Free software activity in January 2025

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. If you appreciate this sort of work and are at a company that uses Debian, have a look to see whether you can pay for any of Freexian‘s services; as well as the direct benefits, that revenue stream helps to keep Debian development sustainable for me and several other lovely people.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay.

Python team

We finally made Python 3.13 the default version in testing! I fixed various bugs that got in the way of this:

As with last month, I fixed a few more build regressions due to the removal of a deprecated intersphinx_mapping syntax in Sphinx 8.0:

I ported a few packages to Django 5.1:

I ported python-pypump to IPython 8.0.

I fixed python-datamodel-code-generator to handle isort 6, and contributed that upstream.

I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools:

I removed the old python-celery-common transitional package from celery, since nothing in Debian needs it any more.

I fixed or helped to fix various other build/test failures:

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

Rust team

I fixed rust-pyo3-ffi to avoid explicit Python version dependencies that were getting in the way of making Python 3.13 the default version.

Security tools packaging team

I uploaded libevt to fix a build failure on i386 and to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools.

Installer team

I helped with some testing of a debian-installer-utils patch as part of the /usr move. I need to get around to uploading this, since it looks OK now.

Other small things

Helmut Grohne reached out for help debugging a multi-arch coinstallability problem (you know it’s going to be complicated when even Helmut can’t figure it out on his own …) in binutils, and we had a call about that.

I reviewed and applied a new Romanian translation of debconf’s manual pages.

I did my twice-yearly refresh of debmirror’s mirror_size documentation, and applied a contribution to improve the example debmirror.conf.

I fixed an arguable preprocessor string handling bug in man-db, and applied a fix for out-of-tree builds.

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