Debian Contributions: 2026-10
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 3.15 transition, by Stefano Rivera with a little help from Colin Watson
Debian has started the transition to add Python 3.15 as a supported version alongside 3.14, which is still the default version. Stefano uploaded Python 3.15.0 final to unstable.
Maximiliano Curia has been test-rebuilding the archive in Debusine with Python 3.15 as a supported version and prepared some patches to dh-python to smooth over some common failure points. Stefano reviewed these MRs, applying some and implementing alternative approaches for some of the issues.
Debian only has multiple supported Python versions during the transition to a new version, and typically this shows up some bugs in packages. This time was no different, the common failure was many packages that installed intermediate build artifacts into the Python module tree. Some of these artifacts would differ between Python versions. We decided to detect both of these and fail the package build, rather than silently ship garbage in the binary packages. Colin helped to fix quite a bit of the build fallout from this.
OpenSSH GSS-API package split improvements, by Colin Watson
The recent GSS-API package split has largely gone relatively smoothly, but there was a subtle problem for people switching from one variant to the other: installing the replacement packages followed by purging the old one would cause some configuration files to disappear. Colin fixed this, and also reviewed and merged some autopkgtest contributions from Andreas Hasenack to make sure that this doesn’t regress in future.
Miscellaneous contributions
- Carles, using check-relations, investigated and reported 52 bugs for packages which have Recommended packages that are not available in Debian anymore. Followed up bugs on the topic.
- Carles added support to check-relations to detect Recommends that recommend a transitional package.
- Carles submitted merge requests (MR89, MR90, MR91, MR92) to the Debian developers-reference to remove or update references to packages that are not available anymore, have their name changed, have typos, etc.
- Carles investigated and opened bugs regarding notifications on LXDE (#1151954, #1151955) and added a section related to notifications on the Wiki.
- Carles uploaded new python-ping3 upstream version. Fixed simplemonitor lintian bugs. Carles also investigated python-librosa documentation building. started preparing a new python-firebase-messaging version.
- Helmut released asyncvarlink/0.3.3 to fix several bugs including connection robustness fixes by Alex Kiernan. Colin uploaded it to Debian.
- Helmut uploaded guess-concurrency to improve behavior on riscv64 by taking swap into account thanks to Adrian Bunk and Aurelien Jarno.
- Helmut sent patches for 55 cross build failures.
- Emilio updated some X11 libraries that fixed security vulnerabilities.
- Emilio managed various transitions.
- Raphaël updated gnome-shell-extension-hamster to work with GNOME 51 that was uploaded to Debian unstable.
- Stefano backported postsrsd 2.4.1 to Debian trixie.
- Stefano installed security updates on debian.social infrastructure.
- October saw a series of security releases for Python, due to the eMudhra key compromise incident. Stefano uploaded cPython 3.15.2, 3.14.10, and 3.13.18 which include blocks for the compromised intermediate CAs.
- Stefano reviewed CVEs fixed in recent cPython releases.
- Stefano spun up a VM for dragon.debian.net.
- Stefano uploaded PyPy3 8.0.1 to unstable.
- Stefano reviewed some of the wafer-debconf MRs that came in as part of Antonio’s Outreachy project.
- Stefano uploaded python-authlib, with many security updates. And started preparing a stable update with backports of these patches.
- Stefano looked at the latest upstream version of munkres and submitted some 32-bit test failure fixes upstream. A new upstream maintainer has been very busy building out accelerated versions of the algorithms with AI assistance.
- Thorsten was finally able to fix the autopkgtest of cups. Afterwards he uploaded the latest version of cups to unstable.
- Santiago proposed a merge request for the Salsa CI pipeline to fix how logs were stored in the piuparts job.
- Lucas reviewed and merged community contributions to Ruby 3.4 in Debian unstable.
- Lucas coordinated with the security team and fixed multiple CVEs reported against Ruby 3.3 in Debian stable.
- Colin did quite a bit of work on the Python 3.15 transition, fixing lots of build and test fallout.
- Colin upgraded python-maturin from 1.9.4 to 1.16.0, helping with several Rust transitions; this involved more or less completely reworking our patch stack.
- Colin improved the packaging of the Frescobaldi frontend to LilyPond to help with his amateur music typesetting work, fixing its missing desktop entry, icon, and translations based on a patch set by Joachim Wiedorn.
- Anupa joined the Publicity team meeting to discuss upcoming events and activities of the Debian Publicity Team including on-boarding meeting for new contributors.
- Antonio spent quite some time welcoming Outreachy applicants to the DebConf/MiniDebConf websites project, replying to questions, reviewing contributions, etc. One of them will be selected for an internship that will start in December.
- Antonio spent some time investigating problems with Salsa background job processing, leading to an upstream bug report.
- Antonio released debci 4.4.