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.
Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a
big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently,
the first job in a Salsa CI pipeline is the extract-source job, used to
produce a debianize source tree of the project. This job was introduced to make
it possible to build the projects on different architectures, on the subsequent
build jobs. However, that extract-source approach is sub-optimal: not only it
increases the execution time of the pipeline by some minutes, but also projects
whose source tree is too large are not able to use the pipeline. The debianize
source tree is passed as an artifact to the build jobs, and for those large
projects, the size of their source tree exceeds the Salsa’s limits. This is
specific issue is documented as
issue #195, and
the proposed solution is to get rid of the extract-source job, relying on
sbuild in the very build job (see
issue #296).
Switching to sbuild would also help to improve the build source job,
solving issues such as
#187 and
#298.
The
current work-in-progress
is very preliminary, but it has already been possible to run the build (amd64),
build-i386 and build-source job using sbuild with the unshare mode. The image
on the right shows a pipeline that builds grep. All the test jobs use the
artifacts of the new build job. There is a lot of remaining work, mainly making
the integration with ccache work. This change could break some things, it will
also be important to test how the new pipeline works with complex projects.
Also, thanks to Emmanuel Arias, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2024 project to improve Salsa CI. As part of the ongoing work in preparation for the GSoC 2024 project, Santiago has proposed a merge request to make more efficient how contributors can test their changes on the Salsa CI pipeline.
/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne
In January, we sent most of the moving patches for the set of packages involved
with debootstrap. Notably missing is glibc, which turns out
harder than anticipated via dumat, because
it has Conflicts between different architectures, which dumat does not analyze.
Patches for diversion mitigations have been updated in a way to not exhibit any loss anymore.
The main change here is that packages which are being diverted now support the diverting packages in transitioning their diversions. We also supported a few packages with non-trivial changes such as netplan.io. dumat has been enhanced to better support derivatives such as Ubuntu.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Python 3.12 migration trundles on. Stefano Rivera helped port several new packages to support 3.12.
- Stefano updated the Sphinx configuration of DebConf Video Team’s documentation, which was broken by Sphinx 7.
- Stefano published the videos from the Cambridge MiniDebConf to YouTube and PeerTube.
- DebConf 24 planning has begun, and Stefano & Utkarsh have started work on this.
- Utkarsh re-sponsored the upload of golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter for Lena.
- Colin Watson added Incus support to autopkgtest.
- Colin discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of his packages, including debconf.
- Colin did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
- Colin figured out how to update the mirror size documentation in debmirror, last updated in 2010. It should now be much easier to keep it up to date regularly.
- Colin issued a man-db buster update to clean up some irritations due to strict sandboxing.
- Thorsten Alteholz adopted two more packages, magicfilter and ifhp, for the debian-printing team. Those packages are the last ones of the latest round of adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don’t hesitate to contact Thorsten.
- Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
- Helmut sent patches for 16 cross build failures.
- Helmut supported Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) with adding
-for-hostsupport to gcc-defaults. - Helmut uploaded
dput-ngenablingdcut migrateand merging two MRs of Ben Hutchings. - Santiago took part in the discussions relating to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Debian public statement that was published last year. He participated in a meeting with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Marcel Kolaja and Karen Melchior, and their teams to clarify some points about the impact of the CRA and Debian and downstream projects, and the improvements in the last version of the proposed regulation.