Sep 03 2025 Free software activity in August 2025

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.

Python team

forky is open! As a result I’m starting to think about the upcoming Python 3.14. At some point we’ll doubtless do a full test rebuild, but in advance of that I concluded that one of the most useful things I could do would be to work on our very long list of packages with new upstream versions. Of course there’s no real chance of this ever becoming empty since upstream maintainers aren’t going to stop work for that long, but there are a lot of packages there where we’re quite a long way out of date, and many of those include fixes that we’ll need for 3.14, either directly or by fixing interactions with new versions of other packages that in turn will need to be fixed. We can backport changes when we need to, but more often than not the most efficient way to do things is just to keep up to date.

So, I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions (deep breath):

• aioftp
• aiosignal (building on work by IanLucca)
• audioop-lts
• celery
• djangorestframework
• djoser
• fpylll
• frozenlist
• git-repo-updater
• ipykernel
• klepto
• kombu
• multipart
• netmiko (sponsoring work by Eduardo Silva; contributed supporting fix upstream)
• pathos
• ppft
• pydantic
• pydantic-core
• pydantic-settings
• pylsqpack
• pymssql
• pytest-mock
• pytest-pretty
• pytest-repeat
• pytest-rerunfailures
• python-a2wsgi
• python-apptools (sponsoring work by Kathlyn Lara Murussi)
• python-asgiref
• python-asyncssh
• python-bitarray
• python-bitstring
• python-bytecode
• python-channels-redis
• python-charset-normalizer
• python-daphne
• python-django-analytical
• python-django-guid
• python-django-health-check
• python-django-pgbulk
• python-django-pgtrigger
• python-django-postgres-extra
• python-django-storages
• python-holidays
• python-httpx-sse
• python-icalendar
• python-lazy-model
• python-line-profiler
• python-lz4
• python-marshmallow-dataclass
• python-mastodon
• python-model-bakery
• python-oauthlib
• python-parse-type
• python-pathvalidate
• python-pgspecial
• python-processview
• python-pytest-subtests
• python-roman
• python-semantic-release
• python-testfixtures
• python-time-machine
• python-tokenize-rt
• python-typeguard
• python-typing-extensions
• python-urllib3
• pyupgrade
• requests (fixing CVE-2024-47081)
• responses
• zope.deferredimport
• zope.schema
• zope.testrunner

That’s only about 10% of the backlog, but of course others are working on this too. If we can keep this up for a while then it should help.

I packaged pytest-run-parallel, pytest-unmagic (still in NEW), and python-forbiddenfruit (still in NEW), all needed as new dependencies of various other packages.

setuptools upstream will be removing the setup.py install command on 31 October. While this may not trickle down immediately into Debian, it does mean that in the near future nearly all Python packages will have to use pybuild-plugin-pyproject (note that this does not mean that they necessarily have to use pyproject.toml; this is just a question of how the packaging runs the build system). We talked about this a bit at DebConf, and I said that I’d noticed a number of packages where this isn’t straightforward and promised to write up some notes. I wrote the Python/PybuildPluginPyproject wiki page for this; I expect to add more bits and pieces to it as I find them.

On that note, I converted several packages to pybuild-plugin-pyproject:

• billiard
• lazr.config
• python-timeline
• zope.sqlalchemy
• zope.testing

I fixed several build/test failures:

• aiosmtplib
• blinker
• ipykernel
• ipyparallel
• quart

I fixed some other bugs:

• austin: binutils now has a libsframe-dev package, please add an explicit build dependency
• python-django-pgbulk: Missing dependency on python3-typing-extensions (contributed upstream)
• python-maturin: Upcoming rust-which update

I reviewed Debian defaults: nftables as banaction and systemd as backend, but it looked as though nothing actually needed to be changed so we closed this with no action.

Rust team

Upgrading Pydantic was complicated, and required a rust-pyo3 transition (which Jelmer Vernooij started and Peter Michael Green has mostly been driving, thankfully), packaging rust-malloc-size-of (including an upstream portability fix), and upgrading several packages to new upstream versions:

• rust-serde
• rust-serde-derive
• rust-serde-json
• rust-smallvec
• rust-speedate
• rust-time
• rust-time-core
• rust-time-macros

bugs.debian.org

I fixed bugs.debian.org: misspelled checkbox id “uselessmesages”, as well as a bug that caused incoming emails with certain header contents to go missing.

OpenSSH

I fixed openssh-server: refuses further connections after having handled PerSourceMaxStartups connections with a cherry-pick from upstream.

Other bits and pieces

I upgraded libfido2 to a new upstream version.

I fixed mimalloc: FTBFS on armhf: cc1: error: ‘-mfloat-abi=hard’: selected architecture lacks an FPU, which was blocking changes to pendulum in the Python team. I also spent some time helping to investigate libmimalloc3: Illegal instruction Running mtxrun —generate, though that bug is still open.

I fixed various autopkgtest bugs in gssproxy, prompted by #1007 in Debusine.

Since my old team is decommissioning Bazaar/Breezy code hosting in Launchpad (the end of an era, which I have distinctly mixed feelings about), I converted Storm to git.