Debian Contributions: 2024-10
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.
rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne
After significant changes earlier this year, the state of architecture cross bootstrap is normalizing again. More and more architectures manage to complete rebootstrap testing successfully again. Here are two examples of what kind of issues the bootstrap testing identifies.
At some point, libpng1.6 would fail to cross build on musl architectures whereas it would succeed on other ones failing to locate zlib. Adding --debug-find to the cmake invocation eventually revealed that it would fail to search in /usr/lib/<triplet>, which is the default library path. This turned out to be a bug in cmake assuming that all linux systems use glibc. libpng1.6 also gained a baseline violation for powerpc and ppc64 by enabling the use of AltiVec there.
The newt package would fail to cross build for many 32-bit architectures whereas it would succeed for armel and armhf due to -Wincompatible-pointer-types. It turns out that this flag was turned into -Werror and it was compiling with a warning earlier. The actual problem is a difference in signedness between wchar_t and FriBidChar (aka uint32_t) and actually affects native building on i386.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Helmut sent 35 patches for cross build failures.
- Stefano Rivera uploaded the Python 3.13.0 final release.
- Stefano continued to rebuild Python packages with C extensions using Python 3.13, to catch compatibility issues before the 3.13-add transition starts.
- Stefano uploaded new versions of a handful of Python packages, including: dh-python, objgraph, python-mitogen, python-truststore, and python-virtualenv.
- Stefano packaged a new release of
mkdocs-macros-plugin, which required packaging a new Python package for Debian, python-super-collections (now in NEW review). - Stefano helped the mini-DebConf Online Brazil get video infrastructure up and running for the event. Unfortunately, Debian’s online-DebConf setup has bitrotted over the last couple of years, and it eventually required new temporary Jitsi and Jibri instances.
- Colin Watson fixed a number of autopkgtest failures to get ansible back into testing.
- Colin fixed an ssh client failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange, and added an integration test to ensure this doesn’t regress in future.
- Colin worked on the Python 3.13 transition, fixing problems related to it in 15 packages. This included upstream work in a number of packages (postgresfixture, python-asyncssh, python-wadllib).
- Colin upgraded 41 Python packages to new upstream versions.
- Carles improved po-debconf-manager: now it can create merge requests to Salsa automatically (created 17, new batch coming this month), imported almost all the packages with debconf translation templates whose VCS is Salsa (currently 449 imported), added statistics per package and language, improved command line interface options. Performed user support fixing different issues. Also prepared an abstract for the talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse.
- Santiago Ruano Rincón continued the organization work for the DebConf 25 conference, to be held in Brest, France. Part of the work relates to the initial edits of the sponsoring brochure. Thanks to Benjamin Somers who finalized the French and English versions.
- Raphaël forwarded a couple of zim and hamster bugs to the upstream developers, and tried to diagnose a delayed startup of gdm on his laptop (cf #1085633).
- On behalf of the Debian Publicity Team, Anupa interviewed 7 women from the Debian community, old and new contributors. The interview was published in Bits from Debian.