Debian Contributions: 2025-06

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.

unschroot, by Helmut Grohne

Quite a while back, the sbuild maintainers added the unshare backend to enable better isolation of builds, but in doing so sbuild now effectively bundles a container runtime. unschroot is an attempt to separate containment from sbuild by implementing the same features and more in a schroot-compatible way. Last year, vague feature parity was achieved, but going beyond required changing the model from keeping state in the filesystem to keeping Linux namespaces as session state. A proof of concept is now available. While it still has sharp corners, it enables building packages on a squashfs with an overlayfs or id-mapped bind mounting of your ccache neither of which is possible with sbuild’s unshare backend. There shall be a DebConf25 presentation about this work.

DebConf 25, by Stefano Rivera, Santiago Ruano Rincón and Lucas Kanashiro

DebConf 25 is now under way in Brest, France. Santiago is part of the “local” team running the event, and Stefano Rivera is part of the DebConf committee, supporting the event, as well as the video team. Both have spent considerable time in the last month, getting things ready for DebConf. Lucas Kanashiro built the schedule for DebConf 25. Also followed-up on multiple requests from speakers and stakeholders.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles did general maintenance on simplemonitor, qnetload and qdacco packages; provided simplemonitor upstream feedback on new feature.
• Carles’s updates about po-debconf-manager: prepared for DebCamp/DebConf, used it for reviewing and merging different packages. Also fixed multispeech po-debconf templates.
• Colin Watson found a crash in pterm (PuTTY’s terminal emulator) when running in a Wayland session, and backported the resulting upstream fix to trixie.
• Colin responded to an upstream groff bug report about URLs being dropped from PDF output in some cases on Debian, and backported the fix to trixie.
• Helmut dealt with issues related to /usr-move. Most prominently Christian Hofstaedler reported an upgrade failure. /usr-move is a contributing factor here as that’s what caused systemd to upgrade a number of Breaks and Replaces to Conflicts. dumat needed some help with dropping mips64el from testing and Theodore Ts’o forwarded a fuse2fs upgrade failure.
• Helmut sent patches for 25 cross build failures.
• Helmut debugged rebootstrap failures and worked around build failures related to gcc-15 when they had patches and sent ones otherwise.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups to fix a FTBFS-bug. This bug was introduced by a change in systemd, which bumped the maximum number of open files. This resulted in a longer test duration that triggered a timeout so that the build failed. Thorsten also uploaded mtink and lprng, which got new translation files.
• Lucas Kanashiro followed-up on multiple unblock requests for ruby packages due to reproducible builds fixes. All of them were accepted into trixie.
• Lucas Kanashiro discussed license issues with upstream involving Redis 8 new license and the possibility of backporting patches to old versions with a different license. Outcome is that upstream is adding a new paragraph to their license to allow the backport for security fixes.
• Lucas Kanashiro fixed multiple CVEs reported against valkey in unstable and trixie.
• Lucas Kanashiro gave a Debian packaging course of 8 hours for students at a free software development course at the University of Sao Paulo.
• Lucas Kanashiro fixed a couple of cross building issues in the ruby ecosystem with Helmut’s help.
• Lucas Kanashiro is working on a debci fix for #1107645 (ongoing).
• Stefano Rivera updated python-mitogen to the latest beta releases with upstream support for Ansible 12.
• Stefano Rivera spent some time winding up DebConf 24 books.
• Stefano Rivera fixed packages that were blocking cPython 3.13.5 from migrating to trixie, and filed an unblock request.
• Stefano Rivera investigated a regression in cPython 3.13 that was breaking OpenStack Nova. There is a patch in progress for cPython, but it is not ready for use, yet.
• Santiago reviewed different MRs in Salsa CI. For example, the MR !605 proposed by Aquila that aims to introduce a new debdiff job, as well as the autopkgtest MR !33 to extend the support to architectures other than amd64. Also reviewed MR !611 by Aayush Raj that fixes the autopkgtest images cleanup. And the MR !614, prepared by Charles, to change the suffix name used to bump the version used in the pipeline.
• Anupa procured supplies needed for the DebConf ID tag for the DebConf registration team and co-ordinated its transport to the venue.
• Anupa joined Nattie to complete the registration team tasks.

by Anupa Ann Joseph 12 Jul, 2025 . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 772 Words.