Oct 01 2024 Free software activity in September 2024

Almost all of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay.

Pydantic

My main Debian project for the month turned out to be getting Pydantic back into a good state in Debian testing. I’ve used Pydantic quite a bit in various projects, most recently in Debusine, so I have an interest in making sure it works well in Debian. However, it had been stalled on 1.10.17 for quite a while due to the complexities of getting 2.x packaged. This was partly making sure everything else could cope with the transition, but in practice mostly sorting out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo Röhling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck.

Learning Rust is on my to-do list, but merely not knowing a language hasn’t stopped me before. So I learned how the Debian Rust team’s packaging works, upgraded a few packages to new upstream versions (including rust-half and upstream rust-idna test fixes), and packaged rust-jiter. After a lot of waiting around for various things and chasing some failures in other packages I was eventually able to get current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing.

I’m looking forward to being able to drop our clunky v1 compatibility code once debusine can rely on running on trixie!

OpenSSH

I upgraded the Debian packaging to OpenSSH 9.9p1.

YubiHSM

I upgraded python-yubihsm, yubihsm-connector, and yubihsm-shell to new upstream versions.

I noticed that I could enable some tests in python-yubihsm and yubihsm-shell; I’d previously thought the whole test suite required a real YubiHSM device, but when I looked closer it turned out that this was only true for some tests.

I fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures (upstream PRs #431, #432), and also made it build reproducibly.

Thanks to Helmut Grohne, I fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed.

As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes.

Python team

setuptools 72.0.0 removed the venerable setup.py test command. This caused some fallout in Debian, some of which was quite non-obvious as packaging helpers sometimes fell back to different ways of running test suites that didn’t quite work. I fixed django-guardian, manuel, python-autopage, python-flask-seeder, python-pgpdump, python-potr, python-precis-i18n, python-stopit, serpent, straight.plugin, supervisor, and zope.i18nmessageid.

As usual for new language versions, the addition of Python 3.13 caused some problems. I fixed psycopg2, python-time-machine, and python-traits.

I fixed build/autopkgtest failures in keymapper, python-django-test-migrations, python-rosettasciio, routes, transmissionrpc, and twisted.

buildbot was in a bit of a mess due to being incompatible with SQLAlchemy 2.0. Fortunately by the time I got to it upstream had committed a workable set of patches, and the main difficulty was figuring out what to cherry-pick since they haven’t made a new upstream release with all of that yet. I figured this out and got us up to 4.0.3.

Adrian Bunk asked whether python-zipp should be removed from trixie. I spent some time investigating this and concluded that the answer was no, but looking into it was an interesting exercise anyway.

On the other hand, I looked into flask-appbuilder, concluded that it should be removed, and filed a removal request.

I upgraded some embedded CSS files in nbconvert.

I upgraded importlib-resources, ipywidgets, jsonpickle, pydantic-settings, pylint (fixing a test failure), python-aiohttp-session, python-apptools, python-asyncssh, python-django-celery-beat, python-django-rules, python-limits, python-multidict, python-persistent, python-pkginfo, python-rt, python-spur, python-zipp, stravalib, transmissionrpc, vulture, zodbpickle, zope.exceptions (adopting it), zope.i18nmessageid, zope.proxy, and zope.security to new upstream versions.

debmirror

The experimental and *-proposed-updates suites used to not have Contents-* files, and a long time ago debmirror was changed to just skip those files in those suites. They were added to the Debian archive some time ago, but debmirror carried on skipping them anyway. Once I realized what was going on, I removed these unnecessary special cases (#819925, #1080168).