FLOSS activity in January/February 2024

diff --git a/content/activity-2024-02.md b/content/activity-2024-02.md
new file mode 100644 (file)
index 0000000..f4b1abe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/activity-2024-02.md
@@ -0,0 +1,112 @@
+Title: FLOSS activity in January/February 2024
+Slug: activity-2024-02
+Date: 2024-03-04 10:39:50 +00:00
+Category: columbiform
+Tags: activity, columbiform, freexian, planet-debian, planet-ubuntu
+
+Two months into my [new gig]({filename}/going-freelance.md) and it's going
+great!  [Tracking my time]({filename}/task-management.md) has taken a bit of
+getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database
+of everything I've done has also allowed some helpful introspection.
+
+Freexian [sponsors](https://www.freexian.com/about/debian-contributions/) up
+to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice.  In fact I've been spending
+the bulk of my time on
+[debusine](https://freexian-team.pages.debian.net/debusine/) which is itself
+intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later.
+While I contribute to Freexian's
+[summaries](https://www.freexian.com/tags/debian-contributions/) now, I've
+also decided to start writing monthly posts about my free software activity
+as many others do, to get into some more detail.
+
+## January 2024
+
+ * I [added Incus
+   support](https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/autopkgtest/-/merge_requests/272)
+   to autopkgtest.  [Incus](https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/) is a system
+   container and virtual machine manager, forked from [Canonical's
+   LXD](https://github.com/canonical/lxd).  I switched my laptop over to it
+   and then quickly found that it was inconvenient not to be able to run
+   Debian package test suites using
+   [autopkgtest](https://manpages.debian.org/man/autopkgtest), so I tweaked
+   autopkgtest's existing LXD integration to support using either LXD or
+   Incus.
+ * I discovered [Perl::Critic](https://metacpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic) and
+   used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of my packages,
+   including debconf.  Perl used to be my language of choice but I've been
+   mostly using Python for over a decade now, so I'm not as fluent as I used
+   to be and some mechanical assistance with spotting common errors is
+   helpful; besides, I'm generally a big fan of applying static analysis to
+   everything possible in the hope of reducing bug density.  Of course, this
+   did result in a couple of regressions
+   ([1](https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-debconf/debconf/-/commit/4f8b9f969679fa4a38aca8da2702057ea861ffae),
+   [2](https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-debconf/debconf/-/commit/7274bf66e82b2557156813f93ed0592539a2ac1c)),
+   but at least we caught them fairly quickly.
+ * I did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error
+   message handling in several places ([1](https://bugs.debian.org/797071),
+   [2](https://bugs.debian.org/754123),
+   [3](https://bugs.debian.org/682508)).
+ * I did some routine maintenance to move several of my upstream projects to
+   a new [Gnulib stable
+   branch](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Stable-Branches.html).
+ * [debmirror](https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror) includes a [useful
+   summary](https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/blob/master/mirror_size)
+   of how big a Debian mirror is, but it hadn't been updated since 2010 and
+   the script to do so had bitrotted quite badly.  I [fixed
+   that](https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/commit/7ae93742377d9205c57b7e47ef96d4663110f0ff)
+   and added a recurring task for myself to refresh this every six months.
+
+## February 2024
+
+ * Some time back I added AppArmor and seccomp confinement to man-db.  This
+   was mainly motivated by a desire to [support manual pages in
+   snaps](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/support-for-man-pages/2299/24) (which
+   is [still open](https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1575593) several
+   years later ...), but since reading manual pages involves a [non-trivial
+   text processing toolchain mostly written in
+   C++](https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/), I thought it was reasonable to
+   assume that some day it might have a vulnerability even though its track
+   record has been good; so `man` now restricts the system calls that
+   `groff` can execute and the parts of the file system that it can access.
+   I stand by this, but it did cause some problems that have needed a
+   succession of small fixes over the years.  This month I issued
+   [DLA-3731-1](https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/02/msg00001.html),
+   backporting some of those fixes to buster.
+ * I spent some time chasing a [console-setup build
+   failure](https://bugs.debian.org/1063413) following the removal of
+   kFreeBSD support, which was uploaded by mistake.  I suggested a [set of
+   fixes](https://salsa.debian.org/holgerw/console-setup/-/merge_requests/1)
+   for this, but the author of the change to remove kFreeBSD support decided
+   to take a different approach (fair enough), so I've abandoned this.
+ * I updated the [Debian zope.testrunner
+   package](https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zope.testrunner) to 6.3.1.
+ * openssh:
+    * A Freexian collaborator had a problem with automating installations
+      involving changes to `/etc/ssh/sshd_config`.  This turned out to be
+      resolvable without any changes, but in the process of investigating I
+      noticed that my dodgy arrangements to avoid
+      [ucf](https://manpages.debian.org/man/ucf) prompts in certain cases
+      had bitrotted slightly, which meant that some people might be prompted
+      unnecessarily.  I [fixed this and arranged for it not to happen
+      again](https://salsa.debian.org/ssh-team/openssh/-/commit/b9671cc74475922fa61e9ebdba56ec84446d19ac).
+    * Following a [recent debian-devel
+      discussion](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/02/msg00239.html),
+      I realized that some particularly awkward code in the OpenSSH
+      packaging was now obsolete, and [removed
+      it](https://salsa.debian.org/ssh-team/openssh/-/commit/a6c7b9ef532489671e3a654ad38102cc30d94b5a).
+ * I backported a [python-channels-redis
+   fix](https://bugs.debian.org/1027387) to bookworm.  I wasn't the first
+   person to run into this, but I rediscovered it while working on debusine
+   and it was confusing enough that it seemed worth fixing in stable.
+ * I fixed a [simple build failure in
+   storm](https://bugs.debian.org/1064699).
+ * I dug into a very confusing cluster of celery build failures
+   ([1](https://bugs.debian.org/1056232),
+   [2](https://bugs.debian.org/1058317),
+   [3](https://bugs.debian.org/1063345)), and tracked the hardest bit down
+   to a [Python 3.12
+   regression](https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/115874), now fixed
+   in unstable thanks to Stefano Rivera.  Getting celery back into testing
+   is blocked on the [64-bit `time_t`
+   transition](https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time) for now, but
+   once that's out of the way it should flow smoothly again.