Debian Contributions: 2026-02

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.

DebConf 26 Registration, by Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, and Santiago Ruano Rincón

DebConf 26, to be held in Santa Fe Argentina in July, has opened for registration and event proposals. Stefano, Antonio, and Santiago all contributed to making this happen.

As always, some changes needed to be made to the registration system. Bigger changes were planned, but we ran out of time to implement them for DebConf 26. All 3 of us have had experience in hosting local DebConf events in the past and have been advising the DebConf 26 local team.

Debian CI improvements, by Antonio Terceiro

Debian CI is the platform responsible for automated testing of packages from the Debian archive, and its results are used by the Debian Release team automation as Quality Assurance to control the migration of packages from Debian unstable into testing, the base for the next Debian release. Antonio started developing an incus backend, and that prompted two rounds of improvements to the platform, including but not limited to allowing user to select a job execution backend (lxc, qemu) during the job submission, reducing the part of testbed image creation that requires superuser privileges and other refactorings and bug fixes. The platform API was also improved to reduce disruption when reporting results to the Release Team automation after service downtimes. Last, but not least, the platform now has support for testing packages against variants of autopkgtest, which will allow the Debian CI team to test new versions of autopkgtest before making releases to avoid widespread regressions.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles improved po-debconf-manager while users requested features / found bugs. Improvements done - add packages from “unstable” instead of just salsa.debian.org, upgrade and merge templates of upgraded packages, finished adding typing annotations, improved deleting packages: support multiple line texts, add –debug to see “subprocess.run” commands, etc.
• Carles, using po-debconf-manager, reviewed 7 Catalan translations and sent bug reports or MRs for 11 packages. Also reviewed the translations of fortunes-debian-hints and submitted possible changes in the hints.
• Carles submitted MRs for reportbug (reportbug --ui gtk detecting the wrong dependencies), devscript (delete unused code from debrebuild and add recommended dependency), wcurl (format –help for 80 columns). Carles submitted a bug report for apt not showing the long descriptions of packages.
• Carles resumed effort for checking relations (e.g. Recommends / Suggests) between Debian packages. A new codebase (still in early stages) was started with a new approach in order to detect, report and track the broken relations.
• Emilio drove several transitions, most notably the haskell transition and the glibc/gcc-15/zlib transition for the s390 31-bit removal. This last one included reviewing and requeueing lots of autopkgtests due to britney losing a lot of results.
• Emilio reviewed and uploaded poppler updates to experimental for a new transition.
• Emilio reviewed, merged and deployed some performance improvements proposed for the security-tracker.
• Stefano prepared routine updates for pycparser, python-confuse, python-cffi, python-mitogen, python-pip, wheel, platformdirs, python-authlib, and python-virtualenv.
• Stefano updated Python 3.13 and 3.14 to the latest point releases, including security updates, and did some preliminary work for Python 3.15.
• Stefano reviewed changes to dh-python and merged MRs.
• Stefano did some debian.social sysadmin work, bridging additional IRC channels to Matrix.
• Stefano and Antonio, as DebConf Committee Members, reviewed the DebConf 27 bids and took part in selecting the Japanese bid to host DebConf 27.
• Helmut sent patches for 29 cross build failures.
• Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap addressing issues relating to specific architectures (such as musl-linux-any, hurd-any or s390x) or specific packages (such as binutils, brotli or fontconfig).
• Helmut worked on diagnosing bugs such as rocblas #1126608, python-memray #1126944 upstream and greetd #1129070 with varying success.
• Antonio provided support for multiple MiniDebConfs whose websites run wafer + wafer-debconf (the same stack as DebConf itself).
• Antonio fixed the salsa tagpending webhook.
• Antonio sent specinfra upstream a patch to fix detection of Debian systems in some situations.
• Santiago reviewed some Merge Requests for the Salsa CI pipeline, including !703 and !704, that aim to improve how the build source job is handled by Salsa CI. Thanks a lot to Jochen for his work on this.
• In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago proposed a couple of projects for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026 round. Santiago has been reviewing applications and giving feedback to candidates.
• Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of ipp-usb, brlaser and gutenprint.
• Raphaël updated publican to fix an old bug that became release critical and that happened only when building with the nocheck profile. Publican is a build dependency of the Debian’s Administrator Handbook and with that fix, the package is back into testing.
• Raphaël implemented a small feature in Debusine that makes it possible to refer to a collection in a parent workspace even if a collection with the same name is present in the current workspace.
• Lucas updated the current status of ruby packages affecting the Ruby 3.4 transition after a bunch of updates made by team members. He will follow up on this next month.
• Lucas joined the Debian orga team for GSoC this year and tried to reach out to potential mentors.
• Lucas did some content work for MiniDebConf Campinas - Brazil.
• Colin published minor security updates to “bookworm” and “trixie” for CVE-2025-61984 and CVE-2025-61985 in OpenSSH, both of which allowed code execution via ProxyCommand in some cases. The “trixie” update also included a fix for mishandling of PerSourceMaxStartups.
• Colin spotted and fixed a typo in the bug tracking system’s spam-handling rules, which in combination with a devscripts regression caused bts forwarded commands to be discarded.
• Colin ported 12 more Python packages away from using the deprecated (and now removed upstream) pkg_resources module.
• Anupa is co-organizing MiniDebConf Kanpur with Debian India team. Anupa was responsible for preparing the schedule, publishing it on the website, co-ordination with the fiscal host in addition to attending meetings.
• Anupa attended the Debian Publicity team online sprint which was a skill sharing session.

by Anupa Ann Joseph 10 Mar, 2026 . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 1018 Words.