My Free Software Activities in February 2018

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

• Last month I wrote about "The state of Debian Games" and I was pleasantly surprised that someone apparently read my post and offered some help with saving endangered games. Well, I don't know how it will turn out but at least it is encouraging to see that there are people who still care about some old fashioned games. As a matter of fact the GNOME maintainers would like to remove some obsolete GNOME 2 libraries which makes a few of our games RC-buggy. Ideally they should be ported to GNOME 3 but if they could be replaced with a similar game written in a different and awesome programming language (such as Java or Clojure?), for a different desktop environment, that would do as well. 😉 If you're bored to death or just want a challenge contact us at debian-devel-games@lists.debian.org.
• I packaged a new release of mupen64plus-qt to fix a FTBFS bug (#887576)
• I uploaded a new version of freeciv to stretch-backports.
• Pygame-sdl2 and renpy got some love too. (new upstream releases)
• I sponsored a new revision of redeclipse for Martin-Erik Werner to fix #887744.
• Yangfl introduced ddnet to Debian which is a popular modification/standalone game similar to teeworlds. I reviewed and eventually sponsored a new upstream release for him. If you are into multiplayer games then ddnet is certainly something you should look forward to.
• I gladly applied another patch by Peter Green to fix #889059 in warzone2100 and Aurelien Jarno's fix for btanks (#890632).

Debian Java

• The Eclipse problem: The Eclipse IDE is seriously threatened to be removed from Debian. Once upon a time we even had a dedicated team that cared about the package but nowadays there is nobody. We regularly get requests to update the IDE to the latest version but there is no one who wants to do the necessary work. The situation is best described in #681726. This alone is worrying enough but due to an interesting dependency chain (batik -> maven -> guice -> libspring-java -> aspectj -> eclipse-platform) Eclipse cannot be removed without breaking dozens of other Java packages. So long story short I started to work on it and packaged a standalone libequinox-osgi-java package, so that we can save at least all reverse-dependencies for this package. Next was tycho which is required to build newer Eclipse versions. Annoyingly it requires said newer version of Eclipse to build...which means we must bootstrap it. I'm still in the process to upgrade tycho to version 1.0 and hope to make some progress in March.
• I prepared security updates for jackson-databind, lucene-solr and tomcat-native.
• New upstream releases: jboss-xnio, commons-parent, jboss-logging, jboss-module, mongo-java-driver and libspring-java (#890001).
• Bug fixes and triaging: wagon2 (#881815, #889427), byte-buddy, (#884207), commons-io, maven-archiver (#886875), jdeb (#889642), commons-math, jflex (#890345), commons-httpclient (#871142)
• I introduced jboss-bridger which is a new build-dependency of jboss-modules.
• I sponsored a freeplane update for Felix Natter.

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-fourth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 23,75 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 05.02.2018 until 11.02.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in binutils, graphicsmagick, wayland, unzip, kde-runtime, libjboss-remoting-java, libvirt, exim4, libspring-java, puppet, audacity, leptonlib, librsvg, suricata, exiv2, polarssl and imagemagick.
• I tested a security update for exim4 and uploaded a package for Abhijith.
• DLA-1275-1. Issued a security update for uwsgi fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1276-1. Issued a security update for tomcat-native fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1280-1. Issued a security update for pound fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1281-1. Issued a security update for advancecomp fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1295-1. Issued a security update for drupal7 fixing 4 CVE.
• DLA-1296-1. Issued a security update for xmltooling fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1301-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 2 CVE.

Misc

• I NMUed vdk2 (#885760) to prevent the removal of langdrill.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.