Better living through software

I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 9.75 hours from August. I only worked 8.25 hours this month, and will return excess hours to the pool.

I attended and participated in the LTS team meeting on the 24th.

I updated linux-4.19 to include the changes in the buster point release, and issued DLA-2385-1.

I began work on an update to the linux (Linux 4.9 kernel) package.

posted at: 23:38 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked 6.25 hours this month and have carried over the rest to September.

I finished my work to add Linux 4.19 to the stretch-security suite, providing an upgrade path for those previously installing it from stretch-backports (DLA-2323-1, DLA-2324-1). I also updated the firmware-nonfree package (DLA-2321-1) so that firmware needed by drivers in Linux 4.19 is also be available in the non-free section of the stretch-security suite.

I also reviewed the report of the Debian LTS survey and commented on the presentation of results. This report was presented in the Debian LTS BoF at DebConf.

posted at: 23:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked 5 hours this month and returned the remainder to the pool.

Now that Debian 9 'stretch' has entered LTS, the stretch-backports suite will be closed and no longer updated. However, some stretch users rely on the newer kernel version provided there. I prepared to add Linux 4.19 to the stretch-security suite, alongside the standard package of Linux 4.9. I also prepared to update the firmware-nonfree package so that firmware needed by drivers in Linux 4.19 will also be available in stretch's non-free section. Both these updates will be based on the packages in stretch-backports, but needed some changes to avoid conflicts or regressions for users that continue using Linux 4.9 or older non-Debian kernel versions. I will upload these after the Debian 10 'buster' point release.

posted at: 00:40 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, and worked all 20 hours this month.

I sent a final request for testing for the next update to Linux 3.16 in jessie. I also prepared an update to Linux 4.9, included in both jessie and stretch. I completed backporting of kernel changes related to CVE-2020-0543, which was still under embargo, to Linux 3.16.

Finally I uploaded the updates for Linux 3.16 and 4.9, and issued DLA-2241 and DLA-2242.

The end of June marked the end of long-term support for Debian 8 "jessie" and for Linux 3.16. I am no longer maintaining any stable kernel branches, but will continue contributing to them as part of my work on Debian 9 "stretch" LTS and other Debian releases.

posted at: 21:25 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

For about two months I've been working on a new project, debplate, which currently lives at benh/debplate on Salsa. This is a template system for Debian packages, primarily intended to ease building multiple similar binary packages from a single source. With some changes, it could also be useful for making multiple source packages consistent (issue #9).

I want debplate to be capable of replacing the kernel team's existing template system and a lot of its custom scripting, but it is also meant to a general tool. I believe it's already capable of supporting source packages with relatively simple needs, and there are some examples of these in the debplate source. My long-term goal is that debplate will replace most team-specific and package-specific template systems, making those source packages using it less unusual and easier to contribute to.

I gave a short talk about debplate at MiniDebConf Online on Sunday.

posted at: 17:13 | path: / | permanent link to this entry