and started the python3.13-only transition.
• Helmut Grohne sent patches for 24 cross build failures.
• Helmut fixed two problems in the Debian /usr-merge analysis tool. In one instance, it would overmatch Debian bugs to issues and in another it would fail to recognize Pre-Depends as a conflict mechanism.
• Helmut attempted making rebootstrap work for gcc-15 with limited success as very many packages FTBFS with gcc-15 due to using function declarations without arguments.
• Helmut provided a change to the security-tracker that would pre-compute /data/json during database updates rather than on demand resulting in a reduced response time.
• Colin uploaded OpenSSH security updates for testing/unstable, bookworm, bullseye, buster, and stretch.
• Colin fixed upstream monitoring for 26 Python packages, and upgraded 54 packages (mostly Python-related, but also PuTTY) to new upstream versions.
• Colin updated python-django in bookworm-backports to 4.2.18 (issuing BSA-121), and added new backports of python-django-dynamic-fixture and python-django-pgtrigger, all of which are dependencies of debusine.
• Thorsten Alteholz finally managed to upload hplip to fix two release critical and some normal bugs. The next step in March would be to upload the latest version of hplip.
• Faidon updated crun in unstable & trixie, resolving a long-standing request of enabling criu support and thus enabling podman with checkpoint/restore functionality (With gratitude to Salvatore Bonaccorso and Reinhard Tartler for the cooperation and collaboration).
• Faidon uploaded a number of packages (librdkafka, libmaxminddb, python-maxminddb, lowdown, tox, tox-uv, pyproject-api, xiccd and gdnsd) bringing them up to date with new upstream releases, resolving various bugs.
• Lucas Kanashiro uploaded some ruby packages involved in the Rails 7 transition with new upstream releases.
• Lucas triaged a ruby3.1 bug (#1092595)) and prepared a fix for the next stable release update.
• Lucas set up the needed wiki pages and updated the Debian Project status in the Outreachy portal, in order to send out a call for projects and mentors for the next round of Outreachy.
• Anupa joined Santiago to prepare a list of companies to contact via LinkedIn for DebConf 25 sponsorship.
• Anupa printed Debian stickers and sponsorship brochures, flyers for DebConf 25 to be distributed at FOSS ASIA summit 2025.
• Anupa participated in the Debian publicity team meeting and discussed the upcoming events and tasks.
• Raphaël packaged zim 0.76.1 and integrated an upstream patch for another regression that he reported.
• Raphaël worked with the Debian System Administrators for tracker.debian.org to better cope with gmail’s requirement for mails to be authenticated.

by Anupa Ann Joseph 11 Mar, 2025 . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 1040 Words.