Debian Contributions: 2024-07
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.
autopkgtest/Incus build streamlining, by Colin Watson
Colin contributed a change to allow maintaining Incus container and VM images in parallel. Both of these are useful (containers are faster, but some tests need full machine isolation), and the build tools previously didn’t handle that very well.
This isn’t yet in unstable, but once it is, keeping both flavours of unstable images up to date will be a simple matter of running this regularly:
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus images:debian/trixie
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus --vm images:debian/trixie
Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago continued the work on the support for applying security fixes to the Linux kernel in Debian, without the need to reboot the machine. As mentioned in the previous month report, kpatch 0.9.9-1 (and 0.9.9-2 afterwards) was uploaded to unstable in July, closing the Intent to Salvage (ITS) bug. With this upload, the remaining RC bugs were solved, and kpatch was able to transition to Debian testing recently. Kpatch is expected to be an important component in the live-patching support, since it makes it easy to build a patch as a kernel module. Emmanuel and Santiago continued to work on the design for Linux live-patching and presented the current status in the DebConf24 presentation.
Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
To be able to add RISC-V support and to avoid using tools not packaged in Debian (See #331), the Salsa CI pipeline first needed to move away from kaniko to build the images used by the pipeline. Santiago created a merge request to use buildah instead, and it was merged last month. Santiago also prepared a couple of more MRs related to how the images are built: initial RISC-V support, that should be merged after improving how built images are tested. The switch to buildah introduced a regression in the work-in-progress MR that adds new build image so the build job can run sbuild. Santiago hopes to address this regression and continue with the sbuild-related MRs in August.
Additionally, Santiago also contributed to the install docker-cli instead of docker.io in the piuparts image MR, and reviewed others such as reprotest: Add –append-build-command option, fix failure at manual pipeline run when leaving RELEASE variable empty and Fix image not found error on image building stage.
Python 3.13 Betas, by Stefano Rivera
As Python 3.13 is approaching the first release, Stefano has been uploading the beta releases to Debian unstable. Most of these have uncovered small bugs that needed to be investigated and fixed.
Stefano also took the time to review the current patch set against cPython in Debian.
Python 3.13 isn’t marked as a supported Python release in Debian’s Python tooling, yet, so nothing has been built against it, yet. Now that the Python 3.12 transition has completed, the next task will be to start trying to build Debian’s Python module packages against Python 3.13, to estimate the work required to transition to 3.13 in unstable.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Carles Pina updated the packages
python-asyncclick,python-pyaarloand prepared updates forpython-ring-doorbellandsimplemonitor. - Carles Pina updated (reviewing or translating) Catalan translations
for
adduser,apt-listchanges,debconfandshadow. - Colin merged OpenSSH 9.8, and prepared a corresponding release note for DSA support now being disabled. This version included some substantial changes to split the server into a listener binary and a per-session binary, and those required some corresponding changes in the GSS-API key exchange patch. Sorting out the details of this and getting it to work again took some time.
- Colin upgraded 11 Python packages to new upstream versions, and modernized the build process and/or added non-superficial autopkgtests to several more.
- Raphaël Hertzog tweaked tracker.debian.org’s debci task to work around changes in the JSON output. He also improved tracker.debian.org’s ability to detect bounces due to spam to avoid unsubscribing emails that are not broken, but that are better than Debian at rejecting spam.
- Helmut Grohne monitored the /usr-move transition with few incidents.
A notable one is that some systems have ended up with aliasing links
that don’t match the ones installed by
base-fileswhich could lead to an unpack error fromdpkg. This is now prevented by havingbase-files.preinsterror out. - Helmut investigated toolchain bootstrap failures with gcc-14 in rebootstrap but would only discover the cause in August.
- Helmut sent a
MR
for the cross-exe-wrapper requested by Simon
McVittie for gobject-introspection.
It is a way of conditionally requesting
qemu-userwhen emulation is required for execution during cross compilation. - Helmut sent three patches for cross build failures.
- Thorsten Alteholz uploaded packages
lprintandmagicfilterto fix RC-bugs that appeared due to the introduction of gcc-14. - Santiago continued to work on activities related to the DebConf24 Content Team, including reviewing the schedule and handling updates on it.
- Santiago worked on preparations for the DebConf25, to be held in Brest, France, next year. A video of the BoF presented during DebConf24 can be found here.
- Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf24, and helped to run the event.