Debian Contributions: 2025-09

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.

Updating old Debian Printing software to meet C23 requirements, by Thorsten Alteholz

The work of Thorsten fell under the motto “gcc15”. Due to the introduction of gcc15 in Debian, the default language version was changed to C23. This means that for example, function declarations without parameters are no longer allowed. As old software, which was created with ANSI C (or C89) syntax, made use of such function declarations, it was a busy month. One could have used something like -std=c17 as compile flags, but this would have just postponed the tasks. As a result Thorsten uploaded modernized versions of ink, nm2ppa and rlpr for the Debian printing team.

Work done to decommission packages.qa.debian.org, by Raphaël Hertzog

Raphaël worked to decommission the old package tracking system (packages.qa.debian.org). After figuring out that it was still receiving emails from the bug tracking system (bugs.debian.org), from multiple debian lists and from some release team tools, he reached out to the respective teams to either drop those emails or adjust them so that they are sent to the current Debian Package Tracker (tracker.debian.org).

rebootstrap uses *-for-host, by Helmut Grohne

Architecture cross bootstrapping is an ongoing effort that has shaped Debian in various ways over the years. A longer effort to express toolchain dependencies now bears fruit. When cross compiling, it becomes important to express what architecture one is compiling for in Build-Depends. As these packages have become available in “trixie”, more and more packages add this extra information and in August, the libtool package gained a gfortran-for-host dependency. It was the first package in the essential build closure to adopt this and required putting the pieces together in rebootstrap that now has to build gcc-defaults early on. There still are hundreds of packages whose dependencies need to be updated though.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Raphaël dropped the “Build Log Scan” integration in tracker.debian.org since it was showing stale data for a while as the underlying service has been discontinued.
• Emilio updated pixman to 0.46.4.
• Emilio coordinated several transitions, and NMUed guestfs-tools to unblock one.
• Stefano uploaded Python 3.14rc3 to Debian unstable. It’s not yet used by any packages, but it allows testing the level of support in packages to begin.
• Stefano upgraded almost all of the debian-social infrastructure to Debian “trixie”.
• Stefano published the sponsorship brochures for DebConf 26.
• Stefano attended the Debian Technical Committee meeting.
• Stefano uploaded routine upstream updates for a handful of Python packages (pycparser, beautifulsoup4, platformdirs, pycparser, python-authlib, python-cffi, python-mitogen, python-resolvelib, python-super-collections, twine).
• Stefano reviewed and responded to DebConf 25 feedback.
• Stefano investigated and fixed a request visibility bug in debian-reimbursements (for admin-altered requests).
• Lucas reviewed a couple of merge requests from external contributors for Go and Ruby packages.
• Lucas updated some ruby packages to its latest upstream version (thin, passenger, and puma is still WIP).
• Lucas set up the build environment to run rebuilds of reverse dependencies of ruby using ruby3.4. As an alternative, he is looking for personal repositories provided by Debusine to perform this task more easily. This is the preparation for the transition to ruby3.4 as the default in Debian.
• Lucas helped on the next round of the Outreachy internship program.
• Helmut sent patches for 30 cross build failures and responded to cross building support questions on the mailing list.
• Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap. As gcc version 15 became the default, test jobs for version 14 had to be dropped. A fair number of patches were applied to packages and could be dropped.
• Helmut resumed removing RC-buggy packages from unstable and sponsored a termrec upload to avoid its deletion. This work was paused to give packages some time to migrate to “forky”.
• Santiago reviewed different merge requests created by different contributors. Those MRs include a new test to build reverse dependencies, created by Aquila Macedo as part of his GSoC internship; restore how lintian was used in experimental, thanks Otto Kekäläinen; and the fix by Christian Bayle to support again extra repositories in deb822-style sources, whose support was broken with the move to sbuild+unshare last month.
• While doing some new upstream release updates, thanks to Debusine’s reverse dependencies autopkgtest checks, Santiago discovered that paramiko 4.0 will introduce a regression in libcloud by the drop of support for the obsolete DSA keys. Santiago finally uploaded to unstable both paramiko 4.0, and a regression fix for libcloud.
• Santiago has taken part in different discussions and meetings for the preparation of DebConf 26. The DebConf 26 local team aims to prepare for the conference with enough time in advance.
• Carles kept working on the missing-package-relations and reporting missing Recommends. He improved the tooling to detect and report bugs creating 269 bugs and followed up comments. 37 bugs have been resolved, others acknowledged. The missing Recommends are a mixture of packages that are gone from Debian, packages that changed name, typos and also packages that were recommended but are not packaged in Debian.
• Carles improved the missing-package-relations to report broken Suggests only for packages that used to be in Debian but are removed from it now. No bugs have been created yet for this case but identified 1320 of them.
• Colin spent much of the month chasing down build/test regressions in various Python packages due to other upgrades, particularly relating to pydantic, python-pytest-asyncio, and rust-pyo3.
• Colin optimized some code in ubuntu-dev-tools (affecting e.g. pull-debian-source) that made O(1) HTTP requests when it could instead make O(n).
• Anupa published Micronews as part of Debian Publicity team work.

by Anupa Ann Joseph 14 Oct, 2025 . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 943 Words.