Debian Contributions: 2026-09
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.
DebConf site visit, by Stefano Rivera
In preparation for DebConf 27, Stefano Rivera, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, and Jongmin Kim from the DebConf Committee visited Asahikawa Japan. A contingent of the local team gathered to tour the venues with us, discuss plans, and meet the local organizations assisting the event. We held a press conference at the city hall that got some coverage. A few potential day-trip options were explored. Photos from the site visit.
autopkgtest-virt-pconr, by Helmut Grohne
Following the creation of the pconr module that provides a basis for unschroot and a more secure containment for mmdebstrap, an experimental autopkgtest backend autopkgtest-virt-pconr is now available. It fits a spot between autopkgtest-virt-unshare and more fully fledged containers as it does not require much infrastructure like setting up incus or lxc but still provides a containment running an initsystem. Due to the use of erofs as base image format, it boots and reverts quickly. This development also required fixing concurrency issues in asyncvarlink and even shed light on a matching bug in systemd that was promptly fixed upstream.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Carles reviewed and submitted six Catalan po-debconf translations using po-debconf-manager. Improved po-debconf-manager’s workflow for updating translations.
- Carles reviewed, translated or updated webwml Catalan translations for security and CD pages. He also fixed issues that prevented building webwml, deleted orphaned translation pages, etc. and experimented with a more global HTML tidying up experiment.
- Carles refactored check-relations adding capacity to ignore concrete from_package -> to_package specific relations and more flexibility around ignores. Detects unused ignore rules as well.
- Carles improved some Wiki pages (LibreOffice, Framework amongst some other ones)
- Thorsten did an hplip upload to replace an expired certificate of HP. This certificate is used to sign new upstream releases and modules that can be downloaded later. Afterwards work on a new upstream version started.
- Thorsten also struggles with autopkgtest problems of the new upstream version of cups. Work is still ongoing.
- Antonio loaded the video recording URLs into the MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026 website, and deployed the website for MiniDebConf Curitiba 2027 (still very early work in progress at this point).
- Antonio uploaded debci 4.3, autodep8 0.31, gem2deb 2.2.10, ruby-sass 3.7.4-7, init-system-helpers 1.69+nmu2 and 1.69+nmu3.
- Antonio worked on several topics around Debian CI maintenance, reliability and performance.
- Stefano updated the autopkgtests for cPython packages in Debian to support setuptools 80.
- Stefano uploaded pypy 8.
- Stefano helped to get DebConf 26 reimbursement claims processed, and worked on some of the resulting issues in debian-reimbursements.
- Emilio managed various transitions.
- Emilio worked on the rustc-web/trixie bootstrap for armel, using the rustc 1.95 version from trixie-backports. This will be needed by the upcoming clamav security updates.
- Helmut sent patches for 11 cross build failures.
- Helmut introduced a new build profile to libcap-ng to keep architecture cross bootstrap working.
- Helmut uploaded debvm_0.5.5 introducing support for Hurd thanks to a lot of work by Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues.
- Colin worked with OpenSSH upstream to reduce the linkage of /usr/sbin/sshd, hardening it a little further.
- Colin upgraded to new security releases of groff and parted.
- Colin upgraded 50 Python packages to new upstream versions, and fixed over 40 RC bugs in the Python team.
- Santiago continued mentoring Aryan Karamtoth with the GSoC project about introducing livepatching support for linux. This mentoring is done in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias. In particular, Santiago explored different requirements for providing binary modules for the same kernel packages used by Debian, that require a matching version number.
- Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the files for point release announcement for Debian 13.7.