Colin Watson: Free software activity in November 2025
My Debian contributions this month were all
sponsored by
Freexian. I had a bit less time than usual, because Freexian collaborators
gathered in Marseille this month for our yearly sprint, doing some planning
for next year.
You can also support my work directly via
Liberapay or GitHub
Sponsors.
OpenSSH
I began preparing for the second stage of the GSS–API key exchange package
split (some
details have changed since that message). It seems that we’ll need to wait
until Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, but that’s close enough that it’s
worth making sure we’re ready. This month I just did some packaging
cleanups that would otherwise have been annoying to copy, such as removing
support for direct upgrades from pre-bookworm. I’m considering some other
package rearrangements to make the split easier to manage, but haven’t made
any decisions here yet.
This also led me to start on a long-overdue bug triage pass, mainly
consisting of applying usertags to lots of our open bugs to sort them by
which program they apply to, and also closing a few that have been fixed,
since some bugs will eventually need to be reassigned to GSS–API packages
and it would be helpful to make them easier to find. At the time of
writing, about 30% of the bug list remains to be categorized this way.
Python packaging
I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:
- aioftp
- basemap (fixing Cython 3.1
compatibility) - billiard
- black
- django-phonenumber-field
- flask-security
- flufl.i18n
- langtable
- mariadb-connector-python
- peewee (fixing Cython 3.1
compatibility) - pydantic
- pydantic-core
- pydantic-settings
- pylsqpack
- pymongo
- pymssql
- pyodbc
- python-auditwheel (contributed follow-up fix
upstream) - python-avro
- python-bleach
- python-btrees
- python-certifi
- python-charset-normalizer
- python-colorlog
- python-django-channels
- python-django-constance
- python-django-contact-form
- python-django-hashids
- python-djvulibre (fixing Cython 3.1
compatibility) - python-evalidate
- python-legacy-cgi
- python-openstep-plist (fixing Cython 3.1
compatibility) - python-pytest-run-parallel
- python-pytokens
- python-tblib
- python-webargs
- pyupgrade
- sqlfluff
- trove-classifiers
- ttconv
- wcwidth
- zope.hookable
- zope.i18nmessageid (removing run-time dependency on
setuptools) - zope.interface
- zope.proxy
- zope.security (removing run-time dependency on
setuptools) - zope.sqlalchemy
I packaged django-pgtransaction and
backported it to trixie, since we plan to use it in Debusine; and I adopted
python-certifi for the Python team.
I fixed or helped to fix several other build/test failures:
- kivy
- mypy
- pytest-mypy-testing (contributed
upstream) - python-cytoolz
- python-discord
- python-ncls, fixing some failures in pyranges
- pyxdg
- traitlets
- twine
I fixed a couple of other bugs:
- pmix: B-D on python3-all-dev, but not built for all supported Python3 versions
- python-certifi: Package not compatible with multiarch
Other bits and pieces
- cdebconf: Move to /usr/lib/apt/apt-extracttemplates
- devscripts: Restore dpkg-dev dependency
- groff: Missing information about some utilities in the “contrib” directory
Code reviews
- base-passwd: French translation (merged
and uploaded) - cdebconf: Consider using the standard dh sequence in
d/rules
(merged and uploaded) - cdebconf: Multiple select is not right aligned in
Hebrew (patch fails to build; asked
reporter for an update) - cdebconf: Allow building without
libglib2.0-dev (merged and uploaded) - pydantic-core (merged and uploaded)
- pymongo (sponsored adoption by Aryan Karamtoth)
- python-maturin: Add missing build
dependencies
(merged and uploaded)
