Tag: Debian

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My Free Software Activities in June 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

  • I advocated Phil Morrell to become Debian Maintainer with whom I have previously worked together on corsix-th. This month I sponsored his updates for scorched3d and the new play.it package, an installer for drm-free commercial games. Play.it is basically a collection of shell scripts that create a wrapper around games from gog.com or Steam and put them into a Debian package which is then seamlessly integrated into the user's system.  Similar software are game-data-packager, playonlinux or lutris (not yet in Debian).
  • I packaged new upstream releases of blockattack, renpy, atomix and minetest, and also backported Minetest version 0.4.17.1 to Stretch later on.
  • I uploaded RC bug fixes from Peter de Wachter for torus-trooper, tumiki-fighters and val-and-rick and moved the packages to Git.
  • I tackled an RC bug (#897548) in yabause, a Saturn emulator.
  • I sponsored connectagram, cutemaze and tanglet updates for Innocent de Marchi.
  • Last but not least I refreshed the packaging of trophy and sauerbraten which had not seen any updates for the last couple of years.

Debian Java

  • I packaged a new upstream release of activemq and could later address #901366 thanks to a bug report by Chris Donoghue.
  • I also packaged upstream releases of bouncycastle, libpdfbox-java, libpdfbox2-java because of reported security vulnerabilities.
  • I investigated and fixed RC bugs in openjpa (#901045), osgi-foundation-ee (#893382) and ditaa (#897494, Java 10 related).
  • A snakeyaml update introduced a regression in apktool (#902666) which was only visible at runtime. Once known I could fix it.
  •   I worked on Netbeans again. It can be built from source now but there is still a runtime error (#891957) that prevents users from starting the application. The current plan is to package the latest release candidate of Netbeans 9 and move forward.

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-eight 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 18.06.2018 until 24.06.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in jasperreports, 389-ds-base, asterisk, lava-server, libidn, php-horde-image, tomcat8, thunderbird, glusterfs, ansible, mercurial, php5, jquery, redis, redmine, libspring-java, php-horde-crypt, mupdf, binutils, jetty9 and libpdfbox-java.
  • DSA-4221-1. Issued a security update for libvncserver fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1398-1. Issued a security update for php-horde-crypt fixing 2 CVE.
  • DLA-1399-1. Issued a security update for ruby-passenger fixing 2 CVE.
  • DLA-1411-1. Issued a security update for tiff fixing 5 CVE.
  • DLA-1410-1. Issued a security update for python-pysaml fixing 2 CVE.
  • DLA-1418-1. Issued a security update for bouncycastle fixing 7 CVE.

ELTS

Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a new 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 first month and I have been paid to work 7 hours on ELTS.

  • ELA-1-1. Issued a security update for Git fixing 1 CVE.
  • ELA-8-1. Issued a security update for ruby-passenger fixing 1 CVE.
  • ELA-14-1. Backported the Linux 3.16 kernel from Jessie to Wheezy. This update also included backports of initramfs-tools and the linux-latest source package. The new kernel is available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Misc

  • I prepared security updates for libvncserver (Stretch, DSA-4221-1) and Sid) and bouncycastle (Stretch, DSA-4233-1)

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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Lowendspirit: VPS-Server ab 3 Euro pro Jahr

Vor sechs Jahren habe ich über den Fünf-Cent-pro-Tag-Server geschrieben, ein damals schon ungemein günstiger Einstieg in die Welt der virtuellen Server. Neulich fand ich dann zu lowendspirit.com, wo man sich seinen Server ab drei Euro pro ...Jahr mieten kann. Die Frage ist nun: Taugt das was und wozu braucht man das? Hier ein kurzer Bericht.
Lowendspirit ist ein Projekt mehrerer Anbieter, die vom Vermieten von Webspace und Servern leben und Standorte auf der ganzen Welt haben. Der Grundgedanke ist dabei, wie viel darf ein virtueller Server gerade noch kosten und welche Merkmale muss er haben, damit er einerseits wirtschaftlich betrieben und zum anderen für den Käufer noch nützlich sein kann. Die Antwort liefern die drei Hoster auf dieser Seite.
Das Angebot reicht von 64 MB RAM und 1 GB Festplatte in Hong Kong, über 128 MB RAM und 3 GB Festplatte (teilweise SSD) bis zu 256 MB RAM bei Mr. VM. Bei den eher "exotischeren" Standorten Hong Kong, Johannesburg oder Tokyo ist der Traffic eher eingeschränkt (zwischen 50 GB und 150 GB pro Monat), ansonsten pendelt dieser so zwischen 300-500 GB pro Monat in Europa und Nordamerika, was in der Regel ausreichend ist um kleinere Projekte zu realisieren.

MiniVPS128 - UK

Zum Testen habe ich mir das Angebot von Inception Hosting angeschaut. Ausgesucht habe ich mir den Standort Enfield in London mit 128 MB RAM, 3 GB SSD und 350 GB Traffic inklusive pro Monat.

Die Bestellung war unkompliziert. Lediglich der Name des Servers und das Rootpasswort musste man angeben, welche später auch wieder geändert werden können. Bezahlt werden kann mit Paypal oder Kreditkarte, manchmal auch mit Kryptowährungen. Als Administrationswerkzeug kommt SolusVM zum Einsatz. Man muss ausdrücklich bestätigen, dass man weiß, was man hier kauft. Der vServer kommt primär mit IPv6-Unterstützung, eine NAT IPv4-Adresse ist mehr als Bonus zu sehen. Im Klartext: Der Server hat nur eine private IPv4-Adresse und ist ohne weitere Konfiguration nicht direkt mit dem alten Protokoll zu erreichen. Für die meisten Kunden aus Deutschland sollte das aber kein Problem sein, da IPv6 mittlerweile praktisch überall verfügbar ist oder sogar bei DSL-Lite-Anschlüssen vorausgesetzt wird. Kleine Helfer wie 6tunnel oder OpenVPN helfen außerdem Probleme mit IPv4/IPv6-Adressen zu umgehen. Wichtigste Anlaufstelle für Fragen ist das englischsprachige Forum. Direkten Support gibt es nicht und kann man bei dem Preis auch nicht wirklich erwarten.

Top oder Flop?

Mit der Begrüßungsmail erhält man die Zugangsdaten und eine Anleitung wie man sich per IPv4 verbinden kann. Im SolusVM-Konfigurator lässt sich aber auch direkt die IPv6-Adresse ablesen. Anschließend kann man sich wie gewohnt mit SSH verbinden. Der vServer nutzt als Virtualisierungslösung OpenVZ und Debian Wheezy war bei mir das voreingestellte Betriebssystem. Da Wheezy nun nicht mehr offiziell von Debian unterstützt wird, kann man sich entweder die neue, erweiterte Langzeitunterstützung anschaun (ELTS) oder man führt ganz einfach ein Upgrade auf Jessie durch, was problemlos bei mir geklappt hat.
Die Performance fühlt sich gut an, was ich bisher nicht immer von allen OpenVZ-Angeboten behaupten konnte. Der Server läuft seit mehr als einem Monat ununterbrochen und die Dienste, die ich für einen solchen Server sinnvoll halte (dazu gleich mehr) funktionieren problemlos. Festplattendurchsatz und Zugriffszeiten sind natürlich wie zu erwarten nicht berauschend. Hier mal eine Momentaufnahme mit ioping.

Inception Hosting - MiniVPS128 - UK
75 requests completed in 1.32 min, 17 iops, 71.0 KiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 184 us / 56.3 ms / 536.5 ms / 123.9 ms
Bei leistungsstärkeren Angeboten liegen die Zugriffszeiten normalerweise durchschnittlich alle im Mikrosekunden- anstatt Millisekundenbereich.

Empfohlene Dienste / Ideen

128 MB RAM klingt wenig, aber es gibt einige Dienste, für die das vollkommen ausreichend ist. Ein Lowendspirit-Server eignet sich ideal als SOCKS-Proxy. Da OpenSSH sowie schon vorinstalliert ist, kann man sich z.B. von seinem Rechner aus mit
ssh -D 9999 -C -q -N Lowendserver-IP-Adresse
verbinden. Im Firefox dann unter Einstellungen->Fortgeschritten->Netzwerk->Verbindung die Werte wie auf dem folgenden Bild setzen und schon surft man mit einer englischen IP-Adresse.


Auch Debians OpenVPN-Paket lässt sich problemlos betreiben. Und dann wäre da ja noch die Möglichkeit einen Webserver mit Lighttpd oder Nginx aufzusetzen. Zu Lighty hatte ich schon vor ein paar Jahren was geschrieben und zu Nginx braucht man heutzutage nicht mehr viel sagen.

Besser bleiben lassen

Intensive Datenbankanwendungen und alles was gerne Unmengen an RAM verschlingt (Hallo Java!). Mit etwas Optimierung lassen sich Forensoftware oder WordPress-Blogs installieren, hierzu würde ich aber eher zu einem 256 RAM Server greifen. Unmöglich ist es aber auch mit 128 RAM nicht, vielleicht liegt darin auch der Spaß und die Herausforderung.

Fazit

Lowendspirit.com ist ein Projekt, das keinen Gewinn macht, aber dennoch ein vernünftiges Angebot ist. Für 3,50 Euro pro Jahr geht man kein finanzielles Risiko ein. Die Server sind nicht für Anfänger geeignet. Wenn man jedoch bereit ist Neues dazuzulernen, gibt es kaum einen günstigeren Einstieg in die Welt der virtuellen Server. Die Server kommen ohne Backups, aber mit Werkzeugen wie rsync oder der Dirvish-Backuplösung sollte auch dieses Problem lösbar sein. Für alle, die schon immer mal einen Server in verschiedenen Ländern der Erde haben wollten, auf jeden Fall interessant. Übrigens, es gibt manchmal Bundleangebote: Fünf Server für 10 Euro pro Jahr. Dem eigenen Cluster steht nun nichts mehr im Wege. 😉

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My Free Software Activities in May 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

Debian Java

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-seventh month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 24,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • From 21.05.2018 until 27.05.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in glusterfs, tomcat7, zookeeper, imagemagick, strongswan, radare2, batik, mupdf and graphicsmagick.
  • I drafted a announcement for Wheezy's EOL that was later released as DLA-1393-1 and as an official Debian news.
  • DLA-1384-1. I reviewed and uploaded xdg-utils for Abhijith PA.
  • DLA-1381-1. Issued a security update for imagemagick/Wheezy fixing 3 CVE.
  • DLA-1385-1. Issued a security update for batik/Wheezy fixing 1 CVE.
  • Prepared a backport of Tomcat 7.0.88 for Jessie which fixes all open CVE (5) in Jessie. From now on we intend to provide the latest upstream releases for a specific Tomcat branch. We hope this will improve the user experience. It also allows Debian users to get more help from Tomcat developers directly because there is no significant Debian specific delta anymore. The update is pending review by the security team.
  • Prepared a security update for graphicsmagick fixing 19 CVE. I also investigated CVE-2017-10794 and CVE-2017-17913 and came to the conclusion that the Jessie version is not affected. I merged and reviewed another update by László Böszörményi. At the moment the update is pending review by the security team. Together these updates will fix the most important issues in Graphicsmagick/Jessie.
  • DSA-4214-1. Prepared a security update for zookeeper fixing 1 CVE.
  • DSA-4215-1. Prepared a security update for batik/Jessie fixing 1 CVE.
  • Prepared a security update for memcached in Jessie and Stretch fixing 2 CVE. This update is also pending review by the security team.
  • Finished the security update for JRuby (Jessie and Stretch) fixing 5 respectively 7 CVE. However we discovered that JRuby fails to build from source in Jessie and a fix or workaround will most likely break reverse-dependencies. Thus we have decided to mark JRuby as end-of-life in Jessie also because the version is already eight years old.

Misc

  • I reviewed and sponsored xtrkcad for Jörg Frings-Fürst.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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Dymo LabelWriter 450: Etiketten drucken unter Linux mit gLabels

Dymo-Etikettendrucker

Verkaufen auf ebay kann Spaß machen. Kann, denn nicht jeder verkauft gleich soviel, dass es sich lohnt in spezielle Software zu investieren, die verkaufte Artikel automatisch importiert, Adressen aufbereitet und Rechnungen per Email verschickt. Vielmehr darf man sich mit Ebays Verkaufsmanager auseinandersetzen, der es tatsächlich lediglich schafft Versandetiketten auf A4 zu drucken, die man anschließend dann auch noch mit der Schere ausschneiden darf. Im folgenden möchte ich für alle angehenden (Klein-)UnternehmerInnen eine Methode vorstellen, wie man ganz einfach diese Adressen mit dem Programm gLabels und einem Etikettendrucker verarbeiten kann.

Dymo LabelWriter 450

Zuerst sollte man sich einen Etikettendrucker kaufen. Er erspart einem jede Menge Arbeit und ist jeden Cent wert. Die Auswahl an Druckern ist groß, ich kann jedoch das hier vorgestellte Modell empfehlen, da es perfekt unter Linux funktioniert, dank nativer Druckertreiber. Einfach installieren mit

apt install printer-driver-dymo

Ein weiterer Vorteil: Es ist relativ günstig. Das Modell findet man schon zwischen 50-60 Euro auf den bekannten Onlineplätzen. Auch der doppelte Preis wird derweilen aufgerufen, hier lohnt es sich einfach noch einmal intensiver nachzuforschen. Außerdem ist der Dymo klein genug, um auf jeden Schreibtisch Platz zu finden und sieht dazu auch noch formschön aus.
Der Dymo LabelWriter 450 ist ein Thermodrucker, das heißt außer speziellen Etiketten kommen weder Toner noch Druckertinte zum Einsatz, was den Einsatz auch langfristig günstig macht. Ich empfehle zum Adressendruck und für dieses Beispiel die 99012 36 x 89 mm Etiketten, es ist aber auch möglich 99014 51 x 101 mm Etiketten zu benutzen.

Adressen aus ebay importieren


Im Verkaufsmanager wählt man einfach alle verkauften Artikel unter "Bestellungen" aus, klickt dann auf "Andere Aktionen" und "Herunterladen". Danach wird einem angeboten, den Datensatz als CSV-Datei herunterzuladen (SalesHistory.csv).
Diese Datei dann z.B. in LibreOffice Calc  öffnen und die Daten als ISO-8859-1 Zeichensatz importieren. Anschließend sollten dann die relevanten Daten wie Name und Adresse in einem zweiten Dokument verarbeitet werden, Stichwort: Serienbrief, so dass am Ende einzelne Spalten im zweiten Dokument auf das erste Dokument verlinken und die Daten bei jedem Öffnen automatisch aktualisiert werden. Dabei sollten in der ersten Zeile unbedingt die Schlüssel (Name, Adresse, Ort, Land, etc.) stehen, da diese später noch für gLabels wichtig sein werden.
Es gibt natürlich auch die Möglichkeit eine beliebige Programmiersprache und deren CSV-Modul zu benutzen, um die Daten so aufzubereiten damit sie anschließend von gLabels weiterverarbeitet werden können. Mit einem Tabellenkalkulationsprogramm ist die Sache aber auch ruckzuck erledigt.

gLabels

gLabels ist eine Anwendung zum Erstellen von Etiketten und Visitenkarten. Das Programm unterstützt zahlreiche Drucker und Formate. Um eine neue Vorlage zu erstellen klickt man auf Datei->Neu. Dann als Marke Dymo und Seitenformat: beliebig auswählen. Anschließend auf Dymo 99012 Große Adressaufkleber klicken und die weiteren Auswahlmöglichkeiten bestätigen.


Die Etikettenvorlage lässt sich nun nach Belieben bearbeiten. Man kann Linien und Umrandungen zeichnen, Bilder und Barcodes einfügen und natürlich auch die Daten aus der aufbereiteten CSV-Datei in einem Textfeld importieren. Dazu geht man auf Objekte->Mischeinstellungen. Wenn sich die Schlüssel (Name, Adresse1, Adresse2, PLZ, Ort und Land) in der ersten Zeile befinden, wählt man einfach "Text: Durch Kommata getrennte Werte (CSV) mit Schlüsseln in Zeile 1". und den Ort der CSV-Datei. Anschließend werden die einzelnen Datensätze angezeigt.
Danach muss man nur noch ein Textobjekt anlegen und die Datenfelder einfügen. Das Ganze könnte dann ganz schlicht wie auf dem oben gezeigten Bildschirmfoto aussehen.
Wer sich die Arbeit nicht selbst machen möchte, kann sich hier meine Vorlage herunterladen.
glabels_Dymo_LableWriter_450_Vorlage.glabels.tar

Fazit

Mit dem neuen Etikettendrucker kann man nun blitzschnell Adressen auf Klebeetiketten drucken, was eine enorme Zeitersparnis darstellt. Preis/Leistung sind spitze und das Beste ist, es funktioniert tadellos mit jedem Linuxsystem, bevorzugterweise Debian. 😉 Natürlich muss es nicht bei Ebay-Adressen bleiben. Sehr gut funktioniert z.B. auch der Druck von Internetmarken der Deutschen Post. Der Dymo lässt sich als Format auswählen und das Porto problemlos damit drucken.

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My Free Software Activities in April 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

  • I adopted childsplay, a suite of educational games for young children. I triaged all open bugs and thanks to a very responsive upstream developer the game is back in testing again now.
  • I did a QA upload for pax-britannica to fix #825673 and #718884 and updated the packaging.
  • In the same vein I did two NMUs for animals and acm and fixed RC bugs #875547 and #889530. Later I contacted the release team to get the fix for animals into Stretch too.
  • I packaged new upstream releases of extremetuxracer, adonthell, renpy and pygame-sdl2.
  • I sponsored and reviewed new versions of tanglet, connectagram and cutemaze for Innocent de Marchi.
  • I released version 2.3 of debian-games, a collection of metapackages to make it easier to find and install certain types of games.
  • I backported the latest release of freeciv to Stretch.
  • Finally I could resolve the RC bugs in morris and grhino and both games are part of Buster again.

Debian Java

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-sixth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 16,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • From 16.04.2018 until 22.04.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in bouncycastle, jruby, typo3-src, imagemagick, pegl, ocaml, radare2, movabletype-opensource, cacti, ghostscript, glusterfs, jasperreports, xulrunner, phpmyadmin, gunicorn, psensor, nasm and lucene-solr.
  • DLA-1352-1. Issued a security update for jruby fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1361-1. Issued a security update for psensor fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1363-1. Issued a security update for ghostscript fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1366-1. Issued a security update for wordpress fixing 2 CVE.
  • DSA-4190-1. Prepared the security update for jackson-databind in Jessie fixing 1 CVE.
  • DSA-4194-1. Prepared the security update for lucene-solr in Jessie fixing 1 CVE.
  • Prepared a security update for imagemagick in Jessie fixing 8 CVE. At the moment it is pending review by the security team and will be released soon.
  • Prepared and uploaded a point-update for faad2 in Jessie and Stretch that addresses 11 security vulnerabilities. (#897369)
  • Prepared a security update for php5 in Wheezy. This one will be released soon. (DLA-1373-1)

Misc

  • I filed wishlist bugs against tracker.debian.org (#897225 and #897227) and requested a feature to allow users to override certain metainformation like VCS-URLs. In the past years we changed VCS addresses multiple times which always requires a source upload. In my opinion this is a design flaw and highly inefficient and such a change in tracker would make it possible to drop the fields from our team maintained packages.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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My Free Software Activities in March 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

Debian Java

  • I spent most of my free time on Java packages because...OpenJDK 9 is now the default Java runtime environment in Debian! As of today I count 319 RC bugs (bugs with severity normal would be serious today as well) of which 227 are already resolved. That means one third of the Java team's packages have to be adjusted for the new OpenJDK version. Java 9 comes with a new module system called Jigsaw. Undoubtedly it represents a lot of new interesting ideas but it is also a major paradigm shift. For us mere packagers it means more work than any other version upgrade in the past. Let's say we are a handful of regular contributors (I'm generous) and we spend most of our time to stabilize the Java ecosystem in Debian to the point that we can build all of our packages again. Repeat for every new Debian release. Unfortunately not much time is actually spent on packaging new and cool applications or libraries unless they are strictly required to fix a specific Java 9 issue. It just doesn't feel right at the moment. Most upstreams are rather indifferent or relaxed when it comes to porting their applications to Java 9 because they still can use Java 8, so why can't we? They don't have to provide security support for five years and can make the switch to Java 9 much later. They can also cherry-pick certain versions of libraries whereas we have to ensure that everything works with one specific version of a library. But that's not all: Java 9 will not be shipped with Buster and we even aim for OpenJDK 11! Releases of OpenJDK will be more frequent from now on, expect a new release every six months, and there are certain versions which will receive extended security support like OpenJDK 11. One thing we can look forward to: Apparently more commercial features of Oracle JDK will be merged into OpenJDK and it appears the longterm goal is to make Oracle JDK and OpenJDK builds completely interchangeable. So maybe one day only one free software JDK for everything and everyone? I hope so.
  • I worked on the following packages to address Java 9 or other bugs: activemq, snakeyaml, libjchart2d-java, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jboss-threads, jboss-logmanager, jboss-logging-tools, qdox2, wildfly-common, activemq-activeio, jackson-datatype-joda, antlr, axis, libitext5-java, libitext1-java, libitext-java, jedit, conversant-disruptor, beansbinding, cglib, undertow, entagged, jackson-databind, libslf4j-java, proguard, libhtmlparser-java, libjackson-json-java and sweethome3d (patch by Emmanuel Bourg)
  • New upstream versions: jboss-threads, okio, libokhttp-java, snakeyaml, robocode.
  • I NMUed jtb and applied a patch from Tiago Stürmer Daitx.

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-fifth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 23,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • From 19.03.2018 until 25.03.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in imagemagick, libvirt, freeplane, exempi, calibre, gpac, ipython, binutils, libraw, memcached, mosquitto, sdl-image1.2, slurm-llnl, graphicsmagick, libslf4j-java, radare2, sam2p, net-snmp, apache2, ldap-account-manager, librelp, ruby-rack-protection, libvncserver, zsh and xerces-c.
  • DLA-1310-1. Issued a security update for exempi fixing 6 CVE.
  • DLA-1315-1. Issued a security update for libvirt fixing 2 CVE.
  • DLA-1316-1. Issued a security update for freeplane fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1322-1. Issued a security update for graphicsmagick fixing 6 CVE.
  • DLA-1325-1. Issued a security update for drupal7 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1326-1. Issued a security update for php5 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1328-1. Issued a security update for xerces-c fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1335-1. Issued a security update for zsh fixing 2 CVE.
  • DLA-1340-1. Issued a security update for sam2p fixing 5 CVE. I also prepared a security update for Jessie. (#895144)
  • DLA-1341-1. Issued a security update for sdl-image1.2 fixing 6 CVE.

Misc

  • I triaged all open bugs in imlib2 and forwarded the issues upstream. The current developer of imlib2 was very responsive and helpful. Thanks to Kim Woelders several longstanding bugs could be fixed.
  • There was also a new upstream release for xarchiver. Check it out!

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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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.

Posted on

My Free Software Activities in January 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

  • The state of Debian Games: We have created a new games-team group at salsa.debian.org. If you are interested in maintaining games or related projects then we're looking forward to see you there. A couple of Gnome related games are at risk of being removed from Debian. If you are interested in a challenge and want to port them to Gnome 3, we would very much like to hear from you too.
  • I reviewed and sponsored new upstream versions of simutrans-pak64 and simutrans for Jörg Frings-Fürst as well as openmw, mygui, wildmidi and openal for Bret Curtis. Later I could also upload hexalate for Unit193 and pegsolitaire for Juhani Numminen. Great job by Juhani who became the new upstream maintainer of pegsolitaire and saved the game from being removed from Debian.
  • I for myself packaged new upstream releases of springlobby, peg-e, pygame-sdl2, freeciv, renpy and cube2. I was a bit surprised to see upstream activity for the Sauerbraten engine again. Will we see a new major release this year?
  • Peter Green provided a patch to fix Debian RC bug #887929 in trigger-rally which I gladly accepted.
  • I also fixed RC bug #885761 in langdrill.

Debian Java

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-third month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 18,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • From 08.01.2018 until 14.01.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in libhibernate-validator-java, libkohana2-php, xbmc, jasperreports, transmission, wireshark, osc, xmltooling, php5 and openocd.
  • DLA-1241-1. Issued a security update for libkohana2-php fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1242-1. Issued a security update for xmltooling fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1243-1. Issued a security update for xbmc fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1251-1. Issued a security update for php5 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1253-1. Issued a security update for openocd fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1254-1. Issued a security update for lucene-solr fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1264-1. Issued a security update for unbound fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1265-1. Issued a security update for krb5 fixing 6 CVE.

Misc

  • I reviewed a patch for byzanz (#886439) but wasn't really happy with the result.
  • I released version 1.4.10 of imlib2.
  • The discussion about a new reportbug feature gathered momentum in #878088 and I am confident now that we can conclude this issue in February.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Posted on

My Free Software Activities in December 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

  • I spent some time in December 2017 to revive Hex-a-Hop, a nice (and somehow cute) logic game, which eventually closed seven bugs. Unfortunately this game was not well maintained but it should be up-to-date again now.
  • I released a new version of debian-games, a collection of games metapackages. Five packages were removed from Debian but  I could also add eight new games or frontends to compensate for that.
  • I updated a couple of packages to fix minor and normal bugs namely: dopewars (#633392,  #857671), caveexpress, marsshooter, snowballz (#866481), drascula, lure-of-the-temptress, lgeneral-data (#861048) and lordsawar (#885888).
  • I also packaged new upstream versions of renpy and lgeneral.
  • Last but not least: I completed another bullet transition (#885179).

Debian Java

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-second month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 14 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • DLA-1216-1. Issued a security update for wordpress fixing 4 CVE.
  • DLA-1227-1. Issued a security update for imagemagick fixing 4 CVE.
  • DLA-1231-1. Issued a security update for graphicsmagick fixing 8 CVE. I confirmed that two more CVE (CVE-2017-17783 and CVE-2017-17913) did not affect the version in Wheezy.
  • DLA-1236-1. Issued a security update for plexus-utils fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1237-1. Issued a security update for plexus-utils2 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1208-1. I released an update for Debian's reportbug tool to fix bug #878088. The LTS and security teams will be informed from now on when users report regressions due to security updates. I have also prepared updates for Jessie/Stretch and unstable but my NMU was eventually canceled by the maintainer of reportbug . He has not made a concrete counterproposal yet.

Misc

  • I reviewed and sponsored mygui and openmw for Bret Curtis.
  • I updated byzanz and fixed #830011.
  • I adopted the imlib2 image library and prepared a new upstream release. I hope to release it soon.

Non-maintainer upload

  • I NMUed lmarbles, prepared a new upstream release and fixed some bugs.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Posted on

My Free Software Activities in November 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

Debian Java

  • New upstream versions this month: undertow, jackrabbit, libpdfbox2, easymock, libokhttp-java, mediathekview, pdfsam, libsejda-java, libsambox-java and libnative-platform-java.
  • I updated bnd (2.4.1-7) in order to help with the removal of Eclipse from Testing. Unfortunately there is more work to do and the only way forward is to package a newer version of Eclipse and to split the package in a way, so that such issues can be avoided in the future. P.S.: We appreciate help with maintaining Eclipse! (#681726)
  • I sponsored libimglib2-java for Ghislain Antony Vaillant.
  • I fixed a regression in libmetadata-extractor-java related to relative classpaths. (#880746)
  • I spent more time on upgrading Gradle to version 3.4.1 and finally succeeded. The package is in experimental now. Upgrading from 3.2.1 to 3.4.1 didn't seem like a big undertaking but the 8 MB debdiff and ~170000 lines of code changes proved me wrong. I discovered two regressions with this version in mockito and bnd. The former one could be resolved but bnd requires probably an upgrade as well. I would like to avoid that at the moment because major bnd upgrades tend to affect dozens of reverse-dependencies, mostly in a negative way.
  • Netbeans was affected by a regression in jaxb and failed to build from source. (#882525) I could partly revert the damage but another bug in jaxb 2.3.0 is currently preventing a complete recovery.
  • I fixed two Java 9 transition bugs in libnative-platform-java (#874645) and  jedit (#875583).

Debian LTS

This was my twenty-first month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 14.75 hours (13 +1.75 from October) on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

  • DLA-1177-1. Issued a security update for poppler fixing 4 CVE.
  • DLA-1178-1. Issued a security update for opensaml2 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1179-1. Issued a security update for shibboleth-sp2 fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1180-1. Issued a security update for libspring-ldap-java fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1184-1. Issued a security update for optipng fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1185-1. Issued a security update for sam2p fixing 1 CVE.
  • DLA-1197-1. Issued a security update for sox fixing 7 CVE.
  • DLA-1198-1. Issued a security update for libextractor fixing 6 CVE. I also discovered that libextractor in buster/sid is still affected by more security issues and reported my findings as Debian bug #883528.

Misc

  • I packaged a new upstream release of osmo, a neat task manager and calendar application.
  • I prepared a security update for sam2p, which will be part of the next Jessie point release, and libspring-ldap-java. (DSA-4046-1)

Thanks for reading and see you next time.