My Free Software Activities in January 2017

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you're interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

Debian Games

• In January 2017 we had the last chance to get new upstream releases into the next stable release of Debian 9 aka Stretch. Hence I packaged new versions of pygame-sdl2, renpy, fife, unknown-horizons, redeclipse and redeclipse-data and also backported Red Eclipse to Jessie.
• I uploaded fifechan to unstable and applied an upstream patch to fix a segmentation fault (#852247) in Unknown Horizons.
• Package cleanups and improvements: freeorion (#843538), I enabled support for mips64el again; I tidied up gtkatlantic, powermanga, lincity-ng, opencity and tecnoballz; I applied a patch from Reiner Herrmann to make the build of netpanzer reproducible (#827150); In spring I changed the build-dependency of asciidoc to asciidoc-base (#850387) although it turned out later that this wasn't strictly needed. I also removed ConvertUTF8 related code from spring because it might be non-free. I don't think this is necessarily true but I didn't want to argue with Lintian in this case.
• I sponsored a new upstream release of pentobi for Juhani Numminen.
• I backported minetest 0.4.5 to jessie-backports and fixed #851114, which I think was not really an issue since we already provide the font sources in Debian and Minetest depends on the respective package.
• I triaged RC bug #847812 in pysolfc, provided a patch and reassigned the issue to src:pillow. Apparently this affected a lot more 32 bit applications written in Python.

Debian Java

• For Debian Java the situation was very similar but I didn't want to break too many reverse-dependencies right before the freeze. So I chose rather "harmless" packages and updated objenesis, syncany and jackson-dataformat-xml. At first I couldn't build objenesis 2.5 from source but after some consultation on the debian-java list, it became clear that the test failure was probably an upstream bug. Henri Tremblay kindly issued a new release of Objenesis which addressed the build failure.
• Package updates and bugfixes: sweethome3d (#849885), I confirmed a build-failure in java-gnome (#849669) and investigated another issue in jackson-module-afterburner (#849931) which was later removed from Debian.  I fixed an RC bug in commons-daemon (#849649). I also released new revisions of  libhamcrest-java (#846116), libjide-oss-java, libjchart2d-java, activemq, osgi-annotations, jsemver, openjpa and xmlbeans (#820839,#822091).
• I prepared security updates for groovy and groovy2 in Jessie. (#853233, #853235)

Debian LTS

This was my eleventh month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 12,75 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 16. January until 22. January I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged security issues in imagemagick, wordpress, hesiod, opus, mysql-5.5, netbeans, groovy and zoneminder.
• DLA-779-1. Issued a security update for Tomcat 7 fixing 1 CVE and a regression when running Tomcat with SecurityManager enabled.
• DLA-761-2. Issued a regression update for python-bottle. (Debian bug #850176).
• DLA-781-1 and DLA-781-2. Issued a security update for Asterisk fixing 2 CVE after I had prepared the package last month. Later Brad Barnett discovered a regression when using SIP communication and provided assistance with debugging the issue. I corrected this one in DLA-781-2.
• DLA-792-1. Issued a security update for libphp-swiftmailer fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-793-1. Issued a security update for opus fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-794-1. Issued a security update for groovy fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-797-1. Issued a security update for mysql-5.5 fixing 10 CVE. The update was prepared by Lars Tangvald.
• DLA-813-1. Issued a security update for wordpress fixing 9 CVE.

Misc

• In xarchiver (#850103) I added binutils to the list of suggested packages, in  iftop (#850040) I applied a patch from Brian Russell and I packaged a new upstream release of mediathekview, a Java application to watch and download broadcasts from German television stations. I had to make some major packaging changes because the build system switched from Ant to Gradle but there were fewer issues than expected.