Debian Contributions: 2025-08
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.
Preparing for setup.py install deprecation, by Colin Watson
setuptools upstream will be removing the setup.py install command
on 31 October. While this may not trickle down immediately into Debian, it does
mean that in the near future nearly all Python packages will have to use
pybuild-plugin-pyproject (though they don’t necessarily have to use
pyproject.toml; this is just a question of how the packaging runs the build
system). Some of the Python team talked about this a bit at DebConf, and Colin
volunteered to write up some notes
on cases where this isn’t straightforward. This page will likely grow as the
team works on this problem.
Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
Santiago fixed some pending issues in the MR that moves the pipeline to sbuild+unshare, and after several months, Santiago was able to mark the MR as ready. Part of the recent fixes include handling external repositories, honoring the RELEASE autodetection from d/changelog (thanks to Ahmed Siam for spotting the main reason of the issue), and fixing a regression about the apt resolver for *-backports releases. Santiago is currently waiting for a final review and approval from other members of the Salsa CI team, and being able to merge it. Thanks to all the folks who have helped testing the changes or provided feedback so far. If you want to test the current MR, you need to include the following pipeline definition in your project’s CI config file:
---
include:
- https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/pipeline/raw/sbuild-unshare-02-salsa-ci/salsa-ci.yml
- https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/pipeline/raw/sbuild-unshare-02-salsa-ci/pipeline-jobs.yml
As a reminder, this MR will make the Salsa CI pipeline build the packages more similar to how it’s built by the Debian official builders. This will also save some resources, since the default pipeline will have one stage less (the provisioning) stage, and will make it possible for more projects to be built on salsa.debian.org (including large projects and those from the OCaml ecosystem), etc. See the different issues being fixed in the MR description.
Debian 13 “trixie” release, by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
On August 9th, Debian 13 “trixie” was released, building on two years worth of updates and bug fixes from hundreds of developers. Emilio helped coordinate the release, communicating with several teams involved in the process.
DebConf 26 Site Visit, by Stefano Rivera
Stefano visited Santa Fe, Argentina, the site for DebConf 26 next year. The aim of the visit was to help build a local team and see the conference venue first-hand. Stefano and Nattie represented the DebConf Committee. The local team organized Debian meetups in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, where Stefano presented a talk on Debian and DebConf. Venues were scouted and the team met with the university management and local authorities.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Raphaël updated tracker.debian.org after the “trixie” release to add the new “forky” release in the set of monitored distributions. He also reviewed and deployed the work of Scott Talbert showing open merge requests from salsa in the “action needed” panel.
- Raphaël reviewed some DEP-3 changes to modernize the embedded examples in light of the broad git adoption.
- Raphaël configured new workflows on debusine.debian.net to upload to “trixie” and trixie-security, and officially announced the service on debian-devel-announce, inviting Debian developers to try the service for their next upload to unstable.
- Carles created a merge request for django-compressor upstream to fix an error when concurrent node processing happened. This will allow removing a workaround added in openstack-dashboard and avoid the same bug in other projects that use django-compressor.
- Carles prepared a system to detect packages that
Recommendspackages which don’t exist in unstable. Processed (either reported or ignored due to mis-detected problems or temporary problems) 16% of the reports. Will continue next month. - Carles got familiar and gave feedback for the freedict-wikdict package. Planned contributions with the maintainer to improve the package.
- Helmut responded to queries related to
/usr-move. - Helmut adapted crossqa.d.n to the release of “trixie”.
- Helmut diagnosed sufficient failures in rebootstrap
to make it work with
gcc-15. - Helmut fixed the CI pipeline of debvm.
- Helmut sent patches for 19 cross build problems.
- Faidon discovered that the Multi-Arch hinter would emit confusing hints about
:anyannotations. Helmut identified the root cause to be the handling of virtual packages and fixed it. - Enrico took some dust off python-debiancontributors and prototyped a receiving end for salsa webpings, to start followup work to contributors.debian.org discussions at DebConf25.
- Colin upgraded about 70 Python packages to new upstream versions, which is around 10% of the backlog; this included a complicated Pydantic upgrade in collaboration with the Rust team.
- Colin fixed a bug in debbugs that caused incoming emails to bugs.debian.org with certain header contents to go missing.
- Thorsten uploaded sane-airscan, which was already in experimental, to unstable.
- Thorsten created a script to automate the upload of new upstream versions of foomatic-db. The database contains information about printers and regularly gets an update. Now it is possible to keep the package more up to date in Debian.
- Stefano prepared updates to almost all of his packages that had new versions waiting to upload to unstable. (beautifulsoup4, hatch-vcs, mkdocs-macros-plugin, pypy3, python-authlib, python-cffi, python-mitogen, python-pip, python-pipx, python-progress, python-truststore, python-virtualenv, re2, snowball, soupsieve).
- Stefano uploaded two new python3.13 point releases to unstable.
- Stefano updated distro-info-data in stable releases, to document the “trixie” release and expected EoL dates.
- Stefano did some debian.social sysadmin work (keeping up quotas with growing databases and filesystems).
- Stefano supported the Debian treasurers in processing some of the DebConf 25 reimbursements.
- Lucas uploaded ruby3.4 to experimental. It was already approved by FTP masters.
- Lucas uploaded ruby-defaults to experimental to add support for ruby3.4. It will allow us to start triggering test rebuilds and catch any FTBFS with ruby3.4.
- Lucas did some administrative work for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and replied to some queries from mentors and students.
- Anupa helped to organize release parties for Debian 13 and Debian Day events.
- Anupa did the live coverage for the Debian 13 release and prepared the Bits post for the release announcement and 32nd Debian Day as part of the Debian Publicity team.
- Anupa attended a Debian Day event organized by FOSS club SSET as a speaker.