My Free Software Activities in February 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in March) 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

  • The games team received a lot of FTBFS bug reports due to a recent change in SDL2. (#951087) Many games that relied on the FindSDL2.cmake macro suddenly stopped building from source. Simon McVittie, who analyzed the situation, provided some helpful fixes for the problem. Ideally all affected packages and SDL2 should be fixed. I applied his patch for blockattack (#951943) and came up with similar patches for megaglest (#951959) and spring (#951974), pekka-kana-2 (#952049) was fixed by Simon and Carlos again.
  • I updated clanlib, an older SDK for game development, fixed a Perl build failure and applied patches to make cross-builds and reproducible builds possible.
  • I backported the latest version of Minetest, 5.1.1, to buster-backports.
  • Morris was ported to GSetting by Yavor Doganov and Reiner Herrmann ported it to the signals2 boost library (well done folks!) while I was tying all things together.
  • Freecol, a remake of the old Colonization received some love too. I could fix a build failure, create a valid appdata file and apply upstream's patch to address CVE-2018-1000825.
  • I packaged new upstream releases of freeciv, freeorion and armagetronad.
  • ufoai: I fixed a build failure caused by an upgrade to the mxml 3.x library. There is another issue with the old and soon to be removed gtksourceview2 library which the map editor relies on for some specific functions. I suppose the only way is to disable the functionality or to disable the editor alltogether. The game itself is not affected.
  • I sponsored an improved version of mupen64plus-qt for Dan Hastings, an RC fix for widelands by Juhani Numminen and
  • reviewed opensurge and surgescript for Carlos Donizete Froes. The former retro platformer opensurge is still missing from Debian and would be a nice addition to the games section. There is still some kind of runtime problem / shared library error and more work is required to make progress here.

Debian Java

Misc

  • After we received new bug reports for ublock-origin, this time because of sandboxing limitations in Chromium, I decided to revert back to two different binary packages, one for Firefox and one for Chromium. This will avoid any sandboxing problems due to the previous use of symlinks. The new version 1.25.0 is currently waiting in NEW.
  • Instead the update of privacybadger to version 2020.2.19 and binaryen was much more straightforward.

Debian LTS

This was my 48. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 10 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • DLA-2133-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 3 CVE.
  • DLA-2138-1. Issued a security update for wpa fixing 1 CVE.
  • Worked on a security update for squid3 that is not finished yet.

ELTS

Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 "Wheezy". This was my 21. month and I have been paid to work 8 hours on ELTS.

  • ELA-217-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE. I investigated CVE-2019-17569 and found that it did not affect the version in Wheezy because the refactoring and thus the regression happened in a later version. I worked on CVE-2020-1938, a possible remote code execution vulnerability regarding the AJP protocol. After I had backported the initial upstream patch, I discovered that more and more changes to the code were required which I found to be too intrusive eventually. Since the AJP port is disabled by default in Debian and the scenario of an untrusted user/service like mod_jk and Apache 2 seems unlikely, I opted for not making those changes.
  • Created a script to display which supported source packages are embedded into other supported packages and to show the embedded code copies in supported packages. There will be another script for LTS that behaves slightly different but it will also help to highlight CVE in embedded-code-copies in LTS and Debian packages in general.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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