Debian Contributions: 2025-03
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.
Preparing for Trixie, by Raphaël Hertzog
As we are approaching the trixie freeze, it is customary for Debian developers to review their packages and clean them up in preparation for the next stable release.
That’s precisely what Raphaël did with publican, a package that had not seen any change since the last Debian release and that partially stopped working along the way due to a major Perl upgrade. While upstream’s activity is close to zero, hope is not yet entirely gone as the git repository moved to a new location a couple of months ago and contained the required fix. Raphaël also developed another fix to avoid an annoying warning that was seen at runtime.
Raphaël also ensured that the last upstream version of zim was uploaded to Debian unstable, and developed a fix for gnome-shell-extension-hamster to make it work with GNOME 48 and thus ensure that the package does not get removed from trixie.
Abseil and re2 transition in Debian, by Stefano Rivera
One of the last transitions to happen for trixie was an update to abseil, bringing it up to 202407. This library is a dependency for one of Freexian’s customers, as well as blocking newer versions of re2, a package maintained by Stefano.
The transition had been stalled for several months while some issues with reverse dependencies were investigated and dealt with. It took a final push to make the transition happen, including fixing a few newly discovered problems downstream. The abseil package’s autopkgtests were (trivially) broken by newer cmake versions, and some tests started failing on PPC64 (a known issue upstream).
debvm uploaded, by Helmut Grohne
debvm is a command line tool for
quickly creating a Debian-based virtual machine for testing purposes. Over time,
it accumulated quite a few minor issues as well as CI failures. The most
notorious one was an ARM32 failure present since August. It was diagnosed down
to a glibc bug by Tj and Chris Hofstaedtler
and little has happened since then. To have debvm work somewhat, it now
contains a workaround for this situation. Few changes are expected to be
noticeable, but related tools such as apt, file, linux, passwd, and
qemu required quite a few adaptations all over the place. Much of the
necessary debugging was contributed by others.
DebConf 25 Registration website, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rincón
DebConf 25, the annual Debian developer conference, is now open for registration. Other than preparing the conference website, getting there always requires some last minute changes to the software behind the registration interface and this year was no exception. Every year, the conference is a little different to previous years, and has some different details that need to be captured from attendees. And every year we make minor incremental improvements to fix long-standing problems.
New concepts this year included: brunch, the closing talks on the departure day, venue security clearance, partial contributions towards food and accommodation bursaries, and attendee-selected bursary budgets.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Helmut uploaded guess-concurrency incorporating feedback from others.
- Helmut reacted to
rebootstrap CI results and
adapted it to cope with changes in
unstable. - Helmut researched real world
/usr-move fallout though little was actually attributable. He also NMUedsystemdunsuccessfully. - Helmut sent 12 cross build patches.
- Helmut looked into undeclared file conflicts in Debian more systematically and filed quite some bugs.
- Helmut attended the cross/bootstrap sprint in Würzburg. A report of the event is pending.
- Lucas worked on the CFP and tracks definition for DebConf 25.
- Lucas worked on some bits involving Rails 7 transition.
- Carles investigated why the job piuparts on salsa-ci/pipeline was passing but was failing on piuparts.debian.org for simplemonitor package. Created an issue and MR with a suggested fix, under discussion.
- Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci/pipeline: added documentation for different variables.
- Carles made debian-history package reproducible (with help from Chris Lamb).
- Carles updated simplemonitor package (new upstream version), prepared a new qdacco version (fixed bugs in qdacco, packaged with the upgrade from Qt 5 to Qt 6).
- Carles reviewed and submitted translations to Catalan for adduser, apt, shadow, apt-listchanges.
- Carles reviewed, created merge-requests for translations to Catalan of 38 packages (using po-debconf-manager tooling). Created 40 bug reports for some merge requests that haven’t been actioned for some time.
- Colin Watson fixed 59 RC bugs (including 26 packages broken by the long-overdue removal of dh-python’s dependency on python3-setuptools), and upgraded 38 packages (mostly Python-related) to new upstream versions.
- Colin worked with Pranav P to track down and fix a dnspython autopkgtest regression on s390x caused by an endianness bug in pylsqpack.
- Colin fixed a time-based test failure in python-dateutil that would have triggered in 2027, and contributed the fix upstream.
- Colin fixed debconf to automatically use the noninteractive frontend if stdin is not a terminal.
- Stefano bisected and fixed a pypy translation regression on Debian stable and older on 32-bit ARM.
- Emilio coordinated and helped finish various transitions in light of the transition freeze.
- Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups-filters to fix an FTBFS with a new upstream version of qpdf.
- With the aim of enhancing the support for packages related to Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in recent industrial standards, Santiago has worked on finishing the packaging of and uploaded CycloneDX python library. There is on-going work about SPDX python tools, but it requires (build-)dependencies currently not shipped in Debian, such as owlrl and pyshacl.
- Anupa worked with the Publicity team to announce the Debian 12.10 point release.
- Anupa with the support of Santiago prepared an announcement and announced the opening of CfP and Registrations for DebConf 25.