Debian Contributions: 2026-01

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cross building, by Helmut Grohne

In version 1.10.1, Meson merged a patch to make it call the correct
g-ir-scanner by default thanks to Eli Schwarz. This problem affected more than
130 source packages. Helmut retried building them all and filed 69 patches as a
result. A significant portion of those packages require another Meson
change to call the correct
vapigen. Another notable change is converting gnu-efi to multiarch,
which ended up requiring changes to a number of other packages. Since Aurelien
dropped the libcrypt-dev dependency from libc6-dev, this transition now is
mostly complete and has resulted in most of the Perl ecosystem correctly
expressing perl-xs-dev dependencies needed for cross building. It is these
infrastructure changes affecting several client packages that this work targets.
As a result of this continued work, about 66% of Debian’s source packages now
have satisfiable cross Build-Depends in unstable and about 10000 (55%) actually
can be cross built. There are now more than 500 open
bug reports
affecting more than 2000 packages most of which carry patches.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne

Maintaining architecture cross-bootstrap requires continued effort for adapting
to archive changes such as glib2.0 dropping a build profile or an e2fsprogs
FTBFS. Beyond those generic problems,
architecture-specific problems with e.g. musl-linux-any or sparc may arise.
While all these changes move things forward on the surface, the bootstrap
tooling has become a growing pile of patches. Helmut managed to upstream two
changes to glibc for reducing its Build-Depends in the stage2 build
profile and thanks Aurelien Jarno.

Refresh of the patch tagging guidelines, by Raphaël Hertzog

Debian Enhancement Proposal #3
(DEP-3) is named “Patch Tagging Guidelines” and standardizes meta-information
that Debian contributors can put in patches included in Debian source packages.
With the feedback received over the years, and with the change in the package
management landscape, the need to refresh those guidelines became evident. As
the initial driver of that DEP, I spent a good day reviewing all the feedback
(that I kept in a folder) and producing a
new version of the document.
The changes aim to give more weight to the syntax that is compatible with git
format-patch’s output, and also to clarify the expected uses and meanings of a
couple of fields, including some algorithm that parsers should follow to define
the state of the patch. After the
announcement of the new draft
on debian-devel, the revised DEP-3 received a significant number of comments
that I still have to process.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Helmut uploaded debvm making it work with unstable as a target distribution
  again.
• Helmut modernized the code base backing dedup.debian.net
  significantly expanding the support for type checking.
• Helmut fixed the multiarch hinter once more given feedback from
  Fabian Grünbichler.
• Helmut worked on migrating the rocblas package to forky.
• Raphaël fixed RC bug #1111812 in publican
  and did some maintenance for tracker.debian.org.
• Carles added support in the festival Debian package for
  systemd socket activation
  and systemd service and socket units.
  Adapted the patch for upstream and created a merge request
  (also fixed a MacOS X building system
  error while working on it). Updated Orca Wiki documentation
  regarding festival. Discussed
  a 2007 bug/feature in festival which allowed having a local shell and that the
  new systemd socket activation has the same code path.
• Carles using po-debconf-manager
  worked on Catalan translations: 7 reviewed and sent; 5 follow ups, 5 deleted packages.
• Carls made some po-debconf-manager changes: now it attaches the translation
  file on follow ups, fixed bullseye compatibility issues.
• Carles reviewed a new Catalan apt translation.
• Carles investigated and reported a lxhotkey bug
  and sent a patch
  for the “abcde” package.
• Carles made minor updates for Debian Wiki for different pages
  (lxde for dead keys, Ripping with abcde
  troubleshooting, VirtualBox troubleshooting).
• Stefano renamed build-details.json in
  Python 3.14 to fix multiarch coinstallability.
• Stefano audited the tooling and ignore lists for checking the contents of the
  python3.X-minimal packages, finding and fixing some issues in the process.
• Stefano made a few uploads of python3-defaults and dh-python in support of
  Python 3.14-as-default in Ubuntu. Also investigated the risk of ignoring byte-compilation
  failures by default, and started down the road of implementing this.
• Stefano did some sysadmin work on debian.social infrastructure.
• Stefano and Santiago worked on preparations for DebConf 26. Especially to help
  the local team on opening the registration, and reviewing the budget to be
  presented for approval.
• Stefano uploaded routine updates of python-virtualenv and python-flexmock.
• Antonio collaborated with DSA on enabling a new proxy for salsa to prevent
  scrapers from taking the service down.
• Antonio did miscellaneous salsa administrative tasks.
• Antonio fixed a few Ruby packages towards the Ruby 3.4 transition.
• Antonio started work on planned improvements
  to the DebConf registration system.
• Santiago prepared unstable updates for the latest upstream versions of
  knot-dns
  and knot-resolver.
  The authoritative DNS server and DNS resolver software developed by CZ.NIC.
  It is worth highlighting that, given the separation of functionality compared to
  other implementations, knot-dns and knot-resolver are also less complex
  software, which results in advantages in terms of security: only three CVEs have
  been reported for knot-dns since 2011).
• Santiago made some routine reviews of merge requests proposed for the Salsa
  CI’s pipeline. E.g. a proposal to fix how sbuild chooses the chroot when building a package for experimental.
• Colin fixed lots of Python packages to handle Python 3.14 and to avoid using
  the deprecated
  pkg_resources module.
• Colin added forky support
  to the images used in Salsa CI pipelines.
• Colin began working on getting a release candidate of groff 1.24.0
  (the first upstream release since mid-2023, so a very large set of changes)
  into experimental.
• Lucas kept working on the preparation for Ruby 3.4 transition. Some packages
  fixed (support build against Ruby 3.3 and 3.4): ruby-rbpdf, jekyll,
  origami-pdf, ruby-kdl, ruby-twitter, ruby-twitter-text, ruby-globalid.
• Lucas supported some potential mentors in the Google Summer of Code 26 program
  to submit their projects.
• Anupa worked on the point release announcements for Debian 12.13 and 13.3 from
  the Debian publicity team side.
• Anupa attended the publicity team meeting to discuss the team activities and
  to plan an online sprint in February.
• Anupa attended meetings with the Debian India team to plan and coordinate the
  MinDebConf Kanpur and sent out related Micronews.
• Emilio coordinated various transitions and helped get rid of llvm-toolchain-17
  from sid.