Debian Contributions: 2026-03

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.

Debusine projects in Google’s Summer of Code

While Freexian initiated Debusine, and is investing a lot of resources in the
project, we manage it as a true free software project that can and should have a
broader community.

We always had documentation for new contributors
and we aim to be reactive with them when they interact via the issue tracker or
via merge requests. We decided to put those intentions under stress tests by
proposing five projects
for Google’s Summer of Code as part of Debian’s participation in that program.

Given that at least 11 candidates managed to get their merge request accepted in
the last 30 days (interacting with the development team is part of the
pre-requisites to apply to Google Summer of Code projects these days), the
contributing experience must not be too bad. 🙂 If you want to try it out, we
maintain a list of “quick fixes”
that are accessible to newcomers. And as always, we welcome your
feedback!

Debian CI: incus backend and upgrade to Bootstrap 5, by Antonio Terceiro

debci 3.14 was released on March 4th, with a followup 3.14.1 release with
regression fixes a few days afterwards. Those releases were followed by new
development and maintenance work that will provide extra capabilities and
stability to the platform.

This month saw the initial version of an incus backend
land in Debian CI. The transition into the new backend will be done carefully so
as to not disrupt ‘testing’ migration. Each package will be running jobs with
both the current lxc backend and with incus. Packages that have the same result
on both backends will be migrated over, and packages that exhibit different
results will be investigated further, resulting in bug reports and/or other
communication with the maintainers.

On the frontend side, the code has been ported to Bootstrap 5
over from the now ancient Bootstrap 3. This need has been
originally reported back in 2024
based on the lack of security support for Bootstrap 3. Beyond improving
maintainability, this upgrade also enables support for dark mode in debci,
which is still work in progress.

Both updates mentioned in this section will be available in a following debci
release.

Salsa CI maintenance by Santiago Ruano Rincón et al.

Santiago reviewed some Salsa CI issues and reviewed associated merge requests.
For example, he investigated a regression (#545),
introduced by the move to sbuild,
on the use of extra repositories configured as “.source” files; and reviewed the
MR (!712)
that fixes it.

Also, there were conflicts with changes made in debci 3.14
and debci 3.14.1
(those updates are mentioned above), and different people have contributed to
fix the subsequent issues, in a long-term way. This includes Raphaël who
proposed MR !707
and who also suggested Antonio to merge the Salsa CI patches to avoid similar
errors in the future. This happened shortly after.
Those fixes finally required the unrelated MR !709,
which will prevent similar problems when building images.

To identify bugs related to the autopkgtest support in the backport suites as
early as possible, Santiago proposed MR !708.

Finally, Santiago, in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias also had exchanges with
GSoC candidates for the Salsa CI project,
including the contributions they have made as merge requests. It is important to
note that there are several very good candidates interested in participating.
Thanks a lot to them for their work so far!

Miscellaneous contributions

• Raphaël reported a zim bug
  affecting Debian Unstable users, which was already fixed in git apparently. He
  could thus cherry-pick the fix and update the package
  in Debian Unstable.
• Carles created a new page on the InstallingDebianOn
  in Debian Wiki.
• Carles submitted translation errors in the debian-installer Weblate.
• Carles, using po-debconf-manager,
  improved Catalan translations: reviewed and submitted 3 packages. Also improved
  error handling when forking or submitting an MR if the fork already existed.
• Carles kept improving check-relations:
  code base related general improvements (added strict typing, enabled pre-commit).
  Also added DebPorts support, virtual packages support and added commands for
  reporting missing relations and importing bugs from bugs.debian.org.
• Antonio handled miscellaneous Salsa support requests.
• Antonio improved the management of MiniDebConf websites
  by keeping all non-secret settings in git
  and fixed
  exporting these sites as static HTML.
• Stefano uploaded routine updates to hatchling, python-mitogen,
  python-virtualenv, python-discovery, dh-python, pypy3, python-pipx,
  and git-filter-repo.
• Faidon uploaded routine updates to crun, libmaxminddb, librdkafka,
  lowdown, platformdirs, python-discovery, sphinx-argparse-cli, tox,
  tox-uv.
• Stefano and Santiago continued to help with DebConf 26 preparations.
• Stefano reviewed some contributions to debian-reimbursements and handled admin
  for reimbursements.debian.net.
• Stefano attended the Debian Technical Committee meeting.
• Helmut sent 8 patches for cross build failures.
• Building on the work of postmarketOS,
  Helmut managed to cross build systemd for musl in rebootstrap and sent several
  patches in the process.
• Helmut reviewed several MRs of Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues expanding
  support for DPKG_ROOT to support installing hurd.
• Helmut incorporated a final round of feedback for the Multi-Arch documentation
  in Debian policy, which finally made it into unstable
  together with documentation of Build-Profiles.
• In order to fix python-memray, Helmut
  NMUed libunwind
  generally disabling C++ exception support as being an incompatible duplication
  of the gcc implementation. Unfortunately, that ended up breaking suricata on riscv64.
  After another NMU,
  python-memray finally migrated.
• Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr and
  sane-airscan. He also fixed a packaging bug in printer-driver-oki. As of
  systemd 260.1-1 the configuration of lpadmin has been added to the sysusers.d
  configuration. All printing packages can now simply depend on the
  systemd-sysusers package and don’t have to take care of its creation in
  maintainer scripts anymore.
• In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago had exchanges with GSoC
  candidates and reviewed the proposals of the
  Linux livepatching GSoC 2026 project.
• Colin helped to fix CVE-2026-3497
  in openssh and CVE-2026-28356
  in multipart.
• Colin upgraded tango and pytango to new upstream releases and packaged
  pybind11-stubgen (needed for pytango), thanks to a Freexian customer. Tests of
  reproducible builds revealed that pybind11-stubgen didn’t generate imports in a
  stable order; this is now fixed upstream.
• Lucas fixed CVE-2025-67733
  and CVE-2026-21863
  affecting src:valkey in unstable and testing. Also reviewed the same fixes
  targeting stable proposed by Peter Wienemann.
• Faidon worked with upstream and build-dep Debian maintainers on resolving
  blockers in order to bring pyHanko into Debian, starting with the adoption of
  python-pyhanko-certvalidator. pyHanko is a suite for signing and stamping PDF
  files, and one of the few libraries that can be leveraged to sign PDFs with
  eIDAS Qualified Electronic Signatures.
• Anupa co-organized MiniDebConf Kanpur
  and attended the event with many others from all across India. She handled the
  accommodation arrangements along with the registration team members, worked on
  the budget and expenses. She was also a speaker at the event.
• Lucas helped with content review/schedule for the
  MiniDebConf Campinas. Thanks Freexian for
  being a Gold sponsor!
• Lucas organized and took part in a one-day in-person sprint to work on
  Ruby 3.4 transition. It was held in a coworking space in Brasilia – Brazil on
  April 6th. There were 5 DDs and they fixed multiple packages FTBFSing against
  Ruby 3.4 (coming to unstable soon hopefully). Lucas has been postponing a blog
  post about this sprint since then 🙂