Debian Contributions: 2026-06
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.
Python 3.14 as default transition, by Stefano Rivera
Debian has had Python 3.13 and 3.14 in unstable and testing since December
2025, with Python 3.13 as the default version (/usr/bin/python3 = 3.13). This
gave time for packages to implement support and detect issues in their test suites.
A slot to transition to 3.14 as default was requested from the release team
in March, and they indicated that we would
likely be able to schedule it in late June. In preparation, Stefano reviewed the
open bugs against Python interpreters and squashed some in uploads of the latest
point releases of Python: 3.13.14
and 3.14.6. Also in
June, Python 3.15.0 beta 2
and beta 3 released.
Stefano uploaded these to Debian experimental.
The 3.15 betas were reason to attempt to revive review
of a blocked upstream patch to
support Debian multiarch in stable ABI Python extensions, now that Python 3.15
is adding a new stable ABI abi3t.
DebConf 26 preparations, by Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rincón and Anupa Ann Joseph
DebConf 26, the annual Debian Developer Conference, is being held in Santa Fe, Argentina, in July. Stefano Rivera, Antonio Terceiro, Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano and Anupa Ann Joseph contributed to the preparations for the event.
- As usual, Stefano has been supporting the conference website and registration, helping the local team to get accurate data on attendee numbers.
- Antonio has been supporting the conference website and helping the content team to put together the conference schedule.
- Santiago has been helping the local team on different topics regarding logistics.
- Anupa assisted with the accommodation arrangements for DebCamp and DebConf, working alongside Nattie.
- Lucas has been coordinating the conference schedule and communicating with some speakers.
debvm, by Helmut Grohne
The debvm tool used for creating and
running ephemeral virtual machines saw a number of small improvements. The
requirement of having a filesystem label has been removed in favor of using a
uuid and /etc/fstab is no longer created. A memory balloon is enabled by
default and this enables qemu to automatically release free guest memory to the
host. Booting Ubuntu VMs regressed as a result of their use of uutils and has
been fixed. The --architecture flag is back to be able to better support Hurd,
which is a work-in-progress of Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Thanks to
Jochen Sprickerhof, you can more easily create VMs for autopkgtest-virt-qemu
using --hook-dir=/usr/share/mmdebstrap/hooks/autopkgtest-create-qemu. There
also are a few documentation and error message improvements. All of this is
pending in git waiting to be uploaded once development slows down. While booting
a machine from virtiofsd succeeded, turning the proof-of-concept into
production remains for later.
pconr, by Helmut Grohne
At DebConf25,
Helmut reported on a schroot
substitute called unschroot. The second iteration uses varlink
IPC to construct a container. That varlink API is now separated into a new
project called programmable container runtime.
It is meant to provide more flexibility in constructing containers than
established solutions such as the unshare command from util-linux, bubblewrap
or podman provide while still managing repetitive complexity such as process
orchestration for the developer. A new example that uses this infrastructure is
a better containment for mmdebstrap
eliminating chroot escape. There also is an
asyncvarlink/0.3.2 release
taking steps to become more maintainable in Debian to eventually get pconr into
Debian.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Stefano did routine uploads (mostly new upstream versions) of
python-pip,python-pipx,hatchling,dh-python,beautifulsoup4,python-virtualenv,python-mitogen. - Stefano uploaded a snowball mini-transition:
snowball,snowball-data, andpystemmer - Stefano did some debian.net team admin, setting up a container and later a VM for vote.debian.net.
- Stefano responded to a semi-escalation to the Debian Technical Committee, after some communication between an upstream, a bug reporter, and a Debian package maintainer went sideways and got heated.
- Emilio managed several transitions, and filed bugs against the few remaining GCC 13 rdeps.
- Antonio did salsa maintenance work, debugging service issues, approving user registrations, and processing support requests.
- Antonio worked on Debian CI maintenance, including but not limited to deploying new armhf and armel workers, fixing bugs and preparing an upcoming release of debci.
- Antonio did several maintenance tasks for MiniDebConf websites.
- Antonio uploaded ruby-bunny, ruby-sinatra and ruby-mustermann, fixing a few FTBFS bugs among them.
- Carles using
po-debconf-manager: Reviewed Catalan translations for 5 packages, submitted 6 packages. Added a draft blog/update about the po-debconf-manager project. - Carles submitted a new Geeqie Catalan translation: it had accumulated a large number of untranslated strings over the last 4 years.
- Carles contributed to the Debian wiki: improved documentation for the Framework Laptop and added a new section “Battery charging control” (after doing some debugging and testing). He wrote a page about Signal Desktop. Carles started looking at testing/documenting Mailman2 -> Mailman3 migration.
- Carles, in relation to the migration process, double checked old pages without relevant information in the Debian wiki.
- Thorsten did another upload of package hplip to fix some bugs.
- In the context of the Google Summer of Code 2026 project, Santiago continued co-mentoring Aryan Karamtoth, who is working on the Linux live-patching project. As part of the team, Santiago guided Aryan to help design the different workflows and to study the different tools available, including the upstream klp-build (that was introduced in v6.19), and compare it with SUSE’s klp-build.
- Colin clarified the bug tracking system’s documentation to indicate that maintainers may sometimes reasonably ask users to file bugs upstream themselves.
- Colin fixed 15 packages for pytest 9.1.
- Colin fixed a depthcharge-tools regression with Python 3.14 as default that broke debian-installer builds.
- Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts and correspond about them.
- Helmut wrote patches for strace to enable cross building and a 32bit personality on arm64.
- Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap working fixing build failures in fontconfig, gettext and sqlite3 as well as changing the way packages from gcc builds are installed to better serve a need reported by Samuel Thibault.