Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Hand holding the release machinery for Phosh 0.51.0 but there's more:

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Better auto brightness (MR)
• Update CI to forky (MR)
• Test mobile data connection in CI (MR)
• Add DebugControl interface (MR)
• Release 0.51~rc1
• caffeine prefs: Fix resize when adding intervals (MR)
• Robustify plugin-prefs screenshot tests (MR)
• Another build systemd dependency fix (MR)
• Gesture to tune brightness on lock screen (MR)

phoc

• Update ci to forky (MR)
• Exit cleanly on SIGTERM (MR)
• Release (0.51~rc1), 0.51.0)
• Fix segfault triggered in alpine CI (MR)
• Cancel preedit on submit (avoids resubmitted text in e.g. chatty or flare) (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Test suite robustness (MR)
• Update CI (MR)
• Release 0.51~rc1)

stevia

• Give up if we can't grab the bus name (MR)
• Release 0.51~rc1 0.51.0

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Release 0.51~rc1, 0.50.0
• Unbreak nightly builds (MR)
• Unbreak 32bit builds (MR)
• Drop C file chooser impl (MR)

pfs

• pfs-open: Allow to open arbitrary directories and start fixing clippy warnings (MR)
• More clippy cleanups (MR)
• Allow to ship schema (MR)
• Run a smoke test in ci (MR)
• Implement org.freedesktop.FileManager1 in the demo (MR, MR, MR)
• dir-view: Don't thumbnail when disabled (MR)

Phrog

• Fix osk dependencies (MR)

gmobile

• run-phosh: Allow to run headless (MR)
• Release 0.5.0 (MR)
• display-panel: Allow to take screenshots (MR)
• Add hwdb and udev rules for torch min brightness (MR)

feedbackd

• Release 0.8.7

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.7

libcall-ui

• Ignore callaudiod deprecations as we otherwise break compilation of downstreams (MR)
• Same for 0.1.x branch (MR)
• Release (0.1.5)

wirepumber

• doc: Fix make run invocation (MR)

Chatty

mobile-broadband-povider-info

• Release 20251101

Debian

• stevia: Upload 0.51~rc1, 0.51.0)
• phrog: Use stevia instead of osk-stub (MR)
• meta-phosh: Modernize dependencies (MR)
• phosh: Drop osk-stub (MR)
• phosh: Upload 0.51~rc1
• phoc: Upload 0.41~rc1
• p-m-s: Upload 0.51~rc1
• feedbackd-device-themes: Upload 0.8.7
• m-b-p-i: Uplaod 20251101
• debcargo-conf: Backport ashpd patch (MR)
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Get it into unstable (MR, MR)

Mobian

• librem5: Drop exponential brightness (MR)

wlroots

• input-method-unstable-v2: Fix two protocol issues (MR)

libqrtr-glib

• Fix transfer annotation to unbreak usage from Python (MR)
• Move doc build to gi-docgen (MR)

libadwaits-rs

• Allow None for parent in adw_dialog_choose (MR)

phosh-site

• Lint tools (MR)
• Add slideshow to landing page (MR)
• Add more videos (MR)
• Fix typos and links (MR)
• Update nightly details (MR)

bengalos-debs

• Fix phrog build (MR, MR)
• Enable arm64 builds (MR)

gtk

• Drop unused defines (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• pfs: Create folder support (MR)`
• portal: Create thumbnails via thumbnailer service (MR)
• phosh: caffeine plugin prefs (MR)
• phosh: lower torch brightness (MR)
• phosh: wi-fi hotspot QR code (MR)
• phosh/caffeine: Close status page when selecting an interval (MR)
• phosh/caffeine: Use empty state (MR)
• bengalos-recpipes: prep supporting multiple disk layouts (MR)
• xdg-p-p: Longer test timeout (MR)
• p-m-s: Volume slider for media rols (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Quiete some things made progress last month: We put out Phosh 0.50 release, got closer to enabling media roles for audio by default in Phosh (see related post) and reworked our images builds. You should also (hopefully) notice some nice quality of life improvements once changes land in a distro near you and you're using Phosh. See below for details:

phosh

• Switch back to default them when disabling automatic HighContrast (MR)
• Hande gnome-session 49 changes so OSK can still start up (MR)
• Release 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Don't forget to apply corner-shift to gear icon (MR)
• Fix startup warning (MR)
• Update doap (MR)
• DBus codegen cleanups (MR, MR, MR)
• Add Autobrightness handling (MR), (MR), (MR)

phoc

• Dispatch idle loop in prepare (MR)
• Release 0.50.0

phosh-mobile-settings

• Allow to hide plugins (MR)
• Release 0.50~rc1, 0.50.0
• Hide demo plugins by default (MR)
• Sink floating refs properly (MR)
• Simplify includes (MR)
• Allow to configure alarm sound if clock app likely supports it (MR)
• Use shared check CI images (MR)
• Release 0.50.1
• Fix ringtone role (MR)

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Ship sytemd user unit so things work with gnome-session 49 (MR)
• Fix fallback to default OSK size with multiple outputs (MR)
• Improve character styling a bit (MR)
• Consolidate input surface creation (MR)
• Release 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Don't trigger backspace key repeat in keypad or emoji layouts (MR)
• Better restore layout after swipe closing (MR)

phosh-tour

• Release 0.50.0

meta-phosh

• Build shared CI image MR

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Use pfs subproject for Rust portal (MR)

libphosh-rs

• Fix doc build (MR)

Calls

• Release 49.1
• Fix plugin loading (MR)
• Fix debug logging (MR)

Phrog

• Allow OSKs to run with gnome-session 49 (MR)
• Release 0.50.0 (MR)

phosh-recipes

• Fix build (MR)
• Simplify and cleanup docs (MR)
• Fix mkosi build (MR)
• Install Recommends: (MR)
• Draft: Add support for initial-setup (MR)
• Add version option (MR)
• Drop debos build (MR, MR)

feedbackd

• Fix compatiblility with systemd >= 258 (MR)
• Use meson.options (MR)
• Add phone role (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Add support for Google Pixel 3A (MR)

Chatty

• Fix failing CI build (MR)

Squeekboard

• Add systemd unit to start with gnome-session 49 (MR)

Debian

• Upload phosh-tour 0.50.0
• Upload stevia 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Upload phosh-mobile-settings 0.50.0
• Upload feedbackd 0.8.6
• Prepare phrog upload (MR)
• gnome-session Breaks (MR, MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Backport our upstream deadlock fix (MR)
• Upload wlroots 0.19.2
• Upload iio-sensor-proxy 3.8 (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Release 0.0.3
• Fix deadlock on start MR)

gnome-settings-daemon

• Fix brightness values (MR)

gnome-control-center

• Ignore role based loopbacks (MR)

gnome-initial-setup

• Use AdwSwitchRow to reduce horizonatal allocation (MR)
• Quit when done (and not under GDM) (MR)

sdm845-mainline

• shift6mq: Switch to mainline panel driver (MR)

gnome-session

• RequiredComponents is now gone (MR)

alpine

• stevia: Add hunspell-en-us dependency (MR)

droid-juicer

• Install sensor firmware for SHIFT6mq (MR)
• Install sensor firmware for Oneplus 6T (MR)
• Fix clippy complaints (MR)

phosh-site

• Mention mirror (MR)
• Update for hugo 150 (MR, MR)
• Embed some ouf our peertube videos (MR)
• Add donations item (MR)
• Update osk post to mention systemd unit (MR)
• Update list of distributions and users (MR)
• Switch nightly builds to forky (MR)
• Lint more markdown (MR)
• Release 0.50.1 (MR)
• Notes on audio (MR)

phosh-debs

• Switch to Debian forky (MR)
• Add g-i-s (MR)

Linux

• shift6mq: Add missing panel driver dependency (MR)
• shift6mq: Fix DTS warning (MR)

Wireplumber

• Update media-role volume MR (MR)
• Allow to set a default target for e.g. alerts and alarms (MR)

Phosh.mobi e.V.

demo-phones

• Add demo videos (MR)
• Add demo epubs (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• phoc: Use correct format specifiers (MR)
• phoc: seat: Use the getter to access focused layer's output (MR)
• phosh: Upcoming events empty state (MR)
• phosh: Caffeine duration (MR)
• phosh: Location service quick setting (MR)
• phosh: UI check fix (MR)
• phosh: Autobrightness toggle (MR)
• p-m-s: Empty tweaks page test (MR)
• p-m-s: Symlink backend (MR)
• p-m-s: Return boolean from value setters (MR)
• p-m-s: conf-tweaks: Make setting_data a prop in Xresources backend (MR)
• p-m-s: conf-tweaks: Add gtk3settings backend (MR)
• gmobile: xiaomi-sweet support (MR)
• xdg-d-p: Use clippy (MR), MR)
• libcmatrix: various tweaks ([MR}(https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libcmatrix/-/merge_requests/110))
• libcmatrix: Release 0.0.4 (MR](https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libcmatrix/-/merge_requests/115)
• meta-phosh: Add cellbroadcasts (MR)
• calls: Unload plugin test (MR)
• calls: Sip proxy support (MR)
• calls: Build system cleanups (MR)
• m-b-p-i: JP MVNO (MR)

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Nothing stands out too much, I enjoyed doing the OSK changes the most as that helped to improve the typing experience further. Also doing a small bit of kernel work again was fun (still need to figure out the 6mq's touch controller repsonsiveness though).

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Add backlight brightness handling (MR)
• Handle brightness keybinding (MR)
• Use stevia (MR)
• Test suite improvements (MR)
• Simplify keybinding generation (MR)
• Allow g-c-c to work against nested phosh (MR)
• Hide demo plugins (MR)

phoc

• Unbreak type to search (MR)
• Update to wlroots 0.19.1 (MR)
• Relese 0.50~rc1
• Catch up with wlroots git (MR)
• Damage tracking and render simplifications (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Allow to hide plugins (MR)
• Release 0.50~rc1
• Hide demo plugins by default (MR)
• Sink floating refs properly (MR)
• Simplify includes (MR)

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Fix meson warning (MR)
• Update URLs (MR)
• Make backspace more clever (MR)
• presage: Better handle predictions vs completions: (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Update to pfs 0.0.5 (MR)
• Release 0.50~rc1
• Allow to disable Rust portal (MR)
• Use release ashpd (MR)

pfs

• Release 0.0.5 (MR)

libphosh-rs

• Modernize and release 0.0.7 (MR)

Phrog

• Bump libphosh dependency to 0.0.7 (MR)

feedbackd

• Release 0.8.5 (MR)
• Publish API docs (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.6 (MR)

Debian

• 0.46 backports for trixie: (MR) - testers needed!
• cellbroadcastd: Upload to sid (MR)
• meta-phosh: Update deps (MR)
• meta-phosh: Adjust deps for 0.49 (MR)
• phosh-tour: Upload to unstable (MR)
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Upload 0.50~rc1
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Enable Rust based portal (MR)
• wlroots: Upload 0.19.1
• rust-libphosh: Update to 0.0.7
• Release Phosh 0.50~rc1
• Release phosh-mobile-seettings 0.50~rc1
• Release feedbackd 0.8.5
• Release feedbackd-device-themes 0.8.6
• Release phoc 0.50~rc1

gnome-settings-daemon

• Fix brightness values (MR)

git-buildpackage

• Make gbp import-orig --uscan useful again when passing in a version (MR)
• Make dsc component tests fetch from salsa (MR)

govarnam

• Fix gcc-15 build (MR)

Sessions

• Fix missing application icon (MR)

twenty-twenty-hugo

• Avoid 404 on each page load (MR)
• Fingerprint custom CSS (MR)

tuwunnel

• Fix alias in systemd unit (MR)
• Document support items (MR)

Linux

• Add backlight support for Shift6MQ (v1, v2, v3)

mutter

• udev: Don't leak parent device (MR)

Phosh debs

• Don't require gsd-49 yet (MR)

phosh-site

• Fix links (MR)
• Update several entries (MR)
• Mention nonprofit (MR)
• Automatic deploy (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews I did on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• p-m-s: Tweaks parsing (MR)
• p-m-s: Prefer char over gchar (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Add .XResources backend (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Add Symlink backend (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Cleanup includes (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Cleanup self ref (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Menu toggle (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: i18n support (MR)
• p-m-s/tweaks: Use toasts for errors (MR)
• p-m-s/run: Add gdb invocation (MR)
• p-m-s: Appinfo tweaks (MR)
• p-m-s: Hide Config tweaks menu entry when not needed (MR)
• m-b-p-i provider updates: (MR)
• m-b-p-i emergency number updates: (MR, MR, MR)
• pfs: Switch to gtk-rs 0.10 (MR)
• x-d-p-p: Switch to gtk-rs 0.10 (MR)
• x-d-p-p: Port file chooser portal to Rust (MR)
• phosh: custom lockscreen message (MR)
• libcmatrix: Bump endpoint versions (MR)
• phosh-recipes: Add gnome-software-plugin-flatpak (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Released Phosh 0.49.0 and added some more QoL improvements to Phosh Mobile stack (e.g. around Cell broadcasts). Also pulled my SHIFT6mq out of the drawer (where it was sitting in a drawwer far too long) and got it to show a picture after a small driver fix. Thanks to the work the sdm845-mainlining folks are doing that was all that was needed. If I can get touch to work better that would be another nice device for demoing Phosh.

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Allow to auto-start pomodoro timer (MR)
• Improve mpris player thumbnails (MR)
• Cellbroadcast fixes (MR)
• Release (MR)
• searchd related build system fixes (MR)
• gchar vs char cleanup (MR)
• upcoming-events: Add filter icons (MR)
• Fix missing header dependency (MR)
• Release 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• Fix some incorrect callback signatures (MR)

phoc

• Workspace indicators (MR)
• Don't overwrite picked output (MR)
• Release (0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• Raise nofile rlimit (MR)
• Fix gettings tarted page title (MR)
• Update cursor when layer surface moves away from under the cursor (MR)
• Support cursor-shape-v1 protocol (MR)
• pointer: Use libinput's LIBINPUT_CONFIG_DRAG_LOCK_ENABLED_STICKY: (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Cellbroadcast fixes (MR)
• build: Link statically against libcellbroadcast subproject (MR)
• Release 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Release 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• Fix emoji matching on big endian (MR)
• Fix emoji matching again aftr switching to GTK's embedded emoji data (MR)
• Fix scaling when adding new layouts (MR)
• Improve character popover and other fixes (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Release 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0

pfs

• Let pressing <enter> save the file (MR)

feedbackd

• Release 0.8.4
• Fix important override. (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.5
• Lower status LED brightness on sargo (MR)

libcmatrix

• Track room version (MR)

Chatty

• Warning fixes (MR)
• matrix: Show room version (MR)

Debian

• feedbackd-device-themes: Upload 0.8.5
• feebackd: Upload 0.8.4
• stevia: Upload 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• p-m-s: Upload 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• With trixie release, upload to unstable feedbackd, feedbackd-device-themes, gmobile
• phosh: Upload 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• phoc: Upload 0.49~rc1, 0.49.0
• meta-phosh: Fix captive portal detection (MR)
• stevia: Fix build failure on s390x (MR)
• libssc: Update to 0.2.2 (MR)
• mobile-config-firefox: Fix stray config file (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Fix daemon systemd target (MR)
• Ignore case when matching country when looking up channels (MR)
• Meson dependency fix (MR)

ModemManager

• Fix two country codes (MR)

gnome-clocks

• Fix sporadic wakeup due to not diposed timers (MR) also resulting in a vala issue

git-buildpackage

• Move test data to salsa and fetch it from there: deb, rpm, MR
• clone: Be less strict on vcs-git URLs (MR)

mobian-recipies

• Fail early without an ssh key (MR)

Linux

• Shift6mq: Fix clock frequency of panel driver (MR)
• Shift6mq: Set chassis type (MR)
• Shift6mq: Tried to improve the touch driver to increase the sensitivity / sample rate not success yet.

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• phosh/upcoming-events: Allow to filter out empty days in (MR)
• phosh: keypad and search bar CSS improvements (MR)
• p-m-s: Tweaks definition parsing code (MR)
• p-m-s: osk-shortcuts: UI tweaks (MR)
• p-m-s: Add gchar check (MR)
• p-m-s: Make it a search provider (MR)
• phoc: toplevel-addons (MR)
• debian: MM stable update (MR)
• stevia: Use default font (MR)
• upcoming-events: Use filtered list model (MR)
• pms: Tweaks rename (MR)
• pms: Clang build fix (MR)
• feedbackd: Udev rule for AW86927 (FP5) (MR)
• xdpm: Allow pure rust build for using in xdg-d-p-phrosh (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month - a lot shorter than usual due to real life events (that will also affect August) but there was some progress on stevia and it landed in Debian too now.

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Use new, rust based) phrosh portal too (MR)
• Consistently format meson files (MR)

phoc

• Add sysprof support (MR)
• Reject input based on shell's state (MR)
• Avoid zero serial (MR)
• Allow to damage whole output on each frame (MR)
• Avoid possible crash on unlock (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Use newer gmobile and make CI more flexible (MR
• Fix nightly build (MR)
• Allow to configure the OSK's automatic scaling properties (MR)

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Portrait keyboard scaling (MR)
• Fix translation of completer descriptions in mobile settings (MR)
• Use key-pressed events (MR)
• Fix additional completions like emojis with hunspell completer (MR)
• Document layout testing (MR)

phosh-vala-plugins

• Drop vapi files, they've made it into a phosh release now (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Bump rustc dependency and simplify CI (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Add key-{pressed,released} (MR)

livi

• Make single click play/pause video (MR)
• Update screenshot and metinfo for better display on flathub (MR)
• Release 0.3.2 (MR)
• Update on Flathub (MR)

Debian

• Upload current stevia to experimental
• phosh: Don't forget to install vapi files (MR)
• meta-phosh: Update to 0.48.0: (MR)
• Update to stevia 0.48 (MR)
• Update xkbcommon to 0.10.0 (MR)
• iio-sensor-proxy: Backport buffer mode fixes for trixie (MR), Unblock request
• livi: Update to 0.3.2 (MR)

foliate

• Don't let session go idle when in fullscreen (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Fix packaging build (MR)

git-buildpackage

• pull: Allow to convert local repo when remote got switched to DEP-14 (MR)

wayland-protocols

• Respin cutout protocol MR

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• phosh-mobile-settings: Disable Xwayland to help e.g. distrobox (MR) - merged
• phosh-mobile-settings: Allow to search (MR) - merged
• phosh-mobile-settings: Allow to configure terminal layout shortcuts (MR) - merged
• feedbackd: Legacy led support (MR) - merged
• phosh: upcoming-events: Allow to hide days without events (MR)
• m-b-p-i: Add emergency numbers for JP (MR)
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: bootstrap pure rust portal (MR) - merged
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: portal avoidance (MR) - merged

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Phosh 0.48.0 is out with nice improvements, phosh.mobi e.V. is alive, helped a bit to get cellbroadcastd out, osk bugfixes and some more:

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Fix crash triggered by our mpris player refactor (MR)
• Generate vapi file for libphosh (MR)
• Backport fixes for 0.47 (MR)
• Media players lockscreen plugin (MR), bugfix
• Fix lockscreen clock when am/pm is localized (MR)
• Another round of CI cleanups (MR)
• Proper life cycle for MeatinfoCache in app-grid button tests (MR)
• Enable cell broadcast display by default (MR)
• Release 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0

phoc

• Unify output config updates and support adaptive sync (MR)
• Avoid crash on shutdown (MR)
• Avoid use after free in gtk-shell (MR)
• Simplify CI (MR)
• Release 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0

phosh-mobile-settings

• Fix leaks and ease running under ASAN (MR), (MR)
• Run ASAN in CI (MR)
• Release 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Release 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0
• Reject non-UTF-8 dictionaries for hunspell so avoid broken completion bar (MR)
• Output tracking (MR) as prep for future work
• Handle non-UTF-8 dictionaries for hunspell for input and output (MR)
• Fix some leaks (MR)
• Handle default completer changes right away (MR)

phosh-osk-data

• Handle stevia rename (MR)
• Supply ru presage data

phosh-vala-plugins

• Add example plugin (MR)

pfs

• Fix initial empty state (MR)
• Use GNOME's mirror for fdo templates (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Release 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0

xdg-desktop-portal

• Fix categories for cell broadcasts (MR)
• Relax app-id requirement in app-chooser portal (MR)

phosh-debs

• Switch from osk-stub to stevia (MR)

meta-phosh

• Make installing from sid and experimental convenient (MR)

feedbackd

• Release 0.8.3

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.4

gmobile

• Release 0.4.0
• Make gir and doc build warning free (MR)

GNOME clocks

• Use libfeedback instead of GTK's media api: (MR). This way the alarm become more recognizable and users can tweak alarm sounds.
• Fix flatpak build and CI in our branch that carries the needed patches for mobile

Debian

• meta-phosh: Switch to 0.47 (MR)
• libmbim: Upload 1.33.1 to experimental
• libqmi: Upload 1.37.1 to experimental
• modemmanager: Upload 1.23.1 to experimental
• Update mobile-broadband-provider-info to 20250613 (MR) in experimental
• Upload phoc 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0 to experimental
• Upload gmobile 0.4.0 to experimental
• Upload phosh-mobile-settings 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0 to experimental
• Upload xdg-desktop-portal-phosh 0.48~rc1, 0.48.0 to experimental
• Prepare stevia 0.48~rc1 and upload 0.48.0 to experimental
• Upload feedbackd 0.8.3 to experimental
• Upload feedbackd-device-themes 0.8.4 to experimental

Mobian

• Add feedbackd and wakeup timer support (MR)

ModemManager

• Release 1.25.1
• Test and warning fixes (MR)
• run asan in ci (MR) and fix more leaks

libmbim

• Release 1.33.1

libqmi

• Release 1.37.1

mobile-broadband-provider-info

• Release 20250613)

Cellbroadcastd

• Better handle empty operator (MR)
• Use GApplicaation (MR)
• Fix library init (MR)
• Add desktop file (MR)
• Allow to send notifications for cell broadcast messages (MR)
• Build introspection data (MR)
• Only indicate Cell Broadcast support for MM >= 1.25 (MR)
• Implement duplication detection (MR)
• Reduce API surface (MR)
• Add symbols file (MR)
• Support vala (MR)

iio-sensor-proxy

• Add minimal gio dependency (MR)

twenty-twenty-hugo

• Support Mastodon (MR)

gotosocial

• Explain STARTTLS behavior in docs (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• cellbroadcastd: Message store (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Print severity (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Packaging (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Rename from cbd (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Release 0.0.1 (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Release 0.0.2 (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Close file descriptors (MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Sort messages by timestamp (MR)
• meta-phosh: Ignore subprojects in format check (MR)
• p-m-s: pmOS tweaks ground work (MR)
• p-m-s: osk popover switch (MR)
• p-m-s: Add panel search (MR)
• p-m-s: Add cellbroadcastd message history (MR)
• phosh: Add search daemon and command line tool to query search results (MR)
• phosh: App-grid: Set max-width entries (MR)
• chatty: Keyboard navigation improvements (MR)
• phosh: LTR QuickSettings and fix LTR in screenshot tests (MR)
• iio-sensor-proxy: improve buffer sensor discovery: (MR)
• Calls: allow favorites to ring (MR)
• feedbackd: More haptic udev rules (MR)
• feedbackd: Simplify udev rules (MR)
• feedbackd: Support legacy LED naming scheme (MR)
• gmobile: FLX1 wakeup key support (MR)
• gmobile: FP6 support (MR)

Help Development

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Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Larger blocks besides the Phosh 0.47 release are on screen keyboard and cell broadcast improvements, work on separate volume streams, the switch of phoc to wlroots 0.19.0 and effort to make Phosh work on Debian's upcoming stable release (Trixie) out of the box. Trixie will ship with Phosh 0.46, if you want to try out 0.47 you can fetch it from Debian's experimental suite.

See below for details on the above and more:

phosh

• Track volume control based on media role priority (MR)
• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0

phoc

• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• More signal unlink fixes (MR)
• Further polish the wlroots 0.19 switch and undraft (MR)
• Start to track wlroots 0.20 dev branch (MR)
• Remember output configuration and restore scale,mode,transform for single output configs (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• CI maintenance (MR, MR, MR)
• New alerts panel (MR)
• Handle p-o-s to stevia rename (MR)

phosh-osk-stub / stevia

• Smoke test completers (MR)
• Better use horizontal space in completion bar (MR)
• Add emojis to completion bar (MR)
• Drop separate emoji data (MR)
• Add some keyword completions (MR)
• Better handle lots of completions (MR)
• Release 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• Rename to Stevia (MR), (MR)
• Release 0.48~alpha1 to ease the rename for distros
• Some minor GTK4 preps (MR)

phosh-tour

• Release 0.47.0

phosh-osk-data

• Check packaging step (MR)

pfs

• Release 0.0.3

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Release 0.47.0

phrog

• Allow systemd to fail to help bootstrapping (MR)

phosh-debs

• Skip noinsttest profiles (MR) - no need for these in nightly builds and helps nocheck triggering errors
• Work around phrog install failure until fixed upstream (MR)
• Switch from osk-stub to stevia (MR)

meta-phosh

• Support automatic restart in more projects (MR)
• Fix glob for meson checks (MR)

feedbackd

• Expand media role MR with volume tracking (MR) - this is basically the same as the Wireplumber MR from below
• vibra-pattern: Don't overwrite magnitutde when changing global level (MR)
• Update fbcli manpage (MR)
• Drop custom script (MR)
• Add key-{pressed,released} events (MR)
• Release 0.8.2

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.3
• Use stronger button-pressed feedback for google,sargo (MR)

gmobile

• Install tests so they can run through ginsttest-runner (MR)
• Release 0.3.0, 0.3.1
• Small timer cleanups (MR)
• Add mcc to iso country code conversion (MR)
• Fix manpage subject (MR)

GNOME calls

• Fix crash on shutdown (MR)
• Drop meson version check (MR)
• Backport fixes for 48 (MR)

Debian

• phosh: Backport patches from 0.46 stable (MR)
• phosh: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• gnome-calls: Backport outging SIP call UI fix (MR)
• gmobile: Upload 0.3.0 with improved autopkg tests
• phoc: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• phosh-osk-stub: 0.47.0
• release-dom-compoenent: Drop tmp branch (MR)
• phosh-tour: Upload 0.47.0
• phosh-mobile-settings: Upload 0.47~rc1, 0.47.0
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Upload 0.47.0
• wlroots: Upload 0.19.0
• stevia: Upload 0.48~alpha1
• meta-phosh: phosh-full: Depend on xwayland (MR)
• feedbackd-device-themes: Upload 0.8.3
• feedbackd: Upload 0.8.2
• feedbackd-device-themes: Backport key-press fix for google,sargo (MR)

ModemManager

• Simplify builds that need updated libqmi/libmbim (MR)
• CellBroadcast: Fix QMI channel reading corner cases (MR)
• Fix crash in CBM code (caused by unrelated bind-to refactor) (MR)
• Handle more data codings and expose CBM's language (MR)

osmo-cbc

• api-tool: Allow to set language of cell broadcast message (MR)

gsm-cell-testing

• Update docs to use our new MM subproject builds (MR)

mobile-broadband-provider-info

• Allow emergency number information (MR)
• Allow Cell Broadcast information (MR)
• Add .dir-locales.el and make tests easier to parse (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Add channel handling (MR)
• Indicate on DBus whether Cell Broadcasts are supported (MR)
• Add ASAN check and fix fallout (MR)

phosh-site

• Add a support feature matrix (MR)
• New post: OSK completion and correction

pipewire

• Simplify header use for projects that use -Wswitch-default (MR)

wireplumber

• Add lua script to track suitable volume control when role based policy linking is in use (MR)

python-dbusmock

• ModemManager: Add set-channel support (MR)

Bugs

• Standardize audio stream roles (MR). Otherwise we'll have a hard time with e.g. WirePlumbers role based policy linking as apps might use all kinds of types.

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• gmobile/pp: Ignore buttons on headsets (MR)
• p-o-s: Add Arabic translation (MR)
• p-o-s: pipe completer examples (MR)
• p-o-s: US Dvorak layout (MR)
• p-m-s: Use static library for building (MR)
• p-m-s: pmos tweaks UI parts (MR)
• p-m-s: Notification categories that light up the screen (MR)
• gmobile: Border radius for oneplus,enchilada (MR)
• m-b-p-i: Telia IOT provider (MR)
• phosh-site: Highlight selected footnote (MR)
• bluez: Don't start mpris proxy for root user (Patch)
• phoc: shortcuts-inhibit: Add support for the keyboard shortcuts inhibit protocol (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

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Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Notable might be the Cell Broadcast support for Qualcomm SoCs, the rest is smaller fixes and QoL improvements.

phosh

• Fix splash spinner icon regression with newer GTK >= 3.24.49 (MR)
• Update adaptive app list (MR)
• Fix missing icon when editing folders (MR)
• Use StartupWMClass for better app-id matching (MR)
• Fix failing CI tests, fix inverted logic, and add tests (MR)
• Fix a sporadic test failure (MR)
• Add support for "do not disturb" by adding a status page to feedback quick settings (MR)
• monitor: Don't track make/model (MR)
• Wi-Fi status page: Correctly show tick mark with multiple access points (MR)
• Avoid broken icon in polkit prompts (MR)
• Lockscreen auth cleanups (MR)
• Sync mobile data toggle to sim lock too (MR)
• Don't let the OSD display cover whole output with a transparent window (MR)

phoc

• Allow to specify listening socket (MR)
• Continue to catch up with wlroots git (MR)
• Disconnect input-method signals on destroy (MR)
• Disconnect gtk-shell and output signals on destroy (MR)
• Don't init decorations too early (MR)
• Allow to disable XWayland on the command line (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Allow to set overview wallpaper (MR)
• Ask for confirmation before resetting favorits (MR)
• Add separate volume controls for notifictaions, multimedia and alerts (MR)
• Tweak warnings (MR)

pfs

• Fix build on a single CPU (MR)

feedbackd

• Move to fdo (MR)
• Allow to set media-role (MR)
• Doc updates (MR)
• Sort LEDs by "usefulness" (MR)
• Ensure multicolor LEDs have multiple components (MR)
• Add example wireplumber config (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Release 0.8.2
• Move to fdo (MR)
• Override notification-missed-generic on fajita (MR)
• Run ci-fairy here too (MR)
• fajita: Add notification-missed-generic (MR)

gmobile

• Build Vala support (vapi files) too (MR)
• Add support for timers that can take the system out of suspend (MR)

Debian

• libmbim: Package 1.32.0
• libqmi: Package 1.36.0
• modemmanager: Package 1.24.0
• wlroots: Package 0.19.0~rc1, 0.19.0~rc2
• phosh: Require a CBS enabled MM (MR)
• meta-phosh: Use phrog instead of phog (MR)

git-buildpackage

• Don't suppress dch errors (MR)
• Release 0.9.38

wlroots

• Get text-input-v3 a bit more in line with other protocols (MR)

ModemManager

• Cell broadcast support for QMI modems (MR)

Libqmi

• QMI channel setting (MR)
• Switch to gi-docgen (MR)
• loc: Fix since annotations (MR)

gnome-clocks

• Add wakeup timer to take device out of suspend (MR)

gnome-calls

• CallBox: Switch between text entry (for SIP) and dialpad (MR)

qmi-parse-kernel-dump

• Allow to filer on message types and some other small improvements (MR)

xwayland-run

• Support phoc (MR)

osmo-cbc

• Small error handling improvements to osmo-cbc (MR)

phosh-nightly

• Handle feedbackd fdo move (MR)

Blog posts

• Booting an Android custom kernel on a Pixel 3a for QMI debugging

Bugs

• Resuming of video streams fails with newer gstreamer (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• chatty: Allow NULL buddy
• phosh: Add search daemon and command line tool to query search results
• debian: librem5-flash-image 0.0.5
• debian: libvirt Also in systemd units (MR)
• debian: libvirt ARCHES_WIRESHARK (MR)
• mobile-settings: Support for pmOS tweaks (MR)
• feedbackd: led: Handle freq 0 (MR)
• feedbackd-device-themes: freq0 theme for Pinephone (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

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Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Some more ModemManager bits landed, Phosh 0.46 is out, haptic feedback is now better tunable plus some more. See below for details (no April 1st joke in there, I promise):

phosh

• Fix swapped arguments in ABI check (MR)
• Sync packaging with Debian so testing packages becomes easier (MR)
• Fix crash when primary output goes away (MR)
• More consistent button press feedback (MR
• Undraft the lockscreen wallpaper branch (MR) - another ~2y old MR out of the way.
• Indicate ongoing WiFi scans (MR)
• Limit ABI compliance check to public headers (MR)
• Document most gsettings in a manpage (MR)
• (Hopefully) make integration test more robust (MR)
• Drop superfluous build invocation in CI by fixing the missing dep (MR)
• Fix top-panel icon size (MR)
• Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• Simplify adding new symbols (MR)
• Fix crash when taking screenshot on I/O starved system (MR)
• Split media-player and mpris-manger (MR)
• Handle Cell Broadcast notification categories (MR)

phoc

• xwayland: Allow views to use opacity: (MR)
• Track wlroots 0.19.x (MR)
• Initial support for workspaces (MR)
• Don't crash when gtk-layer-shell wants to reposition popups (MR)
• Some cleanups split out of other MRs (MR)
• Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• Add meson dist job and work around meson not applying patches in meson dist (MR, MR)
• Small render to allow Vulkan renderer to work (MR)
• Fix possible crash when closing applications (MR)
• Rename XdgSurface to XdgToplevel to prevent errors like the above (MR)

phosh-osk-stub

• Make switching into (and out of) symbol2 level more pleasant (MR)
• Simplify UI files as prep for the GTK4 switch (MR)
• Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Format meson files (MR)
• Allow to set lockscren wallpaper (MR)
• Allow to set maximum haptic feedback (MR)
• Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• Avoid warnings when running CI/autopkgtest (MR)

phosh-tour

• Release 0.46.0

pfs

• Add search when opening files (MR)
• Show loading state when opening folders (MR)
• Move demo to its own folder (MR)
• Release 0.0.2

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

• Add some support for v2 of the notification portal (MR)
• Make two function static (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Add preview for lockscreen wallpapers (MR)
• Update to newer pfs to support search (MR)
• Release 0.46~rc1), 0.46.0
• Add initial support for notification portal v2 (MR) thus finally allowing flatpaks to submit proper feedback.
• Style consistency (MR, MR)
• Add Cell Broadcast categories (MR)

meta-phosh

• Small release helper tweaks (MR)

feedbackd

• Allow for vibra patterns with different magnitudes (MR)
• Allow to tweak maximum haptic feedback strength (MR)
• Split out libfeedback.h and check more things in CI (MR)
• Tweak haptic in default profile a bit (MR)
• dev-vibra: Allow to use full magnitude range (MR)
• vibra-periodic: Use [0.0, 1.0] as ranges for magnitude (MR)
• Release 0.8.0, 0.8.1)
• Only cancel feedback if ever inited (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Increase button feedback for sarge (MR)

gmobile

• Release 0.2.2
• Format and validate meson files (MR)

livi

• Don't emit properties changed on position changes (MR)

Debian

• libmbim: Update to 1.31.95 (MR)
• libmbim: Upload to unstable and add autopkgtest (MR)
• libqmi: Update to 1.35.95 (MR)
• libqmi: Upload to unstable and add autopkgtest (MR)
• modemmanager: Update to 1.23.95 to experimental and add autopkgtest (MR)
• modemmanager: Upload to unstable (MR)
• modemmanager: Add missing nodoc build deps (MR)
• Package osmo-cbc: (Repo)
• feedbackd: Depend on adduser (MR)
• feedbackd: Release 0.8.0, 0.8.1
• feedbackd-device-themes: Release 0.8.0, 0.8.1
• phosh: Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• phoc: Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• phosh-osk-stub: Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• xdg-desktop-portal-phosh: Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0
• phosh-mobile-settings: Release 0.46~rc1, 0.46.0, fix autopkgtest
• phosh-tour: Release 0.46.0
• gmobile: Release 0.2.2-1
• gmobile: Ensure udev rules are applied on updates (MR)

git-buildpackage

• Ease creating packages from scratch and document that better (MR, Testcase MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Tweak some haptic for oneplus,fajita (MR)
• Drop superfluous periodic feedbacks and cleanup CI (MR)

wlroots

• xwm: Allow to set opacity (MR)

ModemManager

• Fix typos (MR)
• Add support for setting channels via libmm-glib and mmcli (MR)

Tuba

• Set input-hint for OSK word completion (MR)

xdg-spec

• Propose _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY (which is around since ages) (MR)

gnome-calls

• Help startup ordering (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• phosh: Remove usage of phosh_{app_grid, overview}handlesearch (MR)
• phosh: app-grid-button: Prepare for GTK 4 by using gestures and other migrations (MR) - merged
• phosh: valign search results (MR) - merged
• phosh: top-panel: Hide setting's details on fold (MR) - merged
• phosh: Show frame with an animation (MR) - merged
• phosh: Use gtk_widget_set_visible (MR) - merged
• phosh: Thumbnail aspect ration tweak (MR) - merged
• phosh: Add clang/llvm ci step (MR)
• mobile-broadband-provider-info: Bild APN (MR) - merged
• iio-sensor-proxy: Buffer driver probing fix (MR) - merged
• iio-sensor-proxy: Double free (MR) - merged
• debian: Autopkgtests for ModemManager (MR)
• debian: gitignore: phosh-pim debian build directory (MR)
• debian: Better autopkgtests for MM (MR) - merged
• feedbackd: tests: Depend on daemon for integration test (MR) - merged
• libcmatrix: Various improvements (MR)
• gmobile/hwdb: Add Sargo (MR) - merged
• gmobile/hwdb: Add xiaomi-daisy (MR) - merged
• gmobile/hwdb: Add SHIFT6mq (MR) - merged
• meta-posh: Add reproducibility check (MR) - merged
• git-buildpackage: Dependency fixes (MR) - merged
• git-buildpackage: Rename tracking (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

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Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. One larger blocks are the Phosh 0.45 release, also reviews took a considerable amount of time. From the fun side debugging bananui and coming up with a fix in phoc as well as setting up a small GSM network using osmocom to test more Cell Broadcast thingies were likely the most fun parts.

phosh

• Release 0.45~beta1, 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Don't hide player when track is stopped (MR) - helps with e.g. Shortwave
• Fetch cover art via http (MR)
• Update CI images (MR)
• Robustify symbol file generation (MR)
• Handle cutouts in the indicators area (MR)
• Reduce flicker when opening overview (MR)
• Select less noisy default background (MR)

phoc

• Release 0.45~beta1, 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Add support for ext-foreign-toplevel-v1 (MR)
• Keep wlroots-0.19.x in shape and add support for ext-image-copy-capture-v1 (MR)
• Fix geometry with scale when rendering to a buffer (MR)
• Allow to tweak log domains at runtime (MR)
• Print more useful information on startup (MR)
• Provide PID of toplevel for phosh (MR)
• Improve detection for hardware keyboards (MR) (mostly to help bananui)
• Make tests a bit more flexible (MR)
• Use wlr_damage_ring_rotate_buffer (MR). Another prep for 0.19.x.
• Support wp-alpha-modifier-v1 protocol (MR)

phosh-osk-stub

• Release 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0

phosh-tour

• Release 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Maintenance (MR, MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Release 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0

pfs

• Add common checks and check meson files (MR)

libphosh-rs

• Update for libphosh 0.45
• Release 0.0.6

meta-phosh

• Add common dot files and job to check meson formatting (MR)
• Add l10n modules to string freeze announcement (based on suggestion by Alexandre Franke) (MR)
• Bring over mk-gitlab-rel and improve it for alpha, beta, RCs (MR)

libcmatrix

• Release 0.3.0

Debian

• Upload phoc 0.45~beta1, 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Upload phosh 0.45~beta1, 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Uplaod feedbackd 0.7.0
• Upload xdg-desktop-portal-phosh 0.45.0
• Upload phosh-tour 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Upload phosh-osk-stub 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• Upload phosh-mobile-settings 0.45~rc1, 0.45.0
• phosh: Fix dependencies of library dev package (MR) (and add a test)
• Update libphosh-rs to 0.0.6 (MR)
• Update iio-sensor-proxy to 3.6 (MR)
• Backport qbootctl RDONLY patch (MR) to make generating the boot image more robust
• libssc: Update to 0.2.1 (MR)
• dom-tools: Write errors to stderr (MR)
• dom-tools: Use underscored version to drop the branch ~ (MR)
• libmbim: Upload 1.31.6 to experimental (MR)
• ModemManager: Upload 1.23.12 to experimental (MR)

gmobile

• data: Add display-panel for Furilabs FLX1 (MR)

feedbackd

• Release 0.7.0)

grim

• Allow to force screen capture protocol (MR)

Wayland protocols

• Address multiple rounds of review comments in the xdg-occlusion (now xdg-cutouts) protocol (MR)

g4music

• Set prefs parent (MR)

wlroots

• Backport touch up fix to 0.18 (MR)

qbootctl

• Don't recreate all partitions on read operations (MR)

bananui-shell

• Check for keyboard caps before using them (Patch, issue)

libssc

• Allow for python3 as interpreter as well (MR)
• Don't leak unprefixed symbols into ABI (MR)
• Improve info on test failures (MR)
• Support mutiarch when loading libqrtr (MR)

ModemManager

• Cell Broadcast: Allow to set channel list via API (MR)

Waycheck

• Add Phosh's protocols (MR)

Bug reports

• Support haptic feedback on Linux in Firefox (Bug)
• Get pmOS to boot again on Nokia 2780 (Bug)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• Debian: qcom-phone-utils rework (MR)
• Simplify ui files (MR) - partially merged
• calls: Implement ussd interface for ofono (MR)
• chatty: Build docs using gi-docgen (MR)
• chatty: Search related improvements (MR)
• chatty: Fix crash on stuck SMS removal (MR)
• feedbackd: stop flash when "prefer flash" is disabled (MR) - merged
• gmobile: Support for nothingphone notch (MR)
• iio-sensor-proxy: polkit for compass (MR) - merged
• libcmatrix: Improved error code (MR) - merged
• libcmatrix: Load room members is current (MR) - merged
• libcmatrix: Start 0.0.4 cycle (MR) - merged
• libhosh-rs: Update to 0.45~rc1 (MR) - merged
• libphosh-rs: Update to reduced API surface (MR) - merged
• phoc: Use color-rect for shields: (MR) - merged
• phoc: unresponsive toplevel state (MR)
• phoc: view: Don't multiply by scale in get_geometry_default (MR)
• phoc: render: Fix subsurface scaling when rendering to buffer (MR)
• phoc: render: Avoid rendering textures with alpha set to zero (MR)
• phoc: Render a spinner on output shield (MR)
• phosh: Manage libpohsh API version separately (MR) - merged
• phosh: Prepare container APIs for GTK4 (MR)
• phosh: Reduce API surface further (MR) - merged
• phosh: Simplify UI files for GTK4 migration (MR) - merged
• phosh: Simplify gvc-channel bar (MR) - merged
• phosh: Simplify parent lookup (MR) - merged
• phosh: Split out private header for LF (MR) - merged
• phosh: Use symbols file for libphosh (MR) - merged
• phosh: stylesheet: Improve legibility of app grid and top bar (MR)
• several mobile-broadband-provider-info updates under (MR) - mostly merged

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

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Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Mostly focused on quality of life improvements in phosh and cleaning up and improving phoc this time around (including catching up with wlroots git) but some improvements for other things like phosh-osk-stub happened on the side line too.

phosh

• Fix crash when switching bitween some fractional scales (MR)
• Make layer surface code more flexible and fade in system modal dialogs (MR)
• Auto close quick setting status pages (MR)
• Cleanup and undraft the captive portal (MR). If this lands we have another 2y old MR out of the way.
• Brush up monitor scaling quick setting originally submitted by Adam Honse (MR)
• Fix modem interface regression introduced by the rework for cell broadcast (MR)
• Fill background with primary color (MR), also ensures fallback
• Release Phosh 0.44.1 (MR)
• Don't forget to update background on dark uri changes (MR) when background can't be loaded
• Fix crash in mpris widget (MR)
• Reduce restyling on state changes (MR)
• Dev Doc updates (MR)
• Drop long unused widget (MR)
• Improve Wi-Fi portal notification handling (MR)
• Support sound capability on the notification server (MR)
• Use systemd-cat to launch session (MR)

phoc

• layer-surface: Don't arrange surfaces / set focus on finalize (MR
• Update to wlroots 0.18.2 and some cleanups (MR)
• Run scan-build in CI and fix detected issues (MR)
• Simplify XWayland handling in PhocDesktop (MR)
• Handle xdg's suspended surface state (in phone mode) (MR)
• Invalidate layer shell list less often and take opacity into account for visibility check (MR)
• Unbreak touch point debugging / deduplicate code (MR)
• Release Phoc 0.44.1 (MR)
• Fix initial alpha == 0.0 (MR)
• Fix leak in output-shield and allow to set easing function (MR)
• Smoothen mode/scale/orientation changes (MR)
• Fix thumbnail rendering of floating windows (MR)
• Fix damage tracking debugging (MR)
• Allow to toggle some debugging flags at runtime (MR)
• Fix subsurface damage tracking regression caused by the wlroots 0.18.x switch (MR)
• Catch up with wlroots 0.19.x again (MR)
• Backport the sensible bits of the 0.19.x branch to main to smoothen the next upgrade (MR)
• Fix touch drag (MR) - basically the wlroots patch from below.
• Make PhocViewChild less of a snow flake (MR)
• Fix popup reposition damage (MR)
• Draft: Deduplicate the View and LayerSurface subsurface/popup handling (MR). Needs 625 to land first.
• popup: Try harder to find a suitable output (MR)

phosh-osk-stub

• Let long press on shift toggle CapsLock (MR)
• Add minimal GObject for application (MR). Lets merge the bits of the 1y old MR that still apply.
• Unbrush 2y old MR to get rid of more globals (MR)
• Update Unicode data, thanks GTK devs! (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Use GTK 4.17's portal avoidance (MR)

phosh-recipes

• Bring back weekly snapshots by switching to a faster runner
• Use xz compression (MR)

libcmatrix

• Use Authorization header: (MR)

phrog

• Ship example greetd config (MR)

Debian

• Update libphosh-rs (MR)
• Update phoc to new git snapshot (MR)
• Upload phosh 0.44.1)
• Backport touch fix (MR)

git-buildpackage

• Make it work with Python 3.13, sigh (MR)
• Typo fixes (MR)
• Release 0.9.37 (MR)
• Run codespell in CI (MR)

livi

• Suspend video stream when toplevel is suspende (MR) - saves battery
• Release 0.3.1 (MR)

feedbackd

• Allow events to override the sound feedback with custom sounds (MR). Allows desktop/mobile shells like phosh to honour application prefs for notifications.

Wayland protocols

• Propose notch/cuttout support protocol MR)

Wlroots

• Allow to access opacity boolean (MR)
• Unbreak drag and drop via touch (MR)

Bug reports

• udev regression affecting gmobile (Bug). Many thanks to Yu Watanabe for providing the fix so quickly

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is incomplete, but I hope to improve on this in the upcoming months. Thanks for the contributions!

• phosh: Uninstall action (MR) - merged
• phosh: Add home-enabled property (MR) - merged
• phosh: Emergency prefs dialog improvements (MR) - merged
• phosh: Bump gtk versions in ui file (MR - merged
• phosh: Show week number (MR) - merged
• phosh: compile schemas for plugins (MR) - merged
• phosh: Reduce API surface (MR)
• phosh: Use AdwEntryRow (MR) - merged
• phosh-osk-stub: Il layout additions (MR) - merged
• phosh-mobile-settings: Use 'meson setup' in CI (MR) - merged
• phosh-tour autostart (MR)
• livi flatpak update (MR) - merged
• debian: phosh: Recommend kbd (MR) - merged
• iio-sensor-proxy libssc support (MR)
• git-buildpackage: Spelling fixes (MR) - merged
• git-buildpackage: DEP spelling consistency (MR) - merged
• git-buildpackage: Add branch layout diagram (MR) - merged

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren't and there shouldn't be.

After two online versions Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren.

When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation, and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can't we have that information on the Phone Shell's lockscreen?

This was a good opportunity to see if the upcoming plugin infrastructure for the lock screen (initially meant to allow for a plugin to show upcoming events) was flexible enough, so I used some leisure time on the train to poke at this and just before I reached Vienna I was able to use it for the first time. It was the very last check of that ticket, it also was a bit of cheating since I didn't present the ticket on the phone itself but from phosh (the phones graphical shell) running on my laptop but still.

This was possible since phosh is written in GTK and so I could just leverage evince's EvView. Unfortunately the hotel check in didn't want to see any documents ☹.

For the next day I moved the code over to the Librem 5 and (being a bit nervous as the queue to get on the bus was quite long) could happily check into the Flixbus by presenting the barcode to the barcode reader via the Librem 5's lockscreen.

When switching to the bus to Prizren I didn't get to use that feature again as we bought the tickets at a counter but we got a nice krem banana after entering the bus - they're not filled with jelly, but krem - a real Kosovo must eat!).

Although it was a rather long trip we had frequent breaks and I'd certainly take the same route again. Here's a photo of Prizren taken on the Librem 5 without any additional postprocessing:

What about seeing the conference schedule on the phone? Confy(a conferences schedule viewer using GTK and libhandy) to the rescue:

Since Debian's confy maintainer was around too, confy saw a bunch of improvements over the conference.

For getting around Puremaps(an application to display maps and show routing instructions) was very helpful, here geolocating me in Prizren via GPS:

Puremaps currently isn't packaged in Debian but there's work onging to fix that (I used the flatpak for the moment).

We got ourselves sim cards for the local phone network. For some reason mine wouldn't work (other sim cards from the same operator worked in my phone but this one just wouldn't). So we went to the sim card shop and the guy there was perfectly able to operate the Librem 5 without further explanation (including making calls, sending USSD codes to query balance, …). The sim card problem turned out to be a problem on the operator side and after a couple of days they got it working.

We had nice, sunny weather about all the time. That made me switch between high contrast mode (to read things in bright sunlight) and normal mode (e.g. in conference rooms) on the phone quite often. Thankfully we have a ambient light sensor in the phone so we can make that automatic.

See here for a video.

Jathan kicked off a DebianOnMobile sprint during the conference where we were able to improve several aspects of mobile support in Debian and on Friday I had the chance to give a talk about the state of Debian on smartphones. pdf-presenter-console is a great tool for this as it can display the current slide together with additional notes. I needed some hacks to make it fit the phone screen but hopefully we figure out a way to have this by default.

I had two great weeks in Prizren. Many thanks to the organizers of Debconf 22 - I really enjoyed the conference.

After some time in the experimental distribution I've uploaded git-buildpackage 0.9.0 to sid a couple of weeks ago and were now at 0.9.2 as of today. This brought in two new commands:

• gbp export-orig to regenerate tarballs based on the current version in debian/changelog. This was always possible by using gbp buildpackage and ignoring the build result e.g. gbp buildpackage --git-builder=/bin/true … but having a separate command is much more straight forward.

• gbp push to push everything related to the current version in debian/changelog: debian-tag, debian-branch, upstream-branch, upstream-tag, pristine-tar branch. This could already be achieved by a posttag hook but having it separate is again more straight forward and reduces the numer of knobs one has to tweak.

We moved to better supported tools:

• Switch to Python3 from Python2
• Switch from epydoc to pydoctor
• Finally switch from Docbook SGML to Docbook XML (we ultimately want to switch to Sphinx at one point but this will be much simpler now).

We added integration with pk4:

 mkdir -p ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/
 ln -s /usr/share/pk4/hooks-available/unpack/gbp ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/

so pk4 invokes gbp import-dsc on package import.

There were lots of improvements all over the place like gbp pq now importing the patch queue on switch (if it's not already there) and gbp import-dsc and import-orig not creating pointless master branches if debian-branch != 'master'. And after being broken in the early 0.9.x cycle gbp buildpackage --git-overlay ... should be much better supported now that we have proper tests.

All in all 26 bugs fixed. Thanks to everybody who contributed bug reports and fixes.

Debian LTS

April marked the 24th month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated plus 4 hours left from March which I used by:

• releasing DLA-881-1 for ejabberd. The actual package was prepared by Philipp Huebner fixing two CVEs
• preparing and releasing DLA-896-1 for icedove. This update involved the debranding of Icedove back to Thunderbird fixing 17 CVEs
• preparing and releasing DLA-895-1 of openoffice.org-dictionaries so the provided dictionaries stay installable with the new thunderbird package
• preparing and releasing DLA-903-1 of hunspell-en-us so the provided dictionary stays intallable with the new thunderbird package
• preparing and releasing DLA-904-1 of uzbek-wordlist so the provided dictionaries stay installable with the new thunderbird package
• handling the communication with credativ regarding XSA-212
• triaging of several QEMU/KVM CVEs
• backporting large amounts of the cirrus_vga driver to Wheezy's qemu-kvm to fix 3 cirrus_vga related CVEs. The DLA is not released yet since I'm awaiting some more feedback about the test packages. Give them a try!
• Looking into the 9pfs related CVEs in qemu-kvm. Work will be resumed in May.

Other Debian stuff

• organized the 10th installment of the Debian Groupware Meeting. A more detailed report on this is pending.
• uploaded osinfo-db 0.20170225-2 to unstable which builds now reproducibly (thanks Chris Lamb) and has support added for the Stretch RC3 installer
• uploaded libvirt 1.2.9-9+deb8u4 to jessie which now works with newer QEMU (thanks Hilko Bengen)
• uploaded libvirt 3.0.0-4 to unstable unbreaking it for architectures that don't support probing CPU definitions in QEMU (like mips) and unbreaking the use of qemu-bridge-helper with apparmor so gnome-boxes works apparmored now too
• uploaded python-vobject 0.9.4.1-1 to experimental. The package was prepared by Jelmer Vernooij. I made some minor cleaups and added a autopkgtest.
• uploaded hunspell-en-us, uzbek-wordlist, openoffice.org-dictionaries to jessie-security to not conflict with the new thunderbird package (see above)
• sponsored the upload of icedove 1:45.8.0-3~deb8u1 to jessie-security.
• sponsored the upload of python-selenium 2.53.2+dfsg1-2 to experimental

git-buildpackage

Released versions 0.8.14 and 0.8.15. Notable changes besides bug fixes:

• gbp buildpackage will now default to --merge-mode=replace for 3.0 (quilt) packages to avoid merges where no merge is necessary.
• gbp buildpackage --git-export=WC now implies --git-ignore-new --git-ignore-branch to make it simpler to use
• gbp buildpackge now has a "sloppy" mode to create a upstream tarball that uses the debian branch as base. This can help to test build from a patched tree. The main reason was to give people a way to not care about 3.0 (quilt) intrinsics when getting started with packaging.

• gbp clone now supports vcsgit: and github: pseudo URLs:

  $ gbp clone vcsgit:libvirt
  gbp:info: Cloning from 'https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-libvirt/libvirt.git'
  …
  $ gbp clone github:agx/libvirt-debian
  gbp:info: Cloning from 'https://github.com/agx/libvirt-debian.git'
  …
  

The versions are also available on pypi.

Debian LTS

February marked the 22nd month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used by:

• the 2nd half of a LTS frontdesk week
• an update to lts-cve-triage.py so we don't ignore undetermined issues anymore
• testing the bind9 update prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
• testing of apache2 packages prepared by Jonas Meurer and Antoine Beaupré
• triaging of QEMU CVEs and fixing most if them resulting in DLA-842-1

Other Debian stuff

• libvirt and gtk-vnc uploads to fix CVEs in unstable and stretch
• A git-buildpackage upload to unstable to unbreak importing large histories with import-dsc
• Some CSS improvements for git-buildpackage to (hopefully) make the manual easier to read.

Some other Free Software activities

Nothing exciting, just some minor fixes at several places:

• Some minor improvements to libplanfahr's trip-query to make it more useful
• Made the logging more useful in ldapsp (a realm smart proxy for the Foreman)
• Some bug fixes for network-manager-iodine (a iodine plugin for NetworkManager)
• Flake8 cleanups in ansible_foreman_module (a ansible module to create hosts in the Foreman)
• Added a unit file to simplec (A service to provide IPs of libvirt based VMs via DNS)
• Made Gource use https to fetch it's submodules
• A PR for the Foreman to not rebuild already correct DNS entries (which needs a respin)
• Several fixes for ansible_spec (some of them pending review)

Debian LTS

November marked the 21st month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used for:

• the first half of a LTS front desk week
• updating icedove 45.6.0 resulting in DLA-782-1 fixing 8 CVEs
• releasing DLA-783-1 for XEN, the actual update was provided by credativ
• testing the bind9 update prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
• fixing 8 CVEs in imagemagick resulting in DLA-807-1.
• work on recent qemu CVEs

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.10 to 0.8.12.1 to experimental and unstable fixing (among other things) a long standing bug when using multiple tarballs with filters and pristine-tar as well as making generated orig tarballs reproducible so one gets identical tarballs even without pristine-tar.
• Ran a gbp import-dsc of unstable and filed bugs for cases where pristine-tar would not import the package. Started to look into git-apply errors.

Some other Free Software activites

• libplanfahr: switched the example to python3 and made it parse arguments without date as "today":

  $ ./run python examples/trip-query.py --when=21:00 Essen Gelsenkirchen
  Loaded provider de_db
  Start: Essen Hbf
  End: Gelsenkirchen Hbf
  Trip #1
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:18
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:26
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  
  
  Trip #2
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:22
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:33
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  
  
  Trip #3
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:44
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:52
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  

• Proposed a workaround to rbvmomi to massively speedup cloning under certain conditions when using CachedOVFDeployer

• Proposed a fix to unbreak ansible's zypper module on first installations
• Made ausroller use git-buildpackage from pypi on non Debian based distros
• Made further progess on the Merkur board clones

Debian LTS

November marked the 20th month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used by:

• some rather quiet frontdesk days
• updating icedove to 45.5.1 resulting in DLA-752-1 fixing 7 CVEs
• looking whether Wheezy is affected by xsa-202, xsa-203, xsa-204 and handling the communication with credativ for these (update not yet released)
• Assessing cURL/libcURL CVE-2016-9586
• Assessing whether Wheezy's QEMU is affeced by security issues in 9pfs "proxy" and "handle" code
• Releasing DLA-776-1 for samba fixing CVE-2016-2125

Other Debian stuff

• Allow travis.debian.net to start services when running autopkgtests
• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.8 and 0.8.9 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Some fixes to libvirt's configure.ac for merged /usr
• Made some progress on getting the merkur board clones to life. The first stage bootloader and contiki are working now.
• Some ansible_spec fixes for roles in non default directories and robustness
• Due to excessive XMPP spam started a jabber-spam-blacklist
• Unbroke ansible-module-foreman
• Added support to configure Foreman settings via ansible-module-foreman and python-foreman
• Speed up VM removal with Foreman and VMware ESX
• Started foreman_serverspec a Foreman plugin to store serverspec reports in the Foreman. This is in a very early stage.

Debian LTS

November marked the nineteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 7 hours allocated which I used completely by:

• Being at LTS frontdesk twice (at the beginning and end of November) triaging about ~30 CVEs.
• Preparing and releasing DLA-698-1 for QEMU fixing 9 CVEs
• Putting out DLA-699-1 for xen, the acutal xen update was prepared by Bastian Blank

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads (osinfo-db-tools, libvirt-python, libosinfo)
• Sponsored svn2git upload
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.7 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Created foreman_influxdb: a plugin to forward foreman metrics to influxdb
• Released of first version of ldapsp: a Foreman realm smartproxy to create arbitrary LDAP entries
• Fixed updating compute resources in ansible-module-foreman
• Fixed a bug in fog-vsphere that would make massive parallel vm creation in Foreman fail
• Helped to update influxdb-rails so the gem is compatible with influxdb-ruby again.

Debian LTS

October marked the eighteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 10 hours (out of allocated 9)

• updating Icedove to 45.4 resulting in DLA-658-1
• looking into current xen issues and handling the communication with credativ
• investigating QEMU CVE-2016-7466 in Wheezy and Jessie
• backporting patches for qemu-kvm to fix 9 CVEs resulting in DLA-689-1
• starting with lts frontdesk (more on that next month)

Other Debian stuff

• Carsten and myself had the chance to talk at the Kopano conference about Debian and the state of Kopano in Debian (slides)
• Uploaded kopanocore to unstable, currently waiting in new
• Several Libvirt and Libvirt (2.3.0, 2.4.0~rc*) related uploads (libvirt 2.3.0, libvirt-python, ruby-libvirt 0.7.0)
• Uploaded libosinfo 1.0.0 to experimental. This version has the osinfo database split out into its own source package (osinfo-db, waiting in new) so the operating system and hypervisor information is updateable during a stable release without having to update the library itself

Some other Free Software activities

• Fixed some issues in ansible-spec
• Made specinfra handle libvirt lxc containers like lxc containers
• Fixed an error in calypso that made us potentially remove the wrong entries, added travis ci support and started looking into python-vobjects unicode breackage

Debian LTS

September marked the seventeenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 6 hours (out of 7) working on

• updating Icedove to 45.3 resulting in DLA-640-1
• finishing my work on bringing rails into shape security wise resulting in DLA-641-1 for ruby-activesupport-3.2 and DLA-642-1 for ruby-activerecord-3.2.
• enhancing the autopkgtests for qemu a bit

Other Debian stuff

• Uploaded libvirt 2.3.0~rc1 to experimental
• Uploaded whatmaps to 0.0.12 in unstable.
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.4 to unstable.

Other Free Software activities

• Ansible: got the foreman callback plugin needed for foreman_ansible merged upstream.
• Made several improvements to foreman_ansible_inventory (a ansible dynamic inventory querying Foreman): Fixing an endless loop when Foreman would miscalculate the number of hosts to process, flake8 cleaniness and some work on python3 support
• ansible-module-foreman:
  • unbreak defining subnets by setting the default boot mode.
  • add support for configuring realms
• Foreman: add some robustness to the nice rebuild host feature when DNS entries are already there
• Released whatmaps 0.0.12.
  • Errors related to a single package don't abort the whole program but rather skip over it now.
  • Systemd user sessions are filtered out
  • The codebase is now checked with flake8.

Debian LTS

August marked the sixteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 9 hours (of allocated 8) mostly on Rails related CVEs which resulted in DLA-603-1 and DLA-604-1 fixing 6 CVEs and marking others as not affecting the packages. The hardest part was proper testing since the split packages in Wheezy don't allow to run the upstream test suite as is. There's still CVE-2016-0753 which I need to check if it affects activerecord or activesupport.

Additionally I had one relatively quiet week of LTS frontdesk work triaging 10 CVEs.

Other Debian stuff

• I uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.2 to experimental and 0.8.3 to unstable. The later bringing all the enhanements and bugfixes since Debconf 16 to sid and testing.
• The usual bunch of libvirt related uploads

Debian LTS

July marked the fifteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. As usual I spent the 8 hours working on these LTS things:

• Updated QEMU and QEMU-KVM packages to fix CVE-2016-5403, CVE-2016-4439, CVE-2016-4020, CVE-2016-2857 and CVE-2015-5239 resulting in DLA-573-1 and DLA-574-1
• Updated icedove to 45.2.0 fixing CVE-2016-2818 resulting in DLA-574-1
• Reviewed and uploaded xen 4.1.6.lts1-1. The update itself was prepared by Bastian Blank.
• The little bit of remaining time I spent on further work the ruby-active{model,record}-3.2 and ruby-actionpack-3.2 (aka rails) CVEs. Although I have fixes for most of the CVEs already there are still some left where I'm not yet clear if the packages are affected.
• Added some trivial autopkgtest for qemu-img (#832982) (on non LTS time)

Other Debian stuff

• Fixed CVE-2016-5008 by uploading libvirt 2.0.0 to sid and 1.2.9-9+deb8u3 to stable-p-u
• Uploaded libvirt 2.1.0~rc1 to experimental
• Uploaded libvirt-python 2.0.0 to sid
• Uploaded libosinfo 0.3.1 to sid preparing for the upcoming upstream package split
• Uploaded virt-manager 1.4.0 to sid
• Uploaded network-manager-iodine 1.2.0 to sid
• Uploaded cups-pk-helper 0.2.6 to sid
• Triaged apparmor related bugs in libvirt most notably the one affecting hotplugging of disks (#805002) which turned out to be rooted in the kernel not reloading profiles properly.
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.0, 0.8.1 to experimental adding additional tarball support to gbp import-orig among other things

Debian LTS

June marked the fourteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent the 8 hours working on these LTS things:

• Reviewed and tested libxml2 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+wheezy6

• Fixed #825508 in mozilla-devscripts to prepare for the Icedove update resulting in DLA-518-1.

• Rebased the proposed Wheezy Icedove update against the Jessie version and uploaded resulting in DLA-519-1.

• Sent out the DLA-521-1 for Iceweasel, the upload was all done by Mike Hommey.

• Rebuilt enigmail with the fixed mozilla-devscripts so it can still be used in Wheezy, resulting in DLA-523-1.

• continue to work on updates for CVE-2016-0753 for ruby-active{record,support}-3.2 - not yet finished.

• Looked into open qemu-kvm and qemu CVEs marking CVE-2015-8666 as no-dsa and fixing CVE-2016-3710 and CVE-2016-3712 via DLA-540-1 and DLA-539-1.

Other Debian stuff

Besides the usual bunch of libvirt* uploads I addressed several bugs in git-buildpackage, upload pending.

Debian LTS

May marked the thirteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent the 17.25 hours working on these LTS things:

• Fixed CVE-2014-7210 in pdns resulting in DLA-492-1
• Fixed the build failure of Icedove on armhf resulting in DLA 472-2
• Forward ported our nss, nspr enhancements to to the current versions in testing to continue the discussion on the same nss and nspr versions in all suites including some ABI compliance research (thanks abi-compliance-tester!), resulting in 824872.
• Backported Icedve 45 and Enigmail to wheezy to check if we can continue to support it - we can with a minor tweaks. Upload will happen in June.
• While at that added some autpkgtests for Icedove 45 resulting in 809723 (already applied).
• Released DLA-498-1 for ruby-active-model-3.2 to address CVE-2016-0753.
• Reviewed the Updates of ruby-active-record-3.2 for CVE-2015-7577 and eglibc.

Other Debian stuff

• Uploaded libvirt 1.3.4 to sid, 1.3.5~rc1 to experimental
• Uploaded libosinfo 0.3.0 to sid
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.7.4 to sid including experimental multiple tarball support for gbp buildpackage

Debian LTS

April marked the twelfth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I only spent 2 hours (instead of expected 11,25) working on LTS things:

• Uploaded gtk+3.0 to wheezy-proposed-updates to fix CVE-2013-7447 (#818090).
• Further work on figuring out how to support Xen and QEMU in Wheezy LTS including writing up a summary and a interview with one prospective company
• Prepared a patch for Jessie's nss to fix CVE-2016-1950, CVE-2016-1979, CVE-2016-1978, CVE-2016-1938 based on Antiones work for Wheezy. This is currently pending review by the security team.
• Started to look into CVE-2014-7210 in pdns

The missing hours will be caught up during May - hopefully also by working on a QEMU/libvirt update in Wheezy should there be any interest - so I've you're relying on QEMU/KVM in wheezy now would be a good time to comment on it.

Other Debian things

• Attended the 9th Debian Groupware Meeting in the LinuxHotel in Essen resulting in a new upload of calypso to unstable.
• Uploded libvirt and python-libvirt 1.3.3, virt-sandbox 0.5.1+git20151113-3 and virt-manager 1.3.2-3 to unstable and libvirt 1.3.4~rc1 to experimental

Debian LTS

March was the eleventh month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent 13 hours (of allocated 11.00 + 5.25h from last month) working on preparing for wheezy-lts:

• Uploaded aptdaemon to {old-,}stable-proposed-updates (#818006, #818007)
• Fix CVE-2012-6700, CVE-2012-6769 CVE-2012-6768, in Wheezy's dhcpcd resulting in DSA-3534
• Reach out to Debian's Xen and KVM maintainers, Xen's community manager and several company to asses LTS maintainability
• Research and propose a possible way forward for QEMU and libvirt
• Upload a backport of libvirt to wheezy-backports for that
• Prepare a fix for Wheezy's gtk+3.0 for CVE-2013-7447 (#818090) and propose it for oldstable-p-u (#819362)
• Looked into Wheezy's lxc and CVE-2015-1335 specifically and marking it as no-dsa after discussion with the security-team.
• Make bin/support-ended.py support EOL dates
• Review Antiones nss work for Wheezy and work on the corresponding update for Jessie in order (to be finished this month).

Other Debian things

• Uploaded several libvirt related packages like ruby-libvirt 0.6.0, libvirt-glib 0.2.3 and libvirt-sandbox 0.5.1+git20151113, libvirt 1.3.3~rc1
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.7.3
• Preparations for the 9th Debian Groupware Meeting

More sandboxing

When working on untrusted code or data it's impossible to predict what happens when one does a:

bundle install --path=vendor

or

npm install

Does this phone out your private SSH and GPG keys? Does a

evince Downloads/justdownloaded.pdf

try to exploit the PDF viewer? While you can run stuff in separate virtual machines this can get cumbersome. libvirt-sandbox to the rescue! It allows to sandbox applications using libvirt's virtualization drivers. It took us a couple of years (The ITP is from 2012) but we finally have it in Debian's NEW queue. When libvirt-sandbox creates a sandbox it uses your root filesystem mounted read only by default so you have access to all installed programs (this can be changed with the --root option though). It can use either libvirt's QEMU or LXC drivers. We're using the later in the examples below:

So in order to make sure the above bundler call has no access to your $HOME you can use:

sudo virt-sandbox \
   -m ram:/tmp=10M \
   -m ram:$HOME=10M \
   -m ram:/var/run/screen=1M \
   -m host-bind:/path/to/your/ruby-stuff=/path/to/your/ruby-stuff \
   -c lxc:/// \
   -S $USER \
   -n rubydev-sandbox \
   -N dhcp,source=default \
   /bin/bash

This will make your $HOME unaccessible by mounting a tmpfs over it and using separate network, ipc, mount, pid and utc namespaces allowing you to invoke bundler with less worries. /path/to/your/ruby-stuff is bind mounted read-write into the sandbox so you can change files there. Bundler can fetch new gems using libvirt's default network connection.

And for the PDF case:

sudo virt-sandbox \
  -m ram:$HOME=10M \
  -m ram:/dev/shm=10M \
  -m host-bind:$HOME/Downloads=$HOME/Downloads \
  -c lxc:/// \
  -S $USER \
  -n evince-sandbox \
  --env="DISPLAY=:0" \
  --env="XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY" \
  /usr/bin/evince Downloads/justdownloaded.pdf

Note that the above example shares /tmp with the sandbox in order to give it access to the X11 socket. A better isolation can probably be achieved using xpra or xvnc but I haven't looked into this yet.

Besides the command line program virt-sandbox there's also the library libvirt-sandbox which makes it simpler to build new sandboxing applications. We're not yet shipping virt-sandbox-service (a tool to provision sandboxed system services) in the Debian packages since it's RPM distro specific. Help on porting this to Debian is greatly appreciated.

Debian LTS

February was the tenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent 7 hours (of allocated 11.15 hours) working on squeeze-lts:

• Triage of 17 CVEs for squeeze-lts. I misread the calendar and thought I was on front-desk duty for a couple of days. Fortunately no duplicate work was done.

• Prepared and released DLA-427-1 for nss fixing CVE-2016-1938 after checking that nss is not affected by CVE-2015-7575 since MD5 signatures never got disabled - another good reason why we should have the same nss in all suites.

… and to make sure we have fewer issues that are fixed in squeeze-lts but affect wheezy …

• I prepared patches for CVE-2015-8036 and CVE-2015-5291 for polarssl for jessie including some autpkgtests (wheezy already happened in January) resulting in DSA-3468-1.

• Prepared patches for CVE-2015-1323 affecting apt-daemon (789162) for jessie and wheezy waiting for a review.

On non LTS time I cooked up a script to make it simpler to check if a package has security support in a certain release.

Now that squeeze-lts is history I'd like to thank the Debian Security Team for their help and answers to all the questions related to security tracker, DSAs, DLAs and whatnot. I'm looking forward to wheezy-lts now…

Other Debian stuff

• Uploaded libvirt-python 1.3.1 to unstable.
• Uploaded virt-manager 1.3.2 to experimental.
• Uploaded libvirt 1.3.2-2 to unstable dropping the libvirt-bin transitional package after NMUing gnome-boxes and virt-goodies to remove the dependency.
• Uploaded whatmaps to experimental switching to Python3

Debian LTS

January was the ninth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent 13 hours working on:

• LTS Frontdesk duties like the triaging of 34 CVEs. That was about twice as much CVEs coming as during December's frontdesk work.

• I looked into what needs to be done DLA wise when we move from Squeeze to Wheezy. For that I added a script do find discrepancies between Squeeze LTS and Wheezy.

• I uploaded giflib to squeeze-lts(DLA-389-1), wheezy(#812363) and jessie(#812362) proposed updates.

• I forward ported the fix for CVE-2015-5291 for polarssl to Wheezy adding autopkgtests on the way (#812420) (forward port to Jessie happend in February)

• I forward ported a patch for freetype fixing CVE-2014-9674 to wheezy(DSA-3461-1) - Jessie being not affected.

• Finally I added some basic autopkgtests to icu (#813338).

There was no progress on using the same nss in all suites. This will continue in February as does the Squeeze-lts Wheezy forward porting.

Other Debian stuff

• I uploaded libvirt 1.3.1~rc1 and 1.3.1~rc2 to experimental and 1.3.1 final to unstable.
• Released git-buildpackage 0.7.2

Debian LTS

December was the eighth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. It was a bit of a funny month since most of the time most open CVEs were already taken care of by other team members (which is nice) but it resulted in me not releasing a single DLA which feels weird.

Nevertheless in total I spent nine hours working on:

• LTS Frontdesk duties like the triaging of 16 CVEs and patch reviews (which actually found an error reassuring me that spending time on this is useful).

• Finding a fix for CVE-2015-7555 in giflib. I did not release a DLA yet since I hoped upstream would comment if this is the proper fix.

• nss/nspr:

  • Discussion on using the same nss in all suites continued.
  • I did further upgrade test for nss focusing on Java this time (which is a heavy user of nss for its certificate handling).
  • Enabled the internal testsuite of nspr as well since nss and nspr often get updated in lockstep. This resulted in 809723 and upstream bugs 1236333, 1236334, 1236244 (which were already merged thanks to Wan-Teh Chang). The current modifications are available here. Overall the test suite needs more cleanups but it's already useful as is.

On unpaid time I introduced some usertags for tracking our non DLA related activities (although it seems I'm currently the only user).

Other Debian stuff

• I uploaded libvirt 1.3.0~rc1 and 1.3.0~rc2 to experimental and 1.3.0 final to unstable.
• I uploaded libvirt-python 1.3.0 with newly added autopkg tests
• Filed bugs reminding that libvirt-bin is a transitional package that will be dropped soon.

• Finally released gbp 0.7.1 with lots of changes most of these where already mentioned in the December installment of this post but there's more:

  • git-pbuilder updates to 1.37 and 1.38
  • fixes for 791759 and 766350,
  • doc updates including the addition of the patch queue handling

  Still looking for time to finish gbp import-orig's rollback support.

• I added a function to link to the Debian BTS to my emacs config to ease writing these kind of posts.

Debian LTS

November was the seventh month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent ten hours working on:

• krb5: Released DLA-340-1 after applying a fix to the work done in October.

• nss: Provided patches for CVE-2015-7181 and CVE-2015-7182 for squeeze, wheezy and jessie and released DLA-354-1 for squeeze-lts for that.

  Since nss is subject to frequent security updates I wanted to spend less time doing "did I break the whole thing" testing so I added some autopkg tests that do basic certificate handling and make sure we can link a simple binary against the dev package (#806207).

  We also discussed using the same nss version in all suites on the debian-lts list. To test that path I worked on creating backports for Jessie/Wheezy/Squeeze of the current sid version. So far I tested the general feasibility and some simple upgrades.

  To be able to detect breackage more easily I enabled the internal test suite resulting in #806639. I also filed #806634 to ease backporting in the future. Packages are collected here with the sources in this (temporary) git repo. Work on this will continue in December.

Other Debian stuff

• There was no git-buildpackge upload in November but the git repository already collected some fixes and new features like building RPMs in clean chroots using mock. Patches for this were provided by Tzafrir Cohen. I've been hoping we get #775118 fixed in mock so it becomes actually useful in Debian before uploading a new gbp version.

  There's also now an example for README.source for gbp managed source packages. I'd be nice to have patches to further improve this.

  The main reason for not uploading new gbp yet is that I said at Debconf that I'll improve error recovery in gbp import-orig with the next or next next upload and that would be 0.7.1 latest. I did no get around to continue on this since Debconf though.

• I supplied a patch for pbuilder's #802800 to allow building with -g
• Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21 to unstable.

Debian LTS

October was the sixth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• krb5: I applied patches for CVE-2015-2697 and CVE-2015-2695. The DLA-340-1 was released on November though since one of the patches was incomplete.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 16 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work.

I also added some very basic indentation support to our CVE/list Emacs major-mode on non LTS time.

Other Debian stuff

• I've released git-buildpackage 0.7.0 with lots of updates, most notably more complete rpm support, a git-pbuilder update and documentation updates. This release has patches from 9 different contributors, thanks a lot!

• Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21~rc1 to experimental, submitted a patch to fix running autopkg tests in pbuilder (#802379) and fixed RC bug #802281 in Icedove.

• I've updated cl2vcs, a CGI to link commit IDs in the debian/changelog to the VCS, to 0.0.4 fixing some bugs that showed up after I updated the hosting machine to Jessie as well as support for the [commitid1,commitd2,commit3,...] format when grouping commits. (SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed)

• At Halloween five Debian aficionados met for Hacking Erpel 1 (aka HEPL1) in Erpel (link goes to German Wikipedia) between Bonn and Koblenz. Some details are here. We're aiming for more of these events on a more frequent basis (HEPL0 being back in 2013) so if you're somewhere from that area and want to join us next time just subscribe to the new mailing list (in German, SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed).

Debian LTS

September was the fifth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent eight hours working on:

• glibc: I fixed four security issues resulting in DLA-316-1 mostly by backporting fixes from current Git. This involved some issues that didn't have a CVE assigned yet. Salvatore gave a nice summary on how to handle these.

• nss: The backport of the fixes for CVE-2015-2721 and CVE-2015-2730 resulted in DLA-315-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work.

Other Debian work

I finally sent out the summary of the 8th Debian Groupware Meeting we had in the Linuxhotel earlier this year and gave a short talk about Debian at the Zarafa Tour in the Netherlands.

Debian LTS

August was the fourth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• pykerberors: Fixed a regression in DLA-265-1 affecting the default parameters of checkPassword(). This resulted in DLA-265-2.

• wordpress: Craig Small updated wordpress to fix CVE-2015-2213 CVE-2015-5622 CVE-2015-5731 CVE-2015-5732 and CVE-2015-5734. I did some testing and released DLA-294-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work.

Debconf 15 was a great opportunity to meet some of the other LTS contributors in person and to work on some of my packages:

Git-buildpackage

git-buildpackage gained buildpackage-rpm based on the work by Markus Lehtonnen and merging of mock support is hopefully around the corner.

Debconf had two gbp skill shares hosted by dkg and a BoF by myself. A summary is here. Integration with dgit as (discussed with Ian) looks doable and I have parts of that on my todo list as well.

Among other things gbp import-orig gained a --merge-mode option so you can replace the upstream branches verbatim on your packaging branch but keep the contents of the debian/ directory.

Libvirt

I prepared an update for libvirt in Jessie fixing a crasher bug, QEMU error reporting. apparmor support now works out of the box in Jessie (thanks to intrigeri and Felix Geyer for that).

Speaking of apparmor I learned enough at Debconf to use this now by default so we hopefully see less breackage in this area when new libvirt versions hit the archive. The bug count wen't down quiet a bit and we have a new version of virt-manager in unstable now as well.

As usual I prepared the RC candidates of libvirt 1.2.19 in experimental and 1.2.19 final is now in unstable.

July was the third month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent eight hours working on:

• lighttpd: Fixed CVE-2014-3566 by adding a option to disable SSLv3 (ssl.use-sslv3) compatible with the option added to newer versions. This resulted in DLA-282-1.

• nss: research on CVE-2015-2730 and CVE-2015-2721. Work on the former is still ongoing since the bug#1125025 referenced in the mozilla advisory has restricted access and I did not manage to get it opened yet. I found commits in uptream's mercurial that reference the bug though and the comitter was nice enough to answer questions.

  The backported changes for CVE-2015-2721 involve lots of changes to the internal state machine when accepting SSL connections so I'm currently looking into backporting the test suite for that on non LTS time.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 11 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work.

June was the second month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent ten hours working on:

• libwmf: research on CVE-2015-4588 and CVE-2015-0848. This resulted in DLA-253-1. RedHat's Bug#1227243 was a great resource here.

• librack-ruby: research on CVE-2015-3225. This resulted in DLA-254-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 17 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security. The information provided by the Security team on these issues in data/CVE/list is an awesome help here. So I tried to be as verbose when triaging CVEs that weren't looked at for Wheezy or Jessie yet.

On non LTS time I patched our lts-cve-triage tool to allow to skip packages that are already in dla-needed.txt. This avoids wasting time on CVEs that were already triaged.

May was the first month I started to contribute to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent six hours working on:

• dulwich: research on CVE-2015-0838, CVE-2014-9706. This resulted in DLA-231-1.

• mercurial: research on CVE-2014-9462, CVE-2014-9390 with Javi Merino. This resulted in DLA-237-1.

• mongodb: research on CVE-2015-1609. It turned out that we're not affected, the code did the check correctly in earlier versions but lost it then.

My current work flow looks like

• Find a package to work on via

  https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/oldoldstable

• Look at the details, via the security tracker, e.g.

  https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/mercurial

• Get the sources

  #!/bin/sh -e
  PKG="$1"
  gbp import-dscs --debsnap "${PKG}"
  cd "${PKG}"
  git checkout -b debian/squeeze-lts debian/$(rmadison -s squeeze -a amd64 "${PKG}" | awk '/squeeze/ { print $3 }'  | sed -s -e 's/:/%/' -e 's/~/_/')
  gbp pq import
  

Now I have an already patched source tree to add the backported patches to. Especially in cases where the Jessie version is already fixed this makes it rather quick to get an idea what the affected versions are and to see how the code evolved over time.

In order for this to work properly I made (on non LTS time) some improvements to gbp:

• git-pbuilder now knows about LTS so it can create chroots like:

  DIST=squeeze-lts git-pbuilder create
  

• gbp buildpackage is now clever enough to figure out the distribution to build for from the current branch name if you adhere to DEP14. So in case you're building from a git branch named debian/squeeze-lts it will automatically pass DIST=squeeze-lts to git-pbuilder. This needs

  [buildpackge]
  dist=DEP14
  

  in gbp.conf.

• gbp pq now tries harder to preserve patch names. While having patch names adhere to what git am writes out is nice but renaming patches just leads to too much noise when importing and exporting from existing packages (#761161). gbp pq still needs to improve in preserving DEP-3 header information though (#785274).

I have released whatmaps 0.0.9 a tool to check which processes map shared objects of a certain package. It can integrate into apt to automatically restart services after a security upgrade.

This release fixes the integration with recent systemd (as in Debian Jessie), makes logging more consistent and eases integration into downstream distributions. It's available in Debian Sid and Jessie and will show up in Wheezy-backports soon.

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The seventh Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to 9. This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We decided to abandon Iceowl (based on the standalone calendar sunbird) since Mozilla started to actively remove the code. Unfortunately this leaves us without a proper GUI stand alone calendar client with GSSAPI support.

• The icedove package got a major cleanup including the switch from CDBS to dh and the removal of the rebranding logic. This will hopefully allow us to better keep in sync with upstream. Carsten's git repo usually carries the most up to date version and a automated build of these version is in the works.

• The sogo connector extension for icedove got uploaded and tested including a wiki page

• The Groupware Page got updated

• We discussed the possibility of caldav/carddav servers in Debian using autopkgtest. This resulted in caldav-tester being packaged. It's currently waiting for an updated dependency before it can be uploaded.

• Based on that we added minimal autopkg tests to calypso. The later also gained GSSAPI support.

• OpenChange got updated in experimental (now moved to sid) and got a debug package. There were also some upstream improvements to ease provisioning.

• Dovecot's installation of the Sieve ext_programs was fixed

• SOPE and SOGo got updated to the latest upstream versions

• The SOGo-OpenChange plugin got build against the OpenChange package in experimental

• Giraffe (aka Zarafa packaging) made nice progress including the switch to free artwork and further renaming of the services. For Details on the current state check the wiki page.

• Due to the warm spring we had two nice barbecues for lunch.

Since we had a nice mix of first time Debian contributors, Debian Maintainers and Debian Developers we had lots of room for discussion and co-working which made this an exciting weekend.

One of the replies to the post about Debian's last groupware meeting was from Patrick Ohly of syncevolution fame pointing out that syncevolution already implements calendar autodetection for CalDAV calendars as described in draft-daboo-srv-caldav-10.

While looking at the code I noticed that there's a backend for the N900s calendar by Ove Kåven as well.

When I tried Ove's latest package on my N900 it lead to an immediate crash when doing a:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

According to Patrick the bug was supposed to be fixed in recent versions so I set up scratchbox and built a newer git snapshot for maemo (sources). This wouldn't crash but didn't show up any items either. It turned out to be a minor bug in calypso returning no content type for REPORT queries which resulted in libneon discarding the whole reply (now already fixed in calypso upstream).

With this out of the way setting up synchronisation is quiet simple:

# Configuration
CALDAV_SERVER=192.168.0.10
syncevolution --configure username=<username> password=<password> \
              calendar/backend=caldav calendar/database=https://${CALDAV_SERVER}:5233/private/my_calendar \
              target-config@webdav calendar
syncevolution --configure --template SyncEvolution_Client sync=none syncURL=local://@webdav username= password= webdav
syncevolution --configure sync=two-way backend=calendar webdav calendar

You should then be able to print the items on the local (N900) and from the remote (CalDAV server) end:

# This lists the current calendar items on the server
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
# This lists the current calendar items on the N900
syncevolution --print-items @default calendar

And from there on sync away:

# initial slow sync
syncevolution --sync slow webdav
# from there on
syncevolution webdav

The syncevolution source code has great documentation about debugging problems (e.g. src/backends/webdav/README). So check that in case you run into problems. The tl;dr version is

SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG=1 src/syncevolution loglevel=10 --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

to debug CalDAV related problems. In case you need to run syncevoluton from source be sure to set these beforehand:

export SYNCEVOLUTION_TEMPLATE_DIR=$PWD/src/templates/
export SYNCEVOLUTION_XML_CONFIG_DIR=$PWD/src/syncevo/configs/

On the CalDAV side I used current Calypso git which (with some additional minor fixes) now also interoperates nicely with Iceowl/Icowl-Extension aka Sunbird/Lightning on the desktop side. There's also an ITP for it. So it'll hopefully end up in Debian soon.

Update: in order to do ssl verification with syncevolution/libneon you have to put the CAs certificate to /etc/ssl/certs on the N900 and do a

c_rehash /etc/ssl/certs

otherwise syncevolution won't ve able to verify the server's certificate.

The sixth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to nine - an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• Sogo 2.0.5 got uploaded to unstable and work on OpenChange support is advancing.

• D-push (the rebranded version of z-push) got split and restructured to better handle different backends. An update in experimental is pending.

• Giraffe's git (the rebranded version of zaraffa) got updated to 7.1. There's some more work needed to get this into the archive though.

• There's been progress on getting Kolab3 into Debian starting with libkolabxml 0.8.4 and libkolab 0.4.2 (also needed by kde-pim).

• mozilla-devscripts now handles Iceowl as well so packaging calendaring extensions like this one becomes even more useful.

• Icedove and Iceowl bugsquashing. New versions were uploaded to unstable and experimental. The bug count trends look quiet promising but we really need help for #658664.

• We did some davmail <-> iceowl/icedove interop testing.

• The Groupware Page got updated

• We had some discussions about calendar and addressbook detection and autoconfiguration. For CalDAV/CardDAV there's a specification available already but there seems to be no client implementation in Debian so we started to work on it.

• We had a nice barbecue enjoying the first warm days.

Running Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell without an external keyboard works pretty nicely. The on screen keyboard - if enabled via the accessibility menu - folds out automatically in the shell itself within text input fields. To have this within GTK+3/GTK+2 applications you need libcaribou-gtk3-module and libcaribou-gtk-module installed. For other cases I stitched together a small extension that puts a keyboard "Button" prominently into the middle of the panel. Clicking/touching it will fold it out, clicking again will hide it again. You can fetch it from

git clone git://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/gnome-shell-oskb-extension.git ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/OnScreenKeyboardButton@sigxcpu.org

and activate it via

 gsettings set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions "['OnScreenKeyboardButton@sigxcpu.org']"

For kinetic scrolling in Iceweasel I'm currently using Grab and Drag which is not yet packaged for Debian.

Thanks to the Debian's GNOME packaging team gnome-shell 3.6 is already available in experimental.

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Interactively installing Debian virtual machines with virt-install without having to download anything in advance can already be done by pointing it to a Debian mirror via --location. But you can also add files to the initrd after downloading using --initrd-inject. Upstreams intended use is for kickstart files but we can also feed it a preseed.cfg to automate the whole installation:

virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
             --location=http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer\-i386 \
             --initrd-inject=/path/to/preseed.cfg \
             --extra-args="auto" \
             --name d-i --ram=512 \
             --disk=pool=default,size=5,format=qcow2,bus=virtio

preseed.cfg is a regular preseed file (as described in the Debian Wiki) in your local filesystem. I'm using this one for Squeeze and Wheezy VMs. It must be named preseed.cfg in order for d-i to pick it up from the initrd. This also works for URLs like qemu+ssh://<remotehost>/system/ since virt-install uses libvirt's streaming API to upload the kernel and modified initrd to the remote host.

In case you're running this on an i386 you'll need this fix which already sits in experimental.

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This went out to d-d-a already but I figured that this might be of interest here too:

The fifth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. Eight persons attended which is an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We pushed a ESR (extended support release) version of icedove including l10n and the calendaring extension to unstable. By cherry-picking lots of build-fixes from iceweasel we made the testing transition getting rid of the old 3.X version.

• Since iceowl (the standalone calendar) is not maintained upstream anymore we're keeping it in experimental only for now. A new version got uploaded including updated l10n.

• A new upstream version of evolution-mapi was upload to sid fixing an FTBFS.

• d-push 1.5.8 (the rebranded version of z-push) got uploaded to unstable including translation updates and adaption to php 5.4.0.

• Lots of progress was made on packaging SOGo and related components and it's now quiet close to an upload to sid.

• Work on OpenChange included looking into using the version in Debian for SOGo packaging as well as fixing Samba4 issues that broke (among other things) the OpenChange build.

• Progress was made on packaging Zarafa ZCP for Debian (rebranded as giraffe). The packages are working but rebranding is not yet complete.

• About 60 evolution bugs where either closed or commented on.

• As usual the Groupware page got updated.

• The meetings 5th anniversary was celebrated with a barbecue.

I've started uploading snapshots of git-buildpackage to experimental recently. Here's a short list of what changed over the version in wheezy and sid:

• git-buildpackage now has a --git-pristine-tar-commit option that commits a tarball right back to the pristine-tar branch if it's not already there. This makes tracking upstream git and dfsg-clean source handling easier.
• git-buildpackage's --git-upstream-tree now accepts a tree directly without the need to use --git-upstream-branch.
• git-buildpackage's --git-export now parses the exported changelog instead of the working copy. This way we automatically pick up the correct tarballs, branches, etc. reducing the number of options needed.
• Jan Čapek added a --git-postexport hook to allow to mangle the source after exporting it.
• gbp-pull and gbp-fetch now support shallow clones thanks to Markus Lehtonen.
• gbp-pull got a speed up by skipping the checkout for fast-forward. This makes updating large source trees less time consuming.
• git-import-orig and git-import-dsc can now import into bare repositories.
• Russ Allbery updated git-pbuilder to 1.27.
• gbp-pq should be easier to use thanks to the --force and --switch options. It also handles patches without descriptions more robustly.
• The test coverage of the internal test suite increased quiet a bit. We're now generating coverage information during the build in build/cover.
• We're now generating apidocs which also serves as usage examples.

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Debian's libvirt in unstable finally passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (libvirt-tck) for qemu:///system:

Files=59, Tests=1579, 315 wallclock secs ( 0.77 usr  1.02 sys + 31.40 cusr 10.14 csys = 43.33 CPU)
Result: PASS

We're running libvirt's internal test suite since 0.9.0 but this doesn't launch any real virtual machines to check things like suspend, resume, snapshotting, migration and it doesn't create storage pools and volumes or networks. This means a lot of testing was done manually with each release.

libvirt-tck provides a framework to perform these kinds of integration testing between libvirt and it's drivers, comes with hundreds of testcases already and it's easy to set up since it's available in experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental libvirt-tck

Edit /etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg if you don't want to use the default connection URI. Then just run libvirt-tck:

libvirt-tck

Since this is supposed to stress libvirtd and the hypervisor and since it creates and deletes storage pools, networks and virtual machines it's recommended to run this on a dedicated system to make sure the tests don't blow away any precious config.

If a test fails one can debug that single test using:

LIBVIRT_TCK_CONFIG=/etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg prove --verbose /usr/share/libvirt-tck/tests/hooks/051-daemon-hook.t

This already revealed errors in our package like a missing parted build dependency breaking the creation of disk based storage pools, bugs in libvirt, crashes in QEMU and minor errors in the test suite itself. We're currently cheating a bit since the tests for hooks and nwfilter are currently disabled due to license problems with the used Perl modules.

libvirt-tck can easily be integrated into Jenkins since it can now use libtap-formatter-junit-perl to generate JUnit XML. To do so simply configure a free-style software project to execute these commands:

rm -f libvirt-tck.xml
sudo libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force > libvirt-tck.xml

allow Jenkins to run libvirt-tck as root

jenkins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force

and configure it to publish a JUnit test result report.

Currently I'm only running the tests for qemu:///system so any help running and debugging this for LXC, VirtualBox or XEN is very welcome.

Many thanks go to Salvatore Bonaccorso for packaging the missing Perl modules needed by libvirt-tck.

During todays very interesting Puppet Skills Exchange given by Christian Hofstaedtler at Debconf 11 it was recommended to syntax check puppet manifests in git commit hooks. Since I wanted to do the same some time ago and I couldn't find anything that does manifests, ruby and erb I wrote some hooks that can be either used on commit or on the remote site when receiving the update. The git archive of this can be found at:

git clone git://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/puppet-helpers.git

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Due to two totally different bugs in tip22 the d-i netinstall images for IP22 (SGI Indy) and IP32 (SGI O2) won't boot the installer correctly.

Tip22 is responsible for merging a minimal loader, kernel and initramfs into a single ELF or ECOFF binary, depending on the architecture. This can then be fetched by the machine's ARC PROM via tftp.

A fixed tip22 has been uploaded to unstable and updated images are available from here until we can get this fixed via stable-proposed-updates.

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This went out to d-d-a a couple of days ago already but I figured that this might be of interest here too:

The fourth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We pushed new versions of icedove and iceowl to unstable fixing several issues with gnome-shell in the later. Unstable now ships packages based on Thunderbird's current 3.1 branch.

• The iceowl-l10n language package got resurrected (currently sitting in NEW) providing translations for iceowl-extension and (in a yet incomplete way) for iceowl. (Update: it's already in unstable now)

• We've done Citadel ↔ ice{dove,owl} interop testing and bug fixing.

• Work was done on Citadel's event driven SMTP client and IPv6 compatibility

• The z-push package got updated to 1.5.1. The patent restrictions are resolved now and we're closer to resolving the trademark issues. So hopefully an upload to main can happen real soon now.

• SOGo packaging made nice progress. Remaining issues involve linking against GNUTLS to resolve the OpenSSL GPL license incompatibility, and handling of the embedded copies of JavaScript libraries.

• We updated the groupware overview page.

• We were invited by the FrOSCon organizers to join their barbecue. Many thanks for that!

In order to ease creation of remote repositories to publish your Debian packaging work git-buildpackage ships gbp-create-remote-repo: If you run

gbp-create-remote-repo --remote-url-pattern='ssh://git.debian.org/home/users/agx/public_git/%(pkg)s.git'

from inside a git repository it will create a remote repository on git.debian.org in the given directory, push your debian, upstream and pristine-tar branches into it and set up branch tracking so you can easily use gbp-pull or git pull to update your local repository from there. '%(pkg)s' will be replaced by the source packages name. If you want to be more explicit you can use:

gbp-create-remote-repo --remote-url-pattern='ssh://git.debian.org/home/users/agx/public_git/foo.git'

so no substitution will take place. In case you only want to push to that repository but not pull from there you can use the --no-track option so gbp-create-repo won't set up any branch tracking.

If you specify the remote-url-pattern via gbp.conf calling:

gbp-create-remote-repo

is enough to create a repo on your favorite git server. The default is to create new repositories in the collab-maint repository on alioth.debian.org.

This feature is available in your $PATH since 0.5.16 (it was shipped in examples/ before) and was inspired by the Debian OCaml Maintainers dom-new-git-repo work.

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Since waiting for long running builds is boring and having to check if the build already finished distracts one from doing other stuff, git-buildpackage 0.5.16 reports the build status of a package via desktop notifications if python-notify is installed:

To disable this feature use:

[git-buildpackage]
notify = off

in your ~/.gbp.conf.

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To make xul-ext-nostalgy work with icedove 3.1 I finally wanted to update to a new upstream version. The git repository is tracking upstream's svn via git-svn which works great but when I typed

git svn rebase

I got a

Connection refused: Can't connect to host 'frisch.fr': Connection refused at /usr/lib/git-core/git-svn line 2310

The svn upstream repo moved to google code. It took me a moment to figure out that this can be fixed easily with:

 git config svn-remote.svn.url http://nostalgy.googlecode.com/svn/
 git config svn-remote.svn.rewriteRoot svn://frisch.fr/nostalgy
 git svn rebase

Just replace the url with the new svn repository url and set rewriteRoot to the old svn repository url and you're done.

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When reviewing packages from mentors.debian.net I like to have them under version control so I can easily compare different versions, write patches and clean up autogenerated files. So when looking at a package I do a

git-import-dsc --download http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/x/xul-ext-firetray/xul-ext-firetray_0.2.8-1.dsc

This command first fetches the files via dget from devscripts and then imports the upstream sources onto the upstream branch (upstream by default) and the debian modifications onto the debian branch (master by default). I can then invoke git-buildpackage as usual. Since this works incrementally I can import newer versions into the same repository and use git diff to see the changes.

If I'd like to hack on a random Debian package (say xul-ext-nostalgy) I usually use:

git-import-dsc --download xul-ext-nostalgy

This uses apt-get source to fetch the source package and imports it into git using the same branch layout as described above so I can use all the familiar git commands to generate patches, etc..

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Let's say you want to clone a git repository that has the debian packaging on master and the upstream source is kept on upstream/master (since it tracks upstream's master branch). You can simply use git clone or you can do a

gbp-clone --upstream-branch=upstream/master --pristine-tar git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-lvm/multipath-tools.git

This will additionally set up master, upstream/master and pristine-tar to track the corresponding remote branches. There's no --debian-branch option in the above example since master is the default.

If you want to safely update these branches at a later point invoke

gbp-pull --upstream-branch=upstream/master --pristine-tar

from inside the repository. This will only update the branches if they can be fast-forwarded. If the repository has a debian/gbp.conf describing the branch layout a call to

gbp-pull

is enough.

In case somebody else wants to jhbuild current GNOME 3 prereleases on Debian here's the current set of dependencies and the jhbuildrc I'm using. With the necessary fixes applied upstream now this allows me to build gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and others via

jhbuild build <program>

It needs libmozjs3d-dev from experimental for the shell but the rest comes out of squeeze.

For a security update of a shared library to take effect processes need to be restarted in order to use the libraries from the newly installed package. The openssl and freetype updates got me thinking again if I caught all the affected services on servers and desktops/laptop systems I'm running.

So I put together a small script that takes a package name and scans /proc/pid/maps for processes that map libraries from this package, it then looks for init scripts in these packages. It can also hook into apt and restart the services after the upgrade. Since the mapping to the init scripts is quite dumb at the moment this should be used with a bit of caution though.

The script whatmaps can be fetched form here. Debs are also available. Besides Debian packages it also handles RPMs and already proved useful since it pointed me to clamav being possibly affected by the recent bzip2 advisory.

Many team maintained packages in Debian are maintained in Subversion which makes a lot of sense if people agreed on a common workflow. If you want to use git to work on these packages you can still do so with a bit of configuration without changing anything for the other team members. Let's take system-config-printer as example. git-svn can be used to checkout the svn repository:

git svn clone svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-gnome/ -T packages/unstable/system-config-printer -t tags/system-config-printer system-config-printer

Since the pkg-gnome team keeps all the packages in one huge SVN repository and splits the directories by release first and then by package the above command uses -T to point git-svn to system-config-printer's trunk and -t to point it to the tags directory. In simpler repositories where trunk, branches and tags are subdirectories of the same base directory using --stdlayout instead is enough.

Since in SVN based packaging the upstream sources usually aren't kept in the repository git-buildpackage needs to know where to find them and how to combine things in the build-directory:

cd system-config-printer
cat <<EOF >.git/gbp.conf
[git-buildpackage]
# Build in a separate build-area
export-dir = ../build-area/
# Look for tarballs in ../tarballs
tarball-dir = ../tarballs/
# Overlay the upstream sources on top of it
overlay = True
# Don't use pristine-tar
pristine-tar = False
# Compression type of the tarball
compression = bzip2

Like with svn-buildpackage the orig-tarball is expected to be found in ../tarballs where you should put it now e.g. using the get-orig-source target of debian/rules (yes, git-buildpackage should support this implicitly). You can then work on the package as usual using all the nifty git commands like git-rebase, etc. and build the package (in this case using git-pbuilder):

git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder

or if you don't want to export the current branch's HEAD of your git repository but your working copy (which might contain uncommitted changes) to the build-area instead use:

git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-export=WC

The built packages can then be found in ../build-area. Once the package is ready pushing the changes into the SVN remote repository is as simple as:

git svn dcommit
git svn tag -m"Tagging system-config-printer (1.2.3-0.2)" 1.2.3-0.2

The last command appropriately tags the new version. This saves a bit of typing. In order to fetch changes others have made use:

git svn rebase

I got tired of having to authenticate as root to change printer settings like paper size or printout mode via a GUI. Since system-config-printer uses PolicyKit things like allow myself to change printer settings when logged into the system should be possible without having to mess with cupsd.conf or sudo, are they?

Which printer related actions are governed by PolicyKit:

pkaction | grep printer

shows about the following if you have cups-pk-helper installed. The later is used by system-config-printer to interface with PolicyKit:

org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-enable
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-remote-edit
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-set-default
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printeraddremove

So org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit seems to be what I'm looking for. Let's change the policy for this action:

cat <<EOF >/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/99-local.pkla 
[EditPrinters]
Identity=unix-user:foo
Action=org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes
EOF

This allows user foo to perform the action org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit if the user is logged into a local interactive session. The pklocalauthority(8) manpage has all the details. PolicyKit will pick up the configuration file changes on the fly. Lets see if this worked by getting the process id of the running system-config-printer and checking via pkcheck if the process is authorized to use that action:

PID=$(ps a | awk '/[p]ython .*system-config-printer/ { print $1 }')
pkcheck --action-id org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit --process $PID
echo $?

If pkcheck returns with a zero return value everything is fine and user foo won't need any password to modify local printer settings from now on.

Check the output of pkaction(1) to list more actions that can be setup this way.

Chris reports back to Debian duty: `Since one week I'm back from NYC where I enjoyed a very nice Debconf. It was my second one after last year in Cáceres. When I unpacked all my luggage - three weeks in the US need some stuff - I found these cute green guys between my clothes. Did they break their UFO and use my airplane to travel with me? Anyway. Thanks to all who made Debconf10 in New York possible. It was a great conference! And last but not least: "Happy Squeeze Freeze"' I too enjoyed DC10 a lot.

Git-buildpackage 0.5.6 in experimental got rid of it's pbuilder/cowbuilder examples and added Russ's nice git-pbuilder script. I'm very happy how this turned out, now building with cowbuilder is as simple as:

# Initially create a cowbuilder environment once
git-pbuilder create

# Build the package
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder

# At a later point update the cowbuilder environment with new versions
git-pbuilder update

Or for another distribution:

DIST=lenny git-pbuilder create 
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-dist=lenny

The new version also better interacts with dch from devscripts. So things like:

git-dch --bpo|--qa|--nmu

are now also supported when adding new changelog sections. Git-dch now detects new upstream version numbers automatically and bumps the version accordingly. In order to get this working I finally fixed the tag format.

Since the current version in unstable should get a chance to move to testing first, I've uploaded 0.5.6 to experimental.

Those old school ones among us that still need a printer who are new school enough to want to get rid of HAL should try system-config-printer from experimental. After replacing hal-cups-utils by system-config-printer-udev aptitude tells me:

    The following packages will be REMOVED:
      hal{u} hal-info{u} 
    0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 2 to remove and 121 not upgraded.

Which means faster startup times and one daemon less on Squeeze's GNOME desktop. The new version also uses PolicyKit instead of gksu for finer grained permission control.

Git-buildpackage 0.5.0 in experimental fixes quiete some bugs related to the import of upstream sources and Debian source packages. By getting rid of a complete source tree copy it also got about 50% faster when doing so. Since the code changed quiete a bit in that area it'd be great if some of you could give it some testing before I'll push it to unstable.

I've just added a simple afs plugin to krb5-auth-dialog. It just calls either aklog or afslog after acquiring or renewing your Kerberos ticket to get you into your AFS cell. To activate it use

gconftool-2 --set --list-type=string --type=list /apps/krb5-auth-dialog/plugins/enabled [afs]

and restart krb5-auth-dialog. A package with the above enabled has been uploaded to Debian. Thanks to the test account in the global2000.at cell provided by Jörg Herzinger I could test this easily and I have to say that AFS looks like a cool thing.

The slides of my talk about git-buildpackage at the Mini Debconf 2010 in Berlin are now available.

It was a great conference that I really enjoyed being at. Thanks a lot to all who made that event possible and happen!

Krb5-auth-dialog now sends DBus signals when you acquire or renew your Kerberos ticket granting ticket and when the ticket expires. When using OpenAFS This can e.g. be used to trigger a call to aklog on ticket renewal. It's simple to catch the DBus signals from a Python script:

import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_renewed_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_renewed")
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_acquired_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_acquired")
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_expired_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_expired")

The tgt_*_handler will then be called when the signal is received. The shipped Python example allows to execute a script already:

tgt-signals.py -q --acquired-action=aklog --renewed-action=aklog

Krb5-auth-dialog also got a plugin system so you could use a loadable module for these kind of things instead. It already ships a PAM plugin that can be used to run some typical actions like calling pam-afs-session or getting kx509 set up.

You need to tell krb5-auth-dialog which plugins to load via gconf. To load the dummy and PAM plugins use:

gconftool-2 --set --list-type=string --type=list /apps/krb5-auth-dialog/plugins/enabled [pam,dummy]

Since I'm not using AFS or kx509 myself I'd be interested to know if this works out as expected.

If you want to write your one plugins you can use the dummy plugin as a basis.

A package with the above enabled has been uploaded to Debian experimental.

gnome-activity-journal recently entered Debian and it could become a great tool to keep track of hacking activities. The underlying zeitgeist can log these and other events and make the information available via DBus. I couldn't find a data provider that feeds the information about Git commits to it so I wrote a simple post commit hook. This way one can easily see when one worked on a source repository:

Now is there a nice way to store additional information like current branch or commit message along with that?

Fedora uses Plymouth to provide a flicker free boot for quiet some time now. Debian has packages in experimental but it took some patches to get these working. After adding a Debian logo the boot splash actually looks quiet nice. The initramfs and init scripts do need some more work but it's basically working. Thanks a lot Daniel for merging these so quickly!

To enable Plymouth you first need to set up KMS in the initramfs. For an intel based card you can do this by either adding

i915 modeset=1

to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules or by setting

i915.modeset=1

on the kernel command line. Then install plymouth, set a default theme and update the initramfs:

aptitude install plymouth plymouth-plugins-all
plymouth-set-default-theme solar
update-initramfs -u

Finally add splash to the kernel's command line (e.g. by adding it to /etc/default/grub).

Afterwards reboot and you should see the solar flares:

We're still not fully there yet since we need a newer gdm for a flicker free handover. Fortunately the Debian GNOME maintainers have already prepared a new package in svn. We also need proper support for encrypted disks, asking for the passphrase works with this fix but cryptsetup needs support for it.

In case somebody wants to run KDE together with some GTK+ based applications (like Iceweasel or Icedove) having a consistent style as well as look and feel between KDE and GTK+ applications is a nice thing to have. QtCurve together with xsettings-kde and gtk-qt-engine makes this easily possible:

aptitude install gtk-qt-engine kde-config-gtk-style qtcurve xsettings-kde

Then adjust the following settings:

• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, Style set Style to QtCurve
• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, GTK Styles under Use another style: select QtCurve
• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, GTK Styles under Firefox and Thunderbird click Install scrollbar fix...

Log off and right back in. Now your GTK+ applications should blend nicely into the QtCurve KDE look. xsettings-kde additionally bridges KDE settings like double click speed and icon theme via xsettings to GTK+ applications.

Now back to using gnome-shell...

Here are some more examples of libguestfs usage:

What kernels, modules and packages are in a (currently powered off) libvirt based virtual machine vmfoo:

virt-inspector -c qemu:///system vmfoo

Show free space in virtual machine vmfoo:

virt-df -c qemu:///system vmfoo

List file systems:

virt-list-filesystems -c qemu:///system -l vmfoo

Edit /etc/passwd in vmfoo:

virt-edit -c qemu:///system lenny-base-clone /etc/passwd

Tell guestfish to mount all filesystems of virtual machine vmfoo for more complex inspection and manipulation tasks like LVM operations, partitioning, resizing or filesystem check or creation:

guestfish $(virt-inspector -c qemu:///system --ro-fish vmfoo)

Debian packages are still on alioth.

I've finally updated the libguestfs Debian packages to 1.0.84 getting them back in sync with upstream. Download instructions are on the pkg-libvirt's wiki page.

Fetching files from a vm image with guestfish is as simple as:

guestfish --ro -a lenny-base-clone.img -m /dev/debian/root download /etc/passwd /tmp/passwd

After hacking around #561991 by running debirf as root we now do pass the testsuite again. The new version includes fuse support as well as the hivex tools to manipulate windows registries.

The source for the Debian package is available at git.debian.org. The next step will be to split out the appliance so we can fetch that one via http and upload libguestfs to contrib.

Here's a short overview of 3.0 source format support in git-buildpackage 0.4.64:

• git-import-dsc & git-import-dscs import 3.0 (quilt and native) format packages.
• git-import-orig: imports gzip and bz2 compressed archives. Other formats will be enabled once pristine-tar supports them (#499489).
• git-buildpackage handles creating gzip, bzip2, lzma and xz compressed tarballs with the --git-compression option although it could get a bit smarter and autodetect the compression type.

One loose end is the handling of multiple upstream tarballs (#561071, #561072). I'd be great to hear from people already using this feature how this can best be added into the gbp workflow.

The newer kids in town gbp-clone, gbp-pull (for keeping the repo up to date when using team maintenance) and gbp-pq (for managing the quilt patch-queue) don't care about the underlying source package format. These three are a bit underdocumented in the manual but information about the workflow is in the wiki.

Release 1.0beta1 of Iceowl-extension (also known as Lightning), the calendaring extensions for Icedove, is now available in experimental. This version works with Icedove 3.0.1 which also lives in experimental at the moment.

Open TODOs for Iceowl:

• reenable standalone build
• don't use internal cairo
• finish branding

Iceowl's current packaging git is here:

http://git.debian.org/?p=users/agx/iceowl.git

Any help on the above issues is greatly appreciated. Other open tasks that need fixing in order to get things in shape for Squeeze:

• Updating icedove-l10n and iceowl-l10n - both packages are looking for a maintainer
• Adding an icedove-dev package for 3.0 ...
• ... so we can build Enigmail for Icedove 3.0

I've just uploaded Icedove 3.0 to Debian experimental. The package is heavily based on Alexanders work in Ubuntu and Chris did most of the hard work.

It's currently named icedove-3.0 so you can (for now) install this version in parallel to Icedove 2. This version copies over your Icedove 2 profile so it doesn't get messed up.

As long as the package is sitting in new you can grab it from the pkg-mozext repository:

deb http://pkg-mozext.alioth.debian.org/packages sid/i386/
deb http://pkg-mozext.alioth.debian.org/packages sid/all/

We now need help with going through the Debian bugreports against Icedove.

If you want to help out: grab a bug, check if it's fixed in Icedove 3 and if it is, simply mark it as fixed in 3.0~rc2-2 in the bts:

bts fixed <bugnumber> 3.0~rc2-2

Once we're confident the package doesn't break everything we'll rename the binary package to icedove so it replaces the default Icedove on upgrades.

If you want to help out with patches: Git is here

git clone git://git.debian.org/pkg-mozilla/icedove.git

As already mentioned on <pkg-libvirt-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org> libvirt 0.7.4-2 (currently in experimental) runs qemu and kvm processes as libvirt-qemu:kvm instead of root allowing you to use features like bridged networking without having to run the emulator itself with full privileges.

Kvm 88+dfsg-3 supports ksm to safe memory when running several similar virtual machines. On a recent linux kernel just do a

echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run

to activate it. Then run two similar virtual machines and see how /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_shared increases.

Thanks to work of Jan and Micheal Debian now also ships kvm's stable branch qemu-kvm.

As of git-buildpackage 0.4.60 gbp-pull supports --redo-pq which additionally recreates the patch-queue branch after a pull. Now you can keep your clone fresh with one command.

Inspired by tools developed by Debian's OCaml maintainers git-buildpackage now ships gbp-pull that can be used to keep your debian-, upstream- and pistine-tar branch up to date when doing team maintenance.

I added a short explanation on howto handle backports with git-buildpackage to the GBP workflow page.

git-buildpackage 0.4.57 adds gbp-clone to /usr/share/doc/examples/. If you use it instead of git pull it will automatically set up your upstream and pristine-tar branches. This was inspired by the helper scripts the ocaml team uses.

git-import-orig now calls a postimport hook which can be used to call git-dch after import so I could remove the hardcoded dch call.

The slides of my talk about libvirt at dc9 are now available.

git-buildpackage 0.4.55 now ships gbp-pq for easier serializing of git patch queue branches into quilt patch series and vice versa. It's currently in /usr/share/doc/git-buildpackage/examples/. I'll move it to /usr/bin/ once I feel a bit more confident that this is the right interface.

I've worked a bit on Richard's libguestfs Debian packages They now also provide perl and python bindings as well as a debug package and the appliance is built using debootstrap/debirf. The wiki has the necessary apt/sources.list (packages are currently available for i386 only).

The source for the Debian package is available at git.debian.org so please send patches to wrap more of the available language bindings into Debian packages.

If you're interested in updates on this as well as other virtualization related stuff in Debian what about joining the pkg-libvirt-discuss list.

As of version 0.4.53 git-buildpackage's git-import-orig supports --fast-import. This uses git fast-import to import the new upstream version and speeds up imports by about a factor of two.

It's not as well tested as importing without --fast-import so please be careful and file bugreports if it fails.

As a result of the 2nd Debian Groupware Meeting snapshot builds of the Thunderbird 3.0 release branch could be rebraned and build for Debian as Icedove. We'll continue to upload snapshots. See the pkg-mozext maintainers page for download instructions.

As of version 0.4.47 git-buildpackage exports these environment variables to a called posttag hook:

• GBP_TAG: the tags name
• GBP_BRANCH: the branch you were on when creating the tag
• GBP_SHA1: the sha1 of the commit the tag was created at

This allows you to write posttag hooks that push out only the changes that correspond to the created tag. For a simple example see the GBP Manual. Using such a hook makes team maintenance a lot easier since you can't forget to push out the commits and tags for a newly uploaded package while making sure you don't push out any other changes.

New upstream versions of virtinst and virt-manager are available via Debian's experimental distribution. All the bugfixes we carried as patches have been applied upstream by Cole Robinson, which is great. New features include disk- and newtork-I/O graphs and direct support for installing paravirtualized Debian Lenny Xen Guests via:

   virt-install -n xenfoo1 -r 96 --disk path=/path/to/file,device=disk,size=1 --location=http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing

The current state of multipath support in Debian Installer's RC2 for Lenny is documented here. The netinst works fine if you use the patched grub (#442382). Unfortunately the CD images are currently broken due to missing libaio udeb.

The easiest way to get the patched grub into your system is via http://tinyurl.com/mpgrub/inst_i386.sh as described in the README.

The recently updated multipath-tools 0.4.8-14 support disks >2TB and also work with kernels more recent then Debian's 2.6.26.

While Debian's Iceweasel ships a nice search engine for Debian packages it doesn't have one for the bug tracking system (which I tend to use more frequently). So I stitched together a simple search engine following the Opensearch specificaton. To install it in Firefox/Iceweasel go here.

sapgui-package allows you to build a Debian package out of the SAP GUI for Java by simply running:

make-sgpkg PlatinGUI-Linux-710r7.jar

You can then install the resulting Debian package via:

dpkg -i sapgui_7.10rev7_i386.deb

The 'guistart' and 'guilogon' binaries are available as 'sapguistart' and 'sapguilogon' in your path.

Once a new release comes out simply repeat the above steps and all users on your system(s) will enjoy the new version. This has been tested with 7.10r6 and 7.10r7.

The source code is available via:

git clone http://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/sapgui-package.git/

An ITP has already been filed.

When following Debian changelogs (e.g. via apt-listchanges or update-manager) one often wonders what an actual commit messages actually means or how a bug got actually fixed. Currently finding this information is cumbersome:

• Find out the version control system of the package, either via the PTS or via debian/control.
• Browse it's VCSs revision history either by using the web interface or by cloning the repository.
• Try to locate the correct commit from it's commit message. Hopefully it's the same as in the changelog and hopefully it mentions the bug number - otherwise: tough luck!

However this process can be automated if a package uses the following format for changelog entries:

* [commitd] changelog message

e.g.:

* [fed3f3d] fixed segfault during daemon startup (Closes: #7005180)

then you can use Cl2vcs to locate the exact commit that corressponds to that changelog entry. Cl2vcs uses the PTS to parse the packages Vcs-Browser URL to create a link back to the commit.

If you maintian your package in Git, creating this type of changelog entry is simple: You can tell git-dch to include N digits of the commit's SHA1 (the commit id) using the --id-length option, e.g.:

git-dch --release --auto --id-length=7

This way git-dch will include the first 7 digits of the commit's SHA1 (this options can of course also be specified in gbp.conf). Packages already using this are e.g. libvirt and calendarserver.

Note: a possibly useful extension of the above format would be:

 * [commitid1,commitid2,commitid3] changelog message 

so several commits can make up a changelog entry. For Subversion this would then look like:

 * [r123,r125.r127] cleanup whitespace errors

The nice thing about d-i is that it's even more flexible then one thinks. Usually an autopartitioning recipe looks like:

500 10000 1000000 ext3
method{ format }
format{ }
use_filesystem{ }
filesystem{ ext3 }
mountpoint{ / } .

But what if you want a to set a filesystem label. That's easy:

500 10000 1000000 ext3
method{ format }
format{ }
use_filesystem{ }
label{ root }
filesystem{ ext3 }
mountpoint{ / } .

This sets the label root on the ext3 filesystem that will be mounted as /. You can set any variable here and the text between the curly braces ends up in $<partition>/<var> ready for partman to pick it up. See partman-auto-recipe for the full details.

The label allows to mount the filesystem by it's label instead of it's device name, so /etc/fstab looks like:

 LABEL=root /     ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro,relatime 0 1
 LABEL=home /home ext3  defaults,relatime,user_xattr        0 2

Very handy if you insert partitions later which would change the numbering or work with partimage snapshots that should work on PATA and SATA. However this currently isn't supported by d-i since it can only create filesystem labels but can't write them to /etc/fstab. With the patches from #488321 and #488322 this can be done with:

500 10000 1000000 ext3
method{ format }
format{ }
use_filesystem{ }
label{ root }
labeled_mount{ }
filesystem{ ext3 }
mountpoint{ / } .

You also need to fixup mount since it will otherwise segfault during d-i's initial deboostrap run (#488312). Now support for labels on swap devides needs to be added to d-i.

Nothing earth shaking in this release:

• [bf8738f] add --git-tag-only (Closes: #485114)
• [b06bcf0] document git-import-dscs
• [c1deeb2] add epoch to dch call (Closes: #483718)
• [6640ac7] Fix typo (Closes: #484243)

''--git-tag-only'' allows you to create a tag without having to build the whole project again - useful for large packages. You can either clone from:

git clone http://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/git-buildpackage.git/

or fetch the package from the Debian Archive once it went through the new queue. The updated documentation is available here