Debian Contributions: 2024-08
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 Python 3 patch review, by Stefano Rivera
Last month, at DebConf, Stefano reviewed the current patch set of Debian’s cPython packages with Matthias Klose, the primary maintainer until now. As a result of that review, Stefano re-reviewed the patchset, updating descriptions, etc. A few patches were able to be dropped, and a few others were forwarded upstream.
One finds all sorts of skeletons doing reviews like this. One of the patches had been inactive (fortunately, because it was buggy) since the day it was applied, 13 years ago. One is a cleanup that probably only fixes a bug on HPUX, and is a result of copying code from xfree86 into Python 25 years ago. It was fixed in xfree86 a year later. Others support just Debian-specific functionality and probably never seemed worth forwarding. Or good cleanup that only really applies to Debian.
A trivial new patch would allow Debian to multiarch co-install Python stable ABI dynamic extensions (like we can with regular dynamic extensions). Performance concerns are stalling it in review, at the moment.
DebConf 24 Organization, by Stefano Rivera
Stefano helped organize DebConf 24, which concluded in early August. The event is run by a large entirely volunteer team. The work involved in making this happen is far too varied to describe here. While Freexian provides funding for 20% of collaborator time to spend on Debian-related work, it only covers a small fraction of contributions to time-intensive tasks like this.
Since the end of the event, Stefano has been doing some work on the conference finances, and initiated the reimbursement process for travel bursaries.
Archive rebuilds on Debusine, by Stefano Rivera
The recent setuptools 73 upload to Debian unstable removed the test subcommand, breaking many packages that were using python3 setup.py test in their Debian packaging. Stefano did a partial archive-rebuild using debusine.debian.net to find the regressions and file bugs.
Debusine will be a powerful tool to do QA work like this for Debian in the future, but it doesn’t have all the features needed to coordinate rebuild-testing, yet. They are planned to be fleshed out in the next year. In the meantime, Debusine has the building blocks to work through a queue of package building tasks and store the results, it just needs to be driven from outside the system.
So, Stefano started working on a set of tools using the Debusine client API to perform archive rebuilds, found and tagged existing bugs, and filed many more.
OpenSSH GSS-API split, by Colin Watson
Colin landed the first stage of the planned split of GSS-API authentication and key exchange support in Debian’s OpenSSH packaging. In order to allow for smooth upgrades, the second stage will have to wait until after the Debian 13 (trixie) release; but once that’s done, as upstream puts it, “this substantially reduces the amount of pre-authentication attack surface exposed on your users’ sshd by default”.
OpenSSL vs. cryptography, by Colin Watson
Colin facilitated a discussion between Debian’s OpenSSL team and the upstream maintainers of Python cryptography about a new incompatibility between Debian’s OpenSSL packaging and cryptography’s handling of OpenSSL’s legacy provider, which was causing a number of build and test failures. While the issue remains open, the Debian OpenSSL maintainers have effectively reverted the change now, so it’s no longer a pressing problem.
/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne
There are less than 40 source packages left to move files to /usr, so what we’re left with is the long tail of the transition. Rather than fix all of them, Helmut started a discussion on removing packages from unstable and filed a first batch. As libvirt is being restructured in experimental, we’re handling the fallout in collaboration with its maintainer Andrea Bolognani. Since base-files validates the aliasing symlinks before upgrading, it was discovered that systemd has its own ideas with no solution as of yet. Helmut also proposed that dash checks for ineffective diversions of /bin/sh and that lintian warns about aliased files.
rebootstrap by Helmut Grohne
Bootstrapping Debian for a new or existing CPU architecture still is a quite manual process. The rebootstrap project attempts to automate part of the early stage, but it still is very sensitive to changes in unstable. We had a number of fairly intrusive changes this year already. August included a little more fallout from the earlier gcc-for-host work where the C++ include search path would end up being wrong in the generated cross toolchain. A number of packages such as util-linux (twice), libxml2, libcap-ng or systemd had their stage profiles broken. e2fsprogs gained a cycle with libarchive-dev due to having gained support for creating an ext4 filesystem from a tar archive. The restructuring of glib2.0 remains an unsolved problem for now, but libxt and cdebconf should be buildable without glib2.0.
Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
Santiago completed the initial RISC-V support (!523) in the Salsa CI’s pipeline. The main work started in July, but it was required to take into account some comments in the review (thanks to Ahmed!) and some final details in [!534]. riscv64 is the most recently supported port in Debian, which will be part of trixie. As its name suggests, the new build-riscv64 job makes it possible to test that a package successfully builds in the riscv64 architecture. The RISC-V runner (salsaci riscv64 runner 01) runs in a couple of machines generously provided by lab.rvperf.org. Debian Developers interested in running this job in their projects should enable the runner (salsaci riscv64 runner 01) in Settings / CI / Runners, and follow the instructions available at https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/#build-job-on-risc-v.
Santiago also took part in discussions about how to optimize the build jobs and reviewed !537 to make the build-source job to only satisfy the Build-Depends and Build-Conflicts fields by Andrea Pappacoda. Thanks a lot to him!
Miscellaneous contributions
- Stefano submitted patches for BeautifulSoup to support the latest soupsieve and lxml.
- Stefano uploaded pypy3 7.3.17, upgrading the cPython compatibility from 3.9 to 3.10. Then ran into a GCC-14-related regression, which had to be ignored for now as it’s proving hard to fix.
- Colin released libpipeline 1.5.8 and man-db 2.13.0; the latter included foundations allowing adding an autopkgtest for man-db.
- Colin upgraded 19 Python packages to new upstream versions (fixing 5 CVEs), fixed several other build failures, fixed a Python 3.12 compatibility issue in zope.security, and made python-nacl build reproducibly.
- Colin tracked down test failures in python-asyncssh and Ruby resulting from certain odd
/etc/hostsconfigurations. - Carles upgraded the packages python-ring-doorbell and simplemonitor to new upstream versions.
- Carles started discussions and implementation of a tool (still in early days) named “po-debconf-manager”: a way for translators and reviewers to collaborate using git as a backend instead of mailing list; and submit the translations using salsa MR. More information next month.
- Carles (dog-fooding “po-debconf-manager”) reviewed debconf templates translated by a collaborator.
- Carles reviewed and submitted the translation of “apt”.
- Helmut sent 19 patches for improving cross building.
- Helmut implemented the
cross-exe-wrapperproposed by Simon McVittie for use withglib2.0. - Helmut detailed what it takes to make Perl’s
ExtUtils::PkgConfigsuitable for cross building. - Helmut made the deletion of the root password work in
debvmin all situations and implemented a test case usingexpect. - Anupa attended Debian Publicity team meeting and is moderating and posting on Debian Administrators LinkedIn group.
- Thorsten uploaded package gutenprint to fix a FTBFS with gcc14 and package ipp-usb to fix a /usr-merge issue.
- Santiago updated bzip2 to fix a long-standing bug that requested to include a pkg-config file. An important impact of this change is that it makes it possible to use Rust bindings for libbz2 by Sequoia, an implementation of OpenPGP.