Debian Contributions: 2025-11

Contributing to Debian
is part of Freexian’s mission. This article
covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this
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consulting services.

DebConf Video Team Sprint

The DebConf Video Team records, streams, and publishes talks from DebConf and
many miniDebConfs. A lot of the infrastructure development happens during setup
for these events, but we also try to organize a sprint once a year to work on
infrastructure, when there isn’t a DebConf about to happen. Stefano attended the
sprint in Herefordshire this year and
wrote up a report.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne

A number of jobs were stuck in architecture-specific failures. gcc-15 and
dpkg still disagree about whether PIE is enabled occasionally and big endian
mipsen needed fixes in systemd. Beyond this regular uploads of libxml2 and
gcc-15 required fixes and rebasing of pending patches.

Earlier, Loongson used rebootstrap to create the initial package set for
loong64 and Miao Wang now submitted their changes. Therefore, there is now
initial support for suites other than unstable and use with derivatives.

Building the support for Software Bill Of Materials tooling in Debian, by Santiago Ruano Rincón

Vendors of Debian-based products may/should be paying attention to the evolution
of different jurisdictions (such as the CRA
or updates on CISA’s Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials)
that require to make available Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of their
products. It is important then to have tools in Debian to make it easier to
produce such SBOMs.

In this context, Santiago continued the work on packaging libraries related to
SBOMs. This includes the packaging of the SPDX python library (python-spdx-tools),
and its dependencies rdflib
and mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin.
System Package Data Exchange (SPDX), defined by ISO/IEC 5962:2021, is an open
standard capable of representing systems with software components as SBOMs and
other data and security references. SPDX and CycloneDX (whose python library
python3-cyclonedx-lib was
packaged by prior efforts this year),
encompass the two main SBOM standards available today.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles improved po-debconf-manager:
  added checking status of bug reports automatically via python-debianbts;
  changed some command line options naming or output based on user feedback;
  finished refactoring user interaction to rich; codebase is now flake8-compliant;
  added type safety with mypy.
• Carles, using po-debconf-manager, created 19 bug reports for translations
  where the merge requests were pending; reviewed and created merge requests for
  4 packages.
• Carles planned a second version of the tool that detects packages that
  Recommends or Suggests packages which are not in Debian. He is taking ideas from
  dumat.
• Carles submitted a pull request
  to python-unidiff2 (adapted from the
  original pull request to
  python-unidiff). He also started preparing a qnetload
  update.
• Stefano did miscellaneous python package updates: mkdocs-macros-plugin,
  python-confuse, python-pip, python-mitogen.
• Stefano reviewed a beets upload for a new maintainer who
  is taking it over.
• Stefano handled some debian.net infrastructure requests.
• Stefano updated debian.social
  infrastructure for the “trixie” point release.
• The update broke jitsi.debian.social, Stefano put some time into debugging it
  and eventually enlisted upstream assistance,
  who solved the problem!
• Stefano worked on some patches for Python that help Debian:
  • GH-139914: The main HP
    PA-RISC support patch for 3.14.
  • GH-141930: We observed
    an unhelpful error when failing to write a .pyc file during package
    installation. We may have fixed the problem, and at least made the error better.
  • GH-141011: Ignore missing
    ifunc support on HP PA-RISC.
• Stefano spun up a website for hamburg2026.mini.debconf.org.
• Raphaël reviewed a merge request
  updating tracker.debian.org to rely on bootstrap
  version 5.
• Emilio coordinated various transitions.
• Helmut sent patches for 26 cross build failures.
• Helmut officially handed over the cleanup of the /usr-move transition.
• Helmut monitored the transition moving libcrypt-dev out of build-essential
  and bumped the remaining bugs to rc-severity in coordination with the release team.
• Helmut updated the Build-Profiles patch for debian-policy
  incorporating feedback from Sean Whitton with a lot of help from
  Nattie Mayer-Hutchings and Freexian colleagues.
• Helmut discovered that the way mmdebstrap deals with start-stop-daemon may
  result in broken output and sent a patch.
• As a result of armel being removed from “sid”, but not from “forky”, the
  multiarch hinter broke. Helmut fixed it.
• Helmut uploaded debvm
  accepting a patch from Luca Boccassi to fix it for newer
  systemd.
• Colin began preparing for the second stage of the
  OpenSSH GSS-API key exchange package split.
• Colin caught and fixed a devscripts regression
  due to it breaking part of Debusine.
• Colin packaged django-pgtransaction
  and backported it to “trixie”, since it looks useful for Debusine.
• Thorsten uploaded the packages lprng, cpdb-backend-cups, cpdb-libs and
  ippsample to fix some RC bugs as well as other bugs that accumulated over time.
  He also uploaded cups-filters to all Debian releases to fix three CVEs.