Debian Contributions: DebConf 25 preparations, PyPA tools updates, Removing libcrypt-dev from build-essential and more!

Debian Contributions: 2025-04

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.

DebConf 25 Preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rincón

DebConf 25 preparations continue. In April, the bursary team reviewed and ranked bursary applications. Santiago Ruano Rincón examined the current state of the conference’s finances, to see if we could allocate any more money to bursaries. Stefano Rivera supported the bursary team’s work with infrastructure and advice and added some metrics to assist Santiago’s budget review. Santiago was also involved in different parts of the organization, including Content team matters, as reviewing the first of proposals, preparing public information about the new Academic Track; or coordinating different aspects of the Day trip activities and the Conference Dinner.

PyPA tools updates, by Stefano Rivera

Around the beginning of the freeze (in retrospect, definitely too late) Stefano looked at updating setuptools in the archive to 78.1.0. This brings support for more comprehensive license expressions (PEP-639), that people are expected to adopt soon upstream. While the reverse-autopkgtests all passed, it all came with some unexpected complications, and turned into a mini-transition. The new setuptools broke shebangs for scripts (pypa/setuptools#4952).

It also required a bump of wheel to 0.46 and wheel 0.46 now has a dependency outside the standard library (it de-vendored packaging). This meant it was no longer suitable to distribute a standalone wheel.whl file to seed into new virtualenvs, as virtualenv does by default. The good news here is that setuptools doesn’t need wheel any more, it included its own implementation of the bdist_wheel command, in 70.1. But the world hadn’t adapted to take advantage of this, yet. Stefano scrambled to get all of these issues resolved upstream and in Debian:

We’re now at the point where python3-wheel-whl is no longer needed in Debian unstable, and it should migrate to trixie.

Removing libcrypt-dev from build-essential, by Helmut Grohne

The crypt function was originally part of glibc, but it got separated to libxcrypt. As a result, libc6-dev now depends on libcrypt-dev. This poses a cycle during architecture cross bootstrap. As the number of packages actually using crypt is relatively small, Helmut proposed removing the dependency. He analyzed an archive rebuild kindly performed by Santiago Vila (not affiliated with Freexian) and estimated the necessary changes. It looks like we may complete this with modifications to less than 300 source packages in the forky cycle. Half of the bugs have been filed at this time. They are tracked with libcrypt-* usertags.

Miscellaneous contributions

  • Carles uploaded a new version of simplemonitor.
  • Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci-team/pipeline regarding piuparts arguments.
  • Carles closed an FTBFS on gcc-15 on qnetload.
  • Carles worked on Catalan translations using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 57 translations and created their merge requests in salsa, created 59 bug reports for packages that didn’t merge in more than 30 days. Followed-up merge requests and comments in bug reports. Managed some translations manually for packages that are not in Salsa.
  • Lucas did some work on the DebConf Content and Bursary teams.
  • Lucas fixed multiple CVEs and bugs involving the upgrade from bookworm to trixie in ruby3.3.
  • Lucas fixed a CVE in valkey in unstable.
  • Stefano updated beautifulsoup4, python-authlib, python-html2text, python-packaging, python-pip, python-soupsieve, and unidecode.
  • Stefano packaged python-dependency-groups, a new vendored library in python-pip.
  • During an afternoon Bug Squashing Party in Montevideo, Santiago uploaded a couple of packages fixing RC bugs #1057226 and #1102487. The latter was a sponsored upload.
  • Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of brlaser, ptouch-driver and sane-airscan to get the latest upstream bug fixes into Trixie.
  • Raphaël filed an upstream bug on zim for a graphical glitch that he has been experiencing.
  • Colin Watson upgraded openssh to 10.0p1 (also known as 10.0p2), and debugged various follow-up bugs. This included adding riscv64 support to vmdb2 in passing, and enabling native wtmpdb support so that wtmpdb last now reports the correct tty for SSH connections.
  • Colin fixed dput-ng’s –override option, which had never previously worked.
  • Colin fixed a security bug in debmirror.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team: 21 packages upgraded to new upstream versions, 8 CVEs fixed, and about 25 release-critical bugs fixed.
  • Helmut filed patches for 21 cross build failures.
  • Helmut uploaded a new version of debvm featuring a new tool debefivm-create to generate EFI-bootable disk images compatible with other tools such as libvirt or VirtualBox. Much of the work was prototyped in earlier months. This generalizes mmdebstrap-autopkgtest-build-qemu.
  • Helmut continued reporting undeclared file conflicts and suggested package removals from unstable.
  • Helmut proposed build profiles for libftdi1 and gnupg2. To deal with recently added dependencies in the architecture cross bootstrap package set.
  • Helmut managed the /usr-move transition. He worked on ensuring that systemd would comply with Debian’s policy. Dumat continues to locate problems here and there yielding discussion occasionally. He sent a patch for an upgrade problem in zutils.
  • Anupa worked with the Debian publicity team to publish Micronews and Bits posts.
  • Anupa worked with the DebConf 25 content team to review talk and event proposals for DebConf 25.

par . Tags : debian-contributions, planet-debian, report , 913 Mots.