Debian Contributions: 2025-05

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.

Updated Austin, by Colin Watson and Helmut Grohne

Austin is a frame stack sampling profiler for Python. It allows profiling Python applications without instrumenting them while losing some accuracy in the process, and is the only one of its kind presently packaged for Debian. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been uploaded in a while and hence the last Python version it worked with was 3.8. We updated it to a current version and also dealt with a number of architecture-specific problems (such as unintended sign promotion, 64bit time_t fallout and strictness due to -Wformat-security ) in cooperation with upstream. With luck, it will migrate in time for trixie.

Preparing for DebConf 25, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rincón

DebConf 25 is quickly approaching, and the organization work doesn’t stop. In May, Stefano continued supporting the different teams. Just to give a couple of examples, Stefano made changes in DebConf 25 website to make BoF and sprints submissions public, so interested people can already know if a BoF or sprint for a given subject is planned, allowing coordination with the proposer; or to enhance how statistics are made public to help the work of the local team.

Santiago has participated in different tasks, including the logistics of the conference, like preparing more information about the public transportation that will be available. Santiago has also taken part in activities related to fundraising and reviewing more event proposals.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Lucas fixed security issues in Valkey in unstable.
• Lucas tried to help with the update of Redis to version 8 in unstable. The package hadn’t been updated for a while due to licensing issues, but now upstream maintainers fixed them.
• Lucas uploaded around 20 ruby-* packages to unstable that weren’t updated for some years to make them build reproducible. Thanks to reproducible builds folks to point out those issues. Also some unblock requests (and follow-ups) were needed to make them reach trixie in time for the release.
• Lucas is organizing a Debian Outreach session for DebConf 25, reaching out to all interns of Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs from the last year. The session will be presented by in-person interns and also video recordings from the interns interested in participating but did not manage to attend the conference.
• Lucas continuously works on DebConf Content team tasks. Replying to speakers, sponsors, and communicating internally with the team.
• Carles improved po-debconf-manager: fixed bugs reported by Catalan translator, added possibility to import packages out of salsa, added using non-default project branches on salsa, polish to get ready for DebCamp.
• Carles tested new “apt” in trixie and reported bugs to “apt”, “installation-report”, “libqt6widget6”.
• Carles used po-debconf-manager and imported remaining 80 packages, reviewed 20 translations, submitted (MR or bugs) 54 translations.
• Carles prepared some topics for translation BoF in DebConf (gathered feedback, first pass on topics).
• Helmut gave an introductory talk about the mechanics of Linux namespaces at MiniDebConf Hamburg.
• Helmut sent 25 patches for cross compilation failures.
• Helmut reviewed, refined and applied a patch from Jochen Sprickerhof to make the Multi-Arch hinter emit more hints for pure Python modules.
• Helmut sat down with Christoph Berg (not affiliated with Freexian) and extended unschroot to support directory-based chroots with overlayfs. This is a feature that was lost in transitioning from sbuild’s schroot backend to its unshare backend. unschroot implements the schroot API just enough to be usable with sbuild and otherwise works a lot like the unshare backend. As a result, apt.postgresql.org now performs its builds contained in a user namespace.
• Helmut looked into a fair number of rebootstrap failures most of which related to musl or gcc-15 and imported patches or workarounds to make those builds proceed.
• Helmut updated dumat to use sqop fixing earlier PGP verification problems thanks to Justus Winter and Neal Walfield explaining a lot of sequoia at MiniDebConf Hamburg.
• Helmut got the previous zutils update for /usr-move wrong again and had to send another update.
• Helmut looked into why debvm’s autopkgtests were flaky and with lots of help from Paul Gevers and Michael Tokarev tracked it down to a race condition in qemu. He updated debvm to trigger the problem less often and also fixed a wrong dependency using Luca Boccassi’s patch.
• Santiago continued the switch to sbuild for Salsa CI (that was stopped for some months), and has been mainly testing linux, since it’s a complex project that heavily customizes the pipeline. Santiago is preparing the changes for linux to submit a MR soon.
• In openssh, Colin tracked down some intermittent sshd crashes to a root cause, and issued bookworm and bullseye updates for CVE-2025-32728.
• Colin spent some time fixing up fail2ban, mainly reverting a patch that caused its tests to fail and would have banned legitimate users in some common cases.
• Colin backported upstream fixes for CVE-2025-48383 (django-select2) and CVE-2025-47287 (python-tornado) to unstable.
• Stefano supported video streaming and recording for 2 miniDebConfs in May: Maceió and Hamburg. These had overlapping streams for one day, which is a first for us.
• Stefano packaged the new version of python-virtualenv that includes our patches for not including the wheel for wheel.
• Stefano got all involved parties to agree (in principle) to meet at DebConf for a mediated discussion on a dispute that was brought to the technical committee.
• Anupa coordinated the swag purchase for DebConf 25 with Juliana and Nattie.
• Anupa joined the publicity team meeting for discussing the upcoming events and BoF at DebConf 25.
• Anupa worked with the publicity team to publish Bits post to welcome GSoc 2025 Interns.

by Anupa Ann Joseph 11 Jun, 2025 . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 957 Words.