Debian Fun in November 2015

Sun, 6 Dec 2015 16:21:47 GMT

Debian LTS

November was the seventh month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent ten hours working on:

krb5: Released DLA-340-1 after applying a fix to the work done in October.

nss: Provided patches for CVE-2015-7181 and CVE-2015-7182 for squeeze, wheezy and jessie and released DLA-354-1 for squeeze-lts for that.

Since nss is subject to frequent security updates I wanted to spend less time doing "did I break the whole thing" testing so I added some autopkg tests that do basic certificate handling and make sure we can link a simple binary against the dev package (#806207).

We also discussed using the same nss version in all suites on the debian-lts list. To test that path I worked on creating backports for Jessie/Wheezy/Squeeze of the current sid version. So far I tested the general feasibility and some simple upgrades.

To be able to detect breackage more easily I enabled the internal test suite resulting in #806639. I also filed #806634 to ease backporting in the future. Packages are collected here with the sources in this (temporary) git repo. Work on this will continue in December.

Other Debian stuff

There was no git-buildpackge upload in November but the git repository already collected some fixes and new features like building RPMs in clean chroots using mock. Patches for this were provided by Tzafrir Cohen. I've been hoping we get #775118 fixed in mock so it becomes actually useful in Debian before uploading a new gbp version.

There's also now an example for README.source for gbp managed source packages. I'd be nice to have patches to further improve this.

The main reason for not uploading new gbp yet is that I said at Debconf that I'll improve error recovery in gbp import-orig with the next or next next upload and that would be 0.7.1 latest. I did no get around to continue on this since Debconf though.

I supplied a patch for pbuilder's #802800 to allow building with -g

Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21 to unstable.