November 2015 was a month where I could not work on much FLOSS, unfortunately. Due to family members and myself being ill, things got stalled and delayed. Local customer projects always receive prioritized attention in such phases.
Ayatana Indicators
As already posted in a separate article [1], I spent quite some time on studying the architectural design of Ayatana/Ubuntu Application Indicators. For the pure purpose of studying I forked various code projects around Indicators and tested them on Debian unstable. Unfortunately, I did not come to a point where things really started working at runtime. Git projects of the various Ayatana Indicators compenents can be found on Github [2].
Debian and Debian LTS
For Debian LTS, I had to dispatch several of the open hours to other team members, because things got delayed here. I spent 6.5h on backporting a patch for CVE-2015-1335 [3] to lxc 0.7.x (as found in Debian squeeze and Ubuntu 12.04) [4]. This is still work in progress and I hope for a solution before X-mas.
Locally, I did a lot of work for our Debian Edu / Skolelinux customers, but there has not been much to contribute back to the FLOSS realm, so far.
In the context of the Debian MATE packaging team, we are sort of ready to push MATE 1.12 to Debian unstable (targetting also Ubuntu 16.04). However, we are currently waiting for mate-user-guide 1.12.0-1 to leave the Debian NEW queue [5]. Unfortunately, we have to hold back further uploads of MATE 1.12 until the mate-user-guide source package has entered Debian. (In MATE 1.10, the mate-user-guide binary package has been shipped in source package mate-desktop. With MATE 1.12, upstream split up mate-user-guide into a separate source project.)
Hacking Horde
Unfortunately, I am still stuck with a Kolab Mail System based on Kolab Server 2.x. On top of this Kolab Server, I use a Horde 5 installation based on Debian jessie/stretch. A customer of mine is doing hard testing work on that system (as he really wants to avoid using any of the big mail providers).
Thus, some of my time in November got spent on consolidating my Horde setup. I still need to filter out issues that are worth reporting upstream. Also, still work in progress.
In parallel, I already started exploring the recent version of Kolab Server, but getting my customer happy first definitely has priority.
Investigating usage of OPSI on top of Debian Edu / Skolelinux
Together with Klaus Ade Johnstad from the Debian Edu team, I have started looking at using OPSI [6] in school environments. More about this at the end of January 2016.
light+love
Mike
[1] http://sunweavers.net/blog/node/24
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject
[3] https://github.com/lxc/lxc/commit/592fd47a6245508b79fe6ac819fe6d3b2c1289be
[4] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/228717506/CVE-2015-1335.patch (v1)
[5] https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/mate-user-guide_1.12.0-1~exp1.html
[6] http://www.opsi.org