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My Debian activities in July 2014

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.

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My Debian activities in June 2014

FTP assistant
With my FTP assistant hat on, I accepted 285 packages. 29 times I had to ask the maintainer a question or had to give a comment. Unfortunately I also had to reject 33 packages. Most of the time due to mistakes in debian/copyright. The review of NEW also resulted in about ten serious bugs in packages that had incomplete copyright information. Dear fellow developers and maintainers: please be more careful when you collect copyright and license information. The better you do your homework, the faster your package will pass NEW!

Squeeze LTS
I also started to contribute to Debian Squeeze-LTS. In June I uploaded security fixes for scheme48 and lxml. Freexian, a French company run by Debian Developer Raphaël Hertzog, started an initiative to establish LTS (Long Term Support) for Debian Squeeze. Via Freexian you can hire other Debian Developers who provide security updates for some more months. So if you still need a stable security support for Debian please consider joining the initiative and visit the Squeeze LTS website at Freexian.

Other packages
For my own packages I uploaded some new versions for different kinds of meep.

Support
If you would like to support my Debian work please 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.

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BOM: bug squashing and new versions during last three months

As announced in my previous DTPOM article the month of May should be a bug squashing month. As everything worked well, I used last three months to decrease the bug count in Debian packages. Unfortunately I don’t remeber everything, so this list might be incomplete:

  • Due to the help of T, who pointed me to a patch which was sent to the fpdns-user emaillist, bug 680077 disappeared.
  • All meep-* packages had a problem with include files installed in the wrong directory. So development of own programs was a bit difficult. This resulted in

    All bugs have been closed in Sid, but the release team doesn’t want to put it to stable!?

  • Package setserial had some open bugs. Most of them resulted from a strange concept of initializing the serial port and could be closed with just some explanations:
  • With the next upload of greylistd to experimental two bugs could be closed:
  • Two uploads of package uucp closed a few ‘simple’ and one RC bug:

Further I created packages for some new software versions:

  • all packages of the mgltools got a new version (1.5.7~rc1~cvs.20130519-1)
    autodocktools, mgltools-bhtree, mgltools-cadd, mgltools-dejavu, mgltools-geomutils, mgltools-gle, mgltools-mglutil, mgltools-molkit, mgltools-networkeditor, mgltools-opengltk, mgltools-pmv, mgltools-pyautodock, mgltools-pybabel, mgltools-pyglf, mgltools-scenario2, mgltools-sff, mgltools-support, mgltools-symserv, mgltools-utpackages, mgltools-viewerframework, mgltools-vision, mgltools-visionlibraries, mgltools-volume, mgltools-webservices

  • autodocksuite is now available in version 4.2.5.1-3
  • saint is now available in version 2.3.4+dfsg-2
  • I uploaded version 1.5.3-1 of python-cogent, but meanwhile even version 1.5.3-2 is available
  • gcal got an update to version 3.6.3-2
  • epigrass got an update to version 2.2.2-2, unfortunately in that version it depends on python-sqlsoup, which is still in the NEW-queue. Thus this package got an RC bug …

From my point of view 17 closed bugs and 29 updated packages within three months are a pretty good result.

The next month will be characterized by solving all problems with epigrass (and of course python-sqlsoup), mgltools-cadd (there must be a better version hidden somewhere in the sources that needs to be activated somehow) and mgltools-sff (why doesn’t it migrate to testing?). Further the TODO-list of the Debian Med UDD needs to become smaller.

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DTPOM: lots of stuff for Debian Med

April has been the month of new packages. I had a look at the task list of Debian Med and tried to finish some (older) packages or created some new ones.

Finally the following packages made it first to “unstable” and after the release of Wheezy, they migrated to “testing” as well:
– uc-echo – error correction algorithm designed for short-reads from NGS
– python-clips – Python module to interface the CLIPS expert system shell library
– visionegg – Python library for 2D/3D visual stimulus generation
– qrisk2 – cardiovascular disease risk calculator

Further there are still some packages waiting in the NEW-queue
– treeview – Java re-implementation of Michael Eisen’s TreeView
– proalign – Probabilistic multiple alignment program

The month of May will be under the banner of bug fixing and new upstream releases. But in case any other package shall be part of Debian, just send an email to blog@alteholz.eu.

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DOPOM: scheme48 – A simple, modular, and lightweight Scheme implementation

Some years ago I heard about Scheme and was fascinated by the (at that time at least for me) strange syntax. As this was not yet the time of WWW, I even bought a book to learn more about it.
Unfortunately priorities changed and I needed to spend my time on other things. As I now found that orphaned package I would like to give it a second try and at least keep it rolling.

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Debian Med advent calendar

I would like to anounce the Debian Med advent calendar 2012. Just like last year the Debian Med team starts a bug squashing event from the December 1st to 24th. Every day at least one bug from the Debian BTS should be closed. Especially RC bugs for the oncoming Debian release (Wheezy) or bugs in one of the packages maintained by Debian Med shall be closed. Anyone shall be called upon to fix a bug or send a patch. Don’t hestitate, start to squash :-).

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DOPOM: a56 – Motorola DSP56001 assembler

Since I first looked at the list of orphaned Debian packages (available at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned) some time ago, the package a56 has been the lonely leader of the list.

This package contains a freeware assembler for the 56000 architecture. These chips have been very popular in the 1980s (used in NeXT, Atari Falcon and SGI Indigo Workstations).
Updated versions are still used in today’s devices like some mobile phones (-> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=563XXGPDSP)

So, being a bit nostalgic, I adopted this package and brought it to shape. There was even a small bug that I was able to close.

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BOM: overflow in ent

Recently I got a bug report for package ent. The internal counter of processed bytes has just type long. In case you feed enough bytes to ent, there will be an overflow after about half an hour (of course that depends on your type of CPU, the bug was reported on architecture i386).

As modern C (C99) introduced a new type long long, I changed the type of some variables from simple long to unsigned long long. The overflow disappeared for now, but it will reappear just some trillion bytes later.

So, are there any recommendations on how to handle such a situation better?

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DSOM: vera++ – Programmable verification and analysis tool for C++

This software is a programmable tool for verification, analysis and transformation of C++ source code.
It is mainly an engine that parses C++ source files and presents the result of this parsing to scripts in the form of various collections. Afterwards the scripts are actually performing the requested tasks.

This is a link to the Debian PTS page.

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DOPOM: greylistd – Greylisting daemon for use with Exim 4

I was really amazed that a package like greylistd does not have an active  maintainer anymore.

Further looking at popcon, this package is only installed on just a few computers. The reason might be that it is only installed on servers that do not take part in popcon.

Anyway, this package needs a maintainer and here I am.

My first upload to ‘experimental’ mainly takes care of lintian warnings and closes a few bugs:

  • #375504: don’t expire entries every check:  the fix was contributed by Steven A. Reisman and verified by Jason  Cormie.
  • #585231: do not use Python strings exceptions anymore

The next step will be to take care of bugs with patches and than reduce the number of other bugs.

Please feel free to help fixing bugs or volunteer for becoming a comaintainer :-).

Here you can find the PTS page.