sunweaver's NET

Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian.

This is a very short notice that I am not available via Freenode anymore. You can now reach me and the projects I am involved in (#x2go, #arctica, #ayatana-indicators) via the libera.chat IRC network.

Of course, I am also available and hanging out on OFTC IRC for all Debian related topics.

For details on the reasoning, I noticed that I am fully aligned with Antoine Beaupré's statements in his recent blog post on the same matter [1]. A recommended read.

light+love
Mike

[1] https://anarc.at/blog/2021-05-24-leaving-freenode/

Recently, Raphael Hertzog published ideas [1] about how to make Debian more attractive for big enterprises. One missing key stone here is the possibility to sign up for an enterprise support subscription scheme. Another question tackles how to provide such a support scheme within Debian, without disturbing the current flow of how Debian is developed these days.

And, there are likely more questions to asks, riddles to solve, and hurdles to overcome.

We want to discuss this topic, brainstorm on it, collect new ideas and also hear your concerns on a public channel. Over the past weeks there already have been mail exchanges off-list.

We want to reboot this privately started discussion now in public (as that's where it belongs) starting +/- at the end of the coming week via the currently quite inactive Debian mailing list 'debian-enterprise' [2]. Please join the discussion (and the mailing list) [3] if interested in this topic.

light & love
Mike (aka sunweaver)

[1] https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/03/30/challenging-times-for-freexian-1/
(also read parts 2-4)
[2] debian-enterprise@lists.debian.org
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-enterprise

Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.

Things got delayed a little recently as my main developer contact on the upstream side was on sick leave for a while. Fortunately, he has now fully recovered and work is getting back on track.

Last week I received the official notice: There is now a German company named "Fre(i)e Software GmbH" registered with the German Trade Register.

Founding a New Company

Over the past months I have put my energy into founding a new company. As a freelancing IT consultant I started facing the limitation of other companies having strict policies that forbid the cooperation with one person businesses (Personengesellschaften).

Thus, the requirement for setting up a GmbH business came onto my agenda. I will move some of my business activities into this new company, starting next year.

Policy Ideas

The "Fre(i)e Software GmbH" will be a platform to facilitate the growth and spreading of Free Software on this planet.

Here are some first ideas for company policies:

• The idea is to bring together teams of developers and consultants that provide the highest expertise in FLOSS.

• Everything this company will do, will finally (or already during the development cycles) be published under some sorf of a free software / content license (for software, ideally a copyleft license).

• Staff members will work and live across Europe, freelancers may possibly live in any country where German businesses may do business with.

• Ideally, staff members and freelancers work on projects that they can identify themselves with, projects that they love.

• Software development and software design is an art. In the company we will honour this.

Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.

Recent Uploads to Debian related to Lomiri

Over the past 4 months I worked on the following bits and pieces regarding Lomiri in Debian:

• Work on lomiri-app-launch (Debian packaging, upstream work, upload to Debian)
• Fork lomiri-url-dispatcher from url-dispatcher (upstream work)
• Upload lomiri-url-dispatcher to Debian
• Fork out suru-icon-theme and make it its own upstream project
• Package and upload suru-icon-theme to Debian
• First glance at lomiri-ui-toolkit (currently FTBFS, needs to be revisited)
• Update of Mir (1.7.0 -> 1.8.0) in Debian
• Fix net-cpp FTBFS in Debian
• Fix FTBFS in gsettings-qt.
• Fix FTBFS in mir (support of binary-only and arch-indep-only builds)
• Coordinate with Marius Gripsgard and Robert Tari on shift over from Ubuntu Indicator to Ayatana Indicators
• Upload ayatana-indicator-* (and libraries) to Debian (new upstream releases)
• Package and upload to Debian: qmenumodel (still in Debian's NEW queue)
• Package and upload to Debian: ayatana-indicator-sound
• Symbol-Updates (various packages) for non-standard architectures
• Fix FTBFS of qtpim-opensource-src in Debian since Qt5.14 had landed in unstable
• Fix FTBFS on non-standard architectures of qtsystems, qtpim and qtfeedback
• Fix wlcs in Debian (for non-standard architectures), more Symbol-Updates (esp.

In August 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 16 hours (of 8 hours planned, plus another 8 hours that I carried over from July).

For ELTS, I have worked for another 8 hours (of 8 hours planned).

LTS Work

• LTS frontdesk: triage wireshark, yubico-piv-tool, trousers, software-properties, qt4-x11, qtbase-opensource-src, openexr, netty and netty-3.9
• upload to stretch-security: libvncserver 0.9.11+dfsg-1.3~deb9u5 (fixing 9 CVEs, DLA-2347-1 [1])
• upload to stretch-security: php-horde-core 2.27.6+debian1-2+deb9u1 (1 CVE, DLA-2348 [2])
• upload to stretch-security: php-horde 5.2.13+debian0-1+deb9u3 (fixing 1 CVE, DLA-2349-1 [3])
• upload to stretch-security: php-horde-kronolith 4.2.19-1+deb9u1 (fixing 1 CVE, DLA-2350-1 [4])
• upload to stretch-security: php-horde-kronolith 4.2.19-1+deb9u2 (fixing 1 more CVE, DLA-2351-1 [5])
• upload to stretch-security: php-horde-gollem 3.0.10-1+deb9u2 (fixing 1 CVE, DLA-2352-1 [6])
• upload to stretch-security: freerdp 1.1.0~git20140921.1.440916e+dfsg1-13+deb9u4 (fixing 14 CVEs, DLA-2356-1 [7])
• prepare salsa MRs for gnome-shell (for gnome-shell in stretch [8] and buster [9])

ELTS Work

• Look into open CVEs for Samba in Debian jessie ELTS.

In July 2020, I was originally assigned 8h of work on Debian LTS as a paid contributor, but holiday season overwhelmed me and I did not do any LTS work, at all.

The assigned hours from July I have taken with me into August 2020.

light+love,
Mike

At DebConf 17 in Montreal, I gave a talk about Ayatana Indicators [1] and the project's goal to continue the — by then already dropped out of maintenance — Ubuntu Indicators in a separate upstream project, detached from Ubuntu and its Ubuntu'isms.

Stalling

The whole Ayatana Indicators project received a bit of a show stopper by the fact that the IDO (Indicator Display Object) rendering was not working in vanilla GTK-3 without a certain patch [2] that only Ubuntu has in their GTK-3 package. Addressing GTK developers upstream some years back (after GTK 3.22 had already gone into long term maintenance mode) and asking for a late patch acceptance did not work out (as already assumed). Ayatana Indicators stalled at a level of 90% actually working fine, but those nice and shiny special widgets, like the calendar widget, the audio volume slider widgets, switch widgets, etc. could not be rendered appropriately in GTK based desktop environments (e.g. via MATE Indicator Applet) on other distros than Ubuntu.

I never really had the guts to sit down without a defined ending and find a patch / solution to this nasty problem. Ayatana Indicators stalled as a whole. I kept it alive and defended its code base against various GLib and what-not deprecations and kept it in Debian, but the software was actually partially broken / dysfunctional.

Taking the Dog for a Walk and then It Became all Light+Love

Several days back, I received a mail from Robert Tari [3]. I was outside on a hike with our dog and thought, ah well, let's check emails...

In June 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 8 hours (of 8 hours planned).

LTS Work

• frontdesk: CVE bug triaging for Debian jessie LTS: mailman, alpine, python3.4, redis, pound, pcre3, ngircd, mutt, lynis, libvncserver, cinder, bison, batik.
• upload to jessie-security: libvncserver (DLA-2264-1 [1], 9 CVEs)
• upload to jessie-security: mailman (DLA-2265-1 [2], 1 CVE)
• upload to jessie-security: mutt (DLA-2268-1 [3] and DLA-2268-2 [4]), 2 CVEs)

Other security related work for Debian

• make sure all security fixes for php-horde-* are also in Debian unstable
• upload freerdp2 2.1.2+dfsg-1 to unstable (9 CVEs)

References

• [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/06/msg00035.html
• [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/06/msg00036.html
• [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/06/msg00039.html
• [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/06/msg00040.html