Dec 04 2025 Free software activity in November 2025

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. I had a bit less time than usual, because Freexian collaborators gathered in Marseille this month for our yearly sprint, doing some planning for next year.

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

OpenSSH

I began preparing for the second stage of the GSS-API key exchange package split (some details have changed since that message). It seems that we’ll need to wait until Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, but that’s close enough that it’s worth making sure we’re ready. This month I just did some packaging cleanups that would otherwise have been annoying to copy, such as removing support for direct upgrades from pre-bookworm. I’m considering some other package rearrangements to make the split easier to manage, but haven’t made any decisions here yet.

This also led me to start on a long-overdue bug triage pass, mainly consisting of applying usertags to lots of our open bugs to sort them by which program they apply to, and also closing a few that have been fixed, since some bugs will eventually need to be reassigned to GSS-API packages and it would be helpful to make them easier to find. At the time of writing, about 30% of the bug list remains to be categorized this way.

Python packaging

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

• aioftp
• basemap (fixing Cython 3.1 compatibility)
• billiard
• black
• django-phonenumber-field
• flask-security
• flufl.i18n
• langtable
• mariadb-connector-python
• peewee (fixing Cython 3.1 compatibility)
• pydantic
• pydantic-core
• pydantic-settings
• pylsqpack
• pymongo
• pymssql
• pyodbc
• python-auditwheel (contributed follow-up fix upstream)
• python-avro
• python-bleach
• python-btrees
• python-certifi
• python-charset-normalizer
• python-colorlog
• python-django-channels
• python-django-constance
• python-django-contact-form
• python-django-hashids
• python-djvulibre (fixing Cython 3.1 compatibility)
• python-evalidate
• python-legacy-cgi
• python-openstep-plist (fixing Cython 3.1 compatibility)
• python-pytest-run-parallel
• python-pytokens
• python-tblib
• python-webargs
• pyupgrade
• sqlfluff
• trove-classifiers
• ttconv
• wcwidth
• zope.hookable
• zope.i18nmessageid (removing run-time dependency on setuptools)
• zope.interface
• zope.proxy
• zope.security (removing run-time dependency on setuptools)
• zope.sqlalchemy

I packaged django-pgtransaction and backported it to trixie, since we plan to use it in Debusine; and I adopted python-certifi for the Python team.

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

• kivy
• mypy
• pytest-mypy-testing (contributed upstream)
• python-cytoolz
• python-discord
• python-ncls, fixing some failures in pyranges
• pyxdg
• traitlets
• twine

I fixed a couple of other bugs:

• pmix: B-D on python3-all-dev, but not built for all supported Python3 versions
• python-certifi: Package not compatible with multiarch

Other bits and pieces

• cdebconf: Move to /usr/lib/apt/apt-extracttemplates
• devscripts: Restore dpkg-dev dependency
• groff: Missing information about some utilities in the “contrib” directory

Code reviews

• base-passwd: French translation (merged and uploaded)
• cdebconf: Consider using the standard dh sequence in d/rules (merged and uploaded)
• cdebconf: Multiple select is not right aligned in Hebrew (patch fails to build; asked reporter for an update)
• cdebconf: Allow building without libglib2.0-dev (merged and uploaded)
• pydantic-core (merged and uploaded)
• pymongo (sponsored adoption by Aryan Karamtoth)
• python-maturin: Add missing build dependencies (merged and uploaded)