My Debian Activities in May 2024

FTP master

This month I accepted 347 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 348.

Debian LTS

This was my hundred-nineteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

  • [#1070154] bullseye-pu: qtbase-opensource-src/5.15.2+dfsg-9+deb11u1 package upload
  • [#1064550] bullseye-pu: libjwt 1.10.2-1+deb11u1 has been marked for accept
  • [#1067544] bullseye-pu: libmicrohttpd 0.9.72-2+deb11u1 has been marked for accept

I also continued to work on tiff and last but not least did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.

Unfortunately I used lots of time to debug an issue with nghttp2. Please see my odyssey below.

Debian ELTS

This month was the seventieth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

  • [ELA-1104-1-1]nghttp2 security update for one CVEs to fix an DoS resulting from bad handling of CONTINUATION frames in Stretch

For some tests I installed the new nghttp2 package on my Stretch VM and started the daemon. Unfortunately I got an unexpected error from getaddrinfo() about ai_socktype not supported. The daemon was configured to listen on lo, the device was available, but the error remained. I was pretty sure that my patch was not the reason for this and indeed the unpatched version showed this error as well. I didn’t want to release an untested package, so nghttp2 had to start at least! Therefore I built a minimal example to reproduce the issue. getaddrinfo() failed for hints.ai_socktype=SOCK_STREAM and a numerical IP address. Having no hints at all or “localhost” instead of “127.0.0.1” made the error disappear (as a remark: “localhost” resolves to 127.0.0.1, the ipv6 variant is “ip6-localhost”). I could see that in nghttp2 as well. Configuring it with “localhost” let the error vanish but the daemon still exited due to other reasons. After some time of debugging, I added another network interface to my VM and configured it with a dummy IPv4 address. Voila, everything worked as expected. According to Wikipedia, IPv6 was ratified as standard in 2017 and Stretch was also released in 2017. No wonder that a IPv6-only-VM had problems back then and these problems survived to the present.

I also continued to work on an update for tiff in Jessie and Stretch, did a week of FD and attended the LTS/ELTS meeting.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of:

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

Debian Mobcom

Due to more and more problems with time_t, I removed osmo-iuh and all dependencies from armel, armhf and i386, sorry. If there is really anybody using this software on 32-bit architectures don’t hesitate to get in touch.

It is official now, the GSoC student working on the Mobcom packages is Nathan Doris. He already finished the hardest part of the job and I could upload the latest version of libosmocore. I really enjoy working with him and look forward to a pleasant SoC :-).

misc

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

Did I already mention that I love lists with topics I can work on. I print out such lists and enjoy checking off one after the other. End of May Helmut told me that I am a bit lazy and gave me such a list with all my packages that have one or the other issue with /usr-move. Most of the uploads above are packages on that list and I could check off a lot :-).