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.
/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al
The work on /usr-merge continues from May. The lengthy discussion was condensed into a still lengthy rewrite of DEP17 listing all known problems and proposed mitigations. An initial consensus call did not resolve all questions, but we now have rough consensus on finalizing the transition without relying on major changes to dpkg. Other questions still have diverging opinions and some matters such as how to not break backports are still missing satisfying answers.
DebConf Bursary prep, by Utkarsh Gupta
DebCamp and DebConf is happening from 03rd September to 17th September in Kochi, India, and the DebConf Bursary team is gearing up for that. After extending the bursary deadline (catering to the requests coming in from various people), we’ve finally managed to clock over 260 bursary requests. The team is set up and we’re starting to review the applications. The team intends to roll out the result as soon as possible.
debci, by Helmut Grohne
As Freexian is working on deploying autopkgtests for the LTS and ELTS services, debci and autopkgtests were improved in Debian to better deal with derivatives (e.g. by better supporting external package signing keyrings). Other aspects that are not deployed on ci.debian.net such as the qemu backend were also improved. We express thanks to the relevant maintainers Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Simon McVittie for their timely reviews and merges of our changes.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Following the release of Debian 12, Raphaël Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to be aware of trixie. He also pushed some fixes to distro-tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org) and released version 1.2.0 (since the former release was lacking fixes to run on Debian 12 bookworm).
- Following the release of Debian 12, Helmut Grohne updated crossqa.debian.net systems. He also sent 7 patches for cross build failures and continued adapting rebootstrap to changes in unstable.
- Santiago Ruano Rincón started to work on how to improve the robustness of Salsa CI’s pipeline for some jobs failing frequently.
- Thorsten Alteholz did security updates of cpdb-libs in Unstable and Bookworm.
- Stefano Rivera upgraded pixelfed.debian.social to bookworm.
- Stefano started an re2 library transition, and started preparation for the next transition.
- Helmut Grohne updated debvm in unstable releasing changes that accumulated during the freeze.
- Stefano did some work on the website and infrastructure for DebConf 23.
- Utkarsh Gupta helped review and fix open redmine bugs and fix them all in unstable.