Debian Janitor: 8,200 landed changes landed so far

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 15 August 2020}

The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.

The bot has been submitting merge requests for about seven months now. The rollout has happened gradually across the Debian archive, and the bot is now enabled for all packages maintained on Salsa, GitLab, GitHub and Launchpad.

There are currently over 1,000 open merge requests, and close to 3,400 merge requests have been merged so far. Direct pushes are enabled for a number of large Debian teams, with about 5,000 direct pushes to date. That covers about 11,000 lintian tags of varying severities (about 75 different varieties) fixed across Debian.

For more information about the Janitor’s lintian-fixes efforts, see the landing page.

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Improvements to Merge Proposals by the Janitor

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 08 August 2020}

The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.

Since the original post, merge proposals created by the janitor now include the debdiff between a build with and without the changes (showing the impact to the binary packages), in addition to the merge proposal diff (which shows the impact to the source package).

New merge proposals also include a link to the diffoscope diff between a vanilla build and the build with changes. Unfortunately these can be a bit noisy for packages that are not reproducible yet, due to the difference in build environment between the two builds.

This is part of the effort to keep the changes from the janitor high-quality.

The rollout surfaced some bugs in lintian-brush; these have been either fixed or mitigated (e.g. by disabling specified fixers).

For more information about the Janitor’s lintian-fixes efforts, see the landing page.

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The Debian Janitor

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Tue 03 December 2019}

There are a lot of small changes that can be made to the Debian archive to increase the overall quality. Many of these changes are small and have just minor benefits if they are applied to just a single package. Lintian encourages maintainers to fix these problems by pointing out the common ones.

Most of these issues are often trivially fixable; they are in general an inefficient use of human time, and it takes a lot of effort to keep up with. This is something that can clearly be automated.

Several tools (e.g. onovy’s mass tool, and the lintian-brush tool that I’ve been working on) go a step further and (for a subset of the issues reported by lintian) fix the problems for you, where they can. Lintian-brush can currently fix most instances of close to 100 lintian tags.

Thanks to the Vcs-* fields set by many packages and the APIs provided by hosting platforms like Salsa, it is now possible to proactively attempt to fix these issues.

The Debian Janitor is a tool that will run lintian-brush across the entire archive, and propose fixes to lintian issues via pull request.

 $ curl https://janitor.debian.net/api/lintian-fixes/pkg/PACKAGE/diff

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Silver Platter

meta = {'category': vcs, 'date': Thu 11 April 2019}

Making changes across the open source ecosystem is very hard; software is hosted on different platforms and in many different version control repositories. Not being able to make bulk changes slows down the rate of progress. For example, instead of being able to actively run a a script that strips out an obsolete header file (say “DM-Upload-Allowed”) across all Debian packages, we make the linter warn about the deprecated header and wait as all developers manually remove the deprecated header.

 #!/bin/sh

 perl -i -pe \
 'BEGIN{undef $/;} s/Free Software
 ([# ]+)Foundation, Inc\., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA/Free Software
 \1Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA/smg' *

 echo "Update FSF postal address."

 $ svp login https://github.com

 $ svp run --dry-run --diff ./fix-fsf-address.sh https://github.com/offlineimap/offlineimap
 Merge proposal created.
 Description: Update FSF postal address.

 === modified file 'offlineimap.py'
 --- upstream/offlineimap.py 2018-03-04 03:28:30 +0000
 +++ proposed/offlineimap.py 2019-04-06 21:07:25 +0000
 @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
  #
  #    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  #    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 -#    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
 +#    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA

  import os
  import sys

 === modified file 'setup.py'
 --- upstream/setup.py       2018-05-01 01:48:26 +0000
 +++ proposed/setup.py       2019-04-06 21:07:25 +0000
 @@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
  #
  #    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  #    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 -#    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
 +#    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA

  import os
  from distutils.core import setup, Command

 $ svp run ./fix-fsf-address.sh https://github.com/offlineimap/offlineimap
 ...
 Reusing existing repository https://github.com/jelmer/offlineimap
 Merge proposal created.
 URL: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap/pull/609
 Description: Update FSF postal address.

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$ debian-svp run ~/fix-fsf-address.sh offlineimap

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Lintian Brush

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sun 09 December 2018}

With Debian packages now widely being maintained in Git repositories, there has been an uptick in the number of bulk changes made to Debian packages. Several maintainers are running commands over many packages (e.g. all packages owned by a specific team) to fix common issues in packages.

Examples of changes being made include:

• Updating the Vcs-Git and Vcs-Browser URLs after migrating from alioth to salsa
• Stripping trailing whitespace in various control files
• Updating e.g. homepage URLs to use https rather than http

Most of these can be fixed with simple sed or perl one-liners.

Some of these scripts are publically available, for example:

• The R packaging team’s routine-update,
• Ondřej Nový’s onovy-mass repository.

 % debcheckout talloc
 declared git repository at https://salsa.debian.org/samba-team/talloc.git
 git clone https://salsa.debian.org/samba-team/talloc.git talloc ...
 Cloning into 'talloc'...
 remote: Enumerating objects: 2702, done.
 remote: Counting objects: 100% (2702/2702), done.
 remote: Compressing objects: 100% (996/996), done.
 remote: Total 2702 (delta 1627), reused 2601 (delta 1550)
 Receiving objects: 100% (2702/2702), 1.70 MiB | 565.00 KiB/s, done.
 Resolving deltas: 100% (1627/1627), done.
 % cd talloc
 talloc% lintian-brush
 Lintian tags fixed: {'insecure-copyright-format-uri', 'public-upstream-key-not-minimal'}
 % git log
 commit 0ea35f4bb76f6bca3132a9506189ef7531e5c680 (HEAD -> master)
 Author: Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@debian.org>
 Date:   Tue Dec 4 16:42:35 2018 +0000

     Re-export upstream signing key without extra signatures.

     Fixes lintian: public-upstream-key-not-minimal
     See https://lintian.debian.org/tags/public-upstream-key-not-minimal.html for more details.

  debian/changelog                |   1 +
  debian/upstream/signing-key.asc | 102 +++++++++++++++---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  2 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 87 deletions(-)

 commit feebce3147df561aa51a385c53d8759b4520c67f
 Author: Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@debian.org>
 Date:   Tue Dec 4 16:42:28 2018 +0000

     Use secure copyright file specification URI.

     Fixes lintian: insecure-copyright-format-uri
     See https://lintian.debian.org/tags/insecure-copyright-format-uri.html for more details.

  debian/changelog | 3 +++
  debian/copyright | 2 +-
  2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

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Using Propellor for configuration management

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Mon 18 August 2014}

For a while, I’ve been wanting to set up configuration management for my home network. With half a dozen servers, a VPS and a workstation it is not big, but large enough to make it annoying to manually log into each machine for network-wide changes.

Most of the servers I have are low-end ARM machines, each responsible for a couple of tasks. Most of my machines run Debian or something derived from Debian. Oh, and I’m a member of the declarative school of configuration management.

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Migrating packaging from Bazaar to Git

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sun 02 June 2013}

A while ago I migrated most of my packages from Bazaar to Git. The rest of the world has decided to use Git for version control, and I don’t have enough reason to stubbornly stick with Bazaar and make it harder for myself to collaborate with others.

So I’m moving away from a workflow I know and have polished over the last few years - including the various bzr plugins and other tools involved. Trying to do the same thing using git is frustrating and time-consuming, but I’m sure that will improve with time. In particular, I haven’t found a good way to merge in a new upstream release (from a tarball) while referencing the relevant upstream commits, like bzr merge-upstream can. Is there a good way to do this? What helper tools can you recommend for maintaining a Debian package in git?

Having been upstream for bzr-git earlier, I used its git-remote-bzr implementation to do the conversions of the commits and tags:

% git clone bzr::/path/to/bzr/foo.bzr /path/to/git/foo.git

One of my last contributions to bzr-git was a bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas subcommand, which will export all bzr-builddeb-style pristine-tar metadata to a pristine-tar branch in a Git repository that can be used by pristine-tar directly or through something like git-buildpackage.

Once you have created a git clone of your bzr branch, it should be a matter of running bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas with the target git repository and the Debian package name:

% cd /path/to/bzr/foo.bzr
% bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas /path/to/git/foo.git foo
% cd /path/to/git/foo.git foo
% git branch
*  master
   pristine-tar

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Bazaar: A retrospective

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Wed 19 December 2012}

For the last 7 years I’ve been involved in the Bazaar project. Since I am slowly stepping down, I recently wrote a retrospective on the project as I experienced it for the last 7 years.

Thanks to a few kind people for proofreading earlier drafts; if you spot any errors, please let me know in the comments.

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Samba 4.0.0, finally

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Tue 11 December 2012}

This afternoon we released version 4.0.0 of Samba. This is a significant milestone, and I’m very proud of the result. Samba 4 is the first version that can be a domain controller in an Active Directory domain.

We embarked on this journey almost a decade ago - the first commit is from August 2003. It’s been a long and bumpy ride. I hardly recognize the people in this team photo from 2003 (I’m second from the left).

A lot has happened in that time. We wrote a few million lines of code. We migrated from CVS to Subversion to Git. We’ve drifted apart and grown back together as a team.

In my youthful naivity I predicted a release “within 1 or 2 years” during a talk at the NLUUG in 2004. But Active Directory was a lot harder than we thought, and there were quite a few other distractions as well. I’m glad this release, which is by far the biggest and longest running software project I have ever worked on, has finally happened.

Some older RCs of Samba 4 have already been packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, in the samba4 source package. For Debian jessie, these will be integrated into the main samba source package. Please use experimental if you do want to try the existing packages, as it is most up to date.

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Last day at Canonical

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Wed 17 October 2012}

This Friday will be my last day at Canonical.

It has been a lot of fun working here. There is so much I have learned in the last three years. I’m going to miss my colleagues.

Over the last couple of months I have slowly stepped down from my involvement in Bazaar and the Bazaar packaging in Debian and Ubuntu. I would like to stay involved in Ubuntu, but we will see how that goes.

I’m taking some time off until the end of the year to see the world and hack, before starting something new in February.

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Summer of Code 2011

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 18 July 2011}

The Samba team is once again participating in the Summer of Code this year. This year we have 4 students working on various projects related to Samba.

This year I am mentoring Dhananjay Sathe, who is improving the GTK+ frontends for Samba. In particular, he is making it possible to manage shares and users of a remote Samba or Windows machine.

Dhananjay is also blogging about his progress.

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On the way to Samba 4: Part 2

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sun 02 January 2011}

It’s been more than a month since the last status update on my Samba 4 work - much more than the two weeks I promised.

During the holidays I finally managed to release the new alpha of Samba 4, as well as releases of some of our companion libraries (tdb, talloc, tevent and ldb). The release includes a significant amount of bug fixes and a lot of work towards a properly functioning Active Directory DC, too much to list here.

This release I’ve mainly been involved in improving our Python bindings and our handling of internal and external libraries. We now use symbol versioning for our copy of Heimdal Kerberos as well as some of our other libraries. Hopefully this will fix some of the issues users of the evolution-mapi plugin have been seeing where they end up with both MIT Kerberos and Heimdal Kerberos loaded into the same process (with all the consequences of overlapping symbol names). Samba 4 now also has the ability to work with the system Heimdal rather than using the bundled copy. I have packaged alpha14 for Debian and Ubuntu (fixing most of the open bugs against the Samba 4 package in the BTS), but am currently waiting for the new release of ldb to pass through NEW before I can upload.

The next release is scheduled for the first week of February.

Currently Playing: Stream of Passion - Haunted

comments.

On the way to Samba 4: Part 1

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Wed 24 November 2010}

After Samba XP 2008 Andrew and I started keeping a wiki page with our bi-weekly goals and achievements for Samba 4. Because planning in a Free Software project is hard (time availability and priorities change over time, and other volunteers are equally unpredictable) we called this our “Fantasy Page”; it listed things we wanted to work on next (“fantasies”), but reality being what it is we would usually actually end up working on something entirely different. We discussed our progress and new plans in - what I would now call - a bi-weekly standup call.

There were several reasons for doing this. It gave us some sense of direction as well as a sense of accomplishment; a way to look back at the end of the year and realize how much we had actually achieved. Because Samba 4 is such a long term project (it is 7 years old at this point) it is easy to become disillusioned, to look back at a year of commits and to not see the gradual improvement, just the fact that there is no release yet.

We managed to keep this up for two years, much longer than I had anticipated, and eventually started to slip last year.

More recently Kai and Tridge have started to blog weekly about their efforts to make Samba 4.0 a reality and I’m going to join them by trying to blog regularly - every two weeks - about my contributions, even if there were none.

In the next two weeks I plan to work on finally getting alpha 14 of Samba 4 out and on fixing the daily builds of Samba 4 and OpenChange for Ubuntu on Launchpad after we did a massive reorganization of the private libraries in Samba 4.

Current Playing: Zero 7 - Somersault

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OpenChange server and SOGo

meta = {'category': openchange, 'date': Tue 26 October 2010}

There’s more good news on the OpenChange front. Julien has been working together with Wolfgang and Ludovic from Inverse to leverage the server-side support in OpenChange to provide native Exchange server support in SOGo.

A couple of days ago we announced that there now is an initial version that allows the use of Outlook against a SOGo server through OpenChange.

There is a screencast up on youtube (there is also a .mov version of the screencast).

As far as I know, this is the first time it’s possible to actually use Outlook clients with a non-Microsoft Exchange-compatible server, without the need for plugins on the Outlook side. And it’s all Free Software. Of course, this is just a preview, and not something we’d recommend everybody to run in production just yet. But it’s exciting to finally see this come together.

We already have OpenChange packages in Debian and Ubuntu but I hope I can help get SOGo packaged for both distributions as well.

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Samba 4 and OpenChange daily Ubuntu packages

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Tue 28 September 2010}

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# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 4.0.0~alpha14~bzr{revno}~ppa{revno:packaging}+{revno:debian}
lp:samba
merge debian lp:~samba-team/samba/unstable
merge packaging lp:~samba-team/samba/4.0-ppa-maverick

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$ apt-add-repository ppa:samba-team/ppa
$ apt-add-repository ppa:openchange/daily-builds

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