FTP assistant
This month I was able to accept 237 packages, 27 times I contacted the maintainer to ask a question about a package and 40 times I had to reject a package. Additionally I needed to file nine serious bugs.
In the light of recent events I want to make clear that there is no automatism to create such bugs. They are all handmade and you can be quite sure that there are no false positives but only real issues.
The highlight of this month has been my first patch to dak, the software which is used to manage the Debian archive. Well, it was just a patch of an email template but at least it closes Bug #754805. Now the new Debian tracker at https://tracker.debian.org/ (a replacement for the Debian Package Tracking system (PTS)) is able to detect in which suite new uploads appear.
Squeeze LTS
This month the initiative to support Squeeze LTS, which was started by Freexian, got some momentum. I would like to thank every sponsor of this initiative (please see a list at
the Freexian LTS page) and of course Raphael Hertzog for organizing everything.
All in all I got assigned a workload of 10.5h for July. I spent these hours to upload new versions of tiff, libxml2, php5 and fail2ban. I prepared these uploads on the basis of the corresponding DSAs for Wheezy. So most of the time the patches for all CVEs could be applied smoothly and only line numbers had to be adjusted. For a few CVEs the difference between the code in Squeeze and Wheezy was too huge and things became more difficult. Luckily all CVEs contained good descriptions of what was wrong, so at the end I could find solutions for all security fixes. In this context I am a bit sad about the feedback on the Debian LTS mailing list. I had hoped to get more responses to my calls to test packages before uploading them to the archive. Of course I do some testing on my own, but I am sure I don’t cover all use cases.
I also used some time to fix the information in the security tracker. Three CVEs for dbus were marked as relevant for Squeeze, but the corresponding code didn’t exist in the Squeeze version.
Anyway, this was a lot of fun and I definitely want to be part of that initiative in the future.
Other packages
I tried to fix #752401 of net-dns-fingerprint. Unfortunately the new version does not really work and upstream is a bit silent.
Support
If you would like to support my Debian work you could either be part of the Freexian initiative (see above) or consider to send some bitcoins to 1JHnNpbgzxkoNexeXsTUGS6qUp5P88vHej. Contact me at donation@alteholz.eu if you prefer another way to donate. Every kind of support is most appreciated.