All but about four hours of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. (I ended up going a bit over my 20% billing limit this month.)

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay.

man-db and friends

I released libpipeline 1.5.8 and man-db 2.13.0.

Since autopkgtests are great for making sure we spot regressions caused by changes in dependencies, I added one to man-db that runs the upstream tests against the installed package. This required some preparatory work upstream, but otherwise was surprisingly easy to do.

OpenSSH

I fixed the various 9.8 regressions I mentioned last month: socket activation, libssh2, and Twisted. There were a few other regressions reported too: TCP wrappers support, openssh-server-udeb, and xinetd were all broken by changes related to the listener/per-session binary split, and I fixed all of those.

Once all that had made it through to testing, I finally uploaded the first stage of my plan to split out GSS-API support: there are now openssh-client-gssapi and openssh-server-gssapi packages in unstable, and if you use either GSS-API authentication or key exchange then you should install the corresponding package in order for upgrades to trixie+1 to work correctly. I’ll write a release note once this has reached testing.

Multiple identical results from getaddrinfo

I expect this is really a bug in a chroot creation script somewhere, but I haven’t been able to track down what’s causing it yet. My sbuild chroots, and apparently Lucas Nussbaum’s as well, have an /etc/hosts that looks like this:

$ cat /var/lib/schroot/chroots/sid-amd64/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost
127.0.1.1       [...]
127.0.0.1       localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback

The last line clearly ought to be ::1 rather than 127.0.0.1; but things mostly work anyway, since most code doesn’t really care which protocol it uses to talk to localhost. However, a few things try to set up test listeners by calling getaddrinfo("localhost", ...) and binding a socket for each result. This goes wrong if there are duplicates in the resulting list, and the test output is typically very confusing: it looks just like what you’d see if a test isn’t tearing down its resources correctly, which is a much more common thing for a test suite to get wrong, so it took me a while to spot the problem.

I ran into this in both python-asyncssh (#1052788, upstream PR) and Ruby (ruby3.1/#1069399, ruby3.2/#1064685, ruby3.3/#1077462, upstream PR). The latter took a while since Ruby isn’t one of my languages, but hey, I’ve tackled much harder side quests. I NMUed ruby3.1 for this since it was showing up as a blocker for openssl testing migration, but haven’t done the other active versions (yet, anyway).

OpenSSL vs. cryptography

I tend to care about openssl migrating to testing promptly, since openssh uploads have a habit of getting stuck on it otherwise.

Debian’s OpenSSL packaging recently split out some legacy code (cryptography that’s no longer considered a good idea to use, but that’s sometimes needed for compatibility) to an openssl-legacy-provider package, and added a Recommends on it. Most users install Recommends, but package build processes don’t; and the Python cryptography package requires this code unless you set the CRYPTOGRAPHY_OPENSSL_NO_LEGACY=1 environment variable, which caused a bunch of packages that build-depend on it to fail to build.

After playing whack-a-mole setting that environment variable in a few packages’ build process, I decided I didn’t want to be caught in the middle here and filed an upstream issue to see if I could get Debian’s OpenSSL team and cryptography’s upstream talking to each other directly. There was some moderately spirited discussion and the issue remains open, but for the time being the OpenSSL team has effectively reverted the change so it’s no longer a pressing problem.

GCC 14 regressions

Continuing from last month, I fixed build failures in pccts (NMU) and trn4.

Python team

I upgraded alembic, automat, gunicorn, incremental, referencing, pympler (fixing compatibility with Python >= 3.10), python-aiohttp, python-asyncssh (fixing CVE-2023-46445, CVE-2023-46446, and CVE-2023-48795), python-avro, python-multidict (fixing a build failure with GCC 14), python-tokenize-rt, python-zipp, pyupgrade, twisted (fixing CVE-2024-41671 and CVE-2024-41810), zope.exceptions, zope.interface, zope.proxy, zope.security, zope.testrunner. In the process, I added myself to Uploaders for zope.interface; I’m reasonably comfortable with the Zope Toolkit and I seem to be gradually picking up much of its maintenance in Debian.

A few of these required their own bits of yak-shaving:

• python-aiohttp 3.10.0 needed fixes in blinkpy (#1077981, upstream PR) and python-yalexs (#1077985, upstream PR).
• twisted 24.7.0 needed fixes in pytest-twisted (cherry-picked existing upstream commit), python-daphne (cherry-picked existing upstream PR), and python-tornado (#1078411, upstream PR).

I improved some Multi-Arch: foreign tagging (python-importlib-metadata, python-typing-extensions, python-zipp).

I fixed build failures in pipenv, python-stdlib-list, psycopg3, and sen, and fixed autopkgtest failures in autoimport (upstream PR), python-semantic-release and rstcheck.

Upstream for zope.file (not in Debian) filed an issue about a test failure with Python 3.12, which I tracked down to a Python 3.12 compatibility PR in zope.security.

I made python-nacl build reproducibly (upstream PR).

I moved aliased files from / to /usr in timekpr-next (#1073722).

Installer team

I applied a patch from Ubuntu to make os-prober support building with the noudeb profile (#983325).