The Kali Janitor

meta = {'category': vcs, 'date': Wed 08 March 2023}

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.

Kali Linux have been running their own instance of the Janitor for the last year, under the kali-bot user on GitLab. Their web site has some excellent documentation explaining how the bot works.

Both projects share some common components - the core janitor codebase, Silver-Platter and the various codemods (lintian-brush and deb-new-upstream). The site and some of the review logic is different for Kali.

The Kali bot has several campaigns:

• Lintian-Fixes
• Fresh releases
• Fresh snapshots
• Merge from Debian (and other distributions)

The last campaign doesn’t exist in the Debian janitor, and pulls in new changes from packages that have been imported from other distributions.

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

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Debian Janitor: Hosters used by Debian packages

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 24 October 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 Janitor knows how to talk to different hosting platforms. For each hosting platform, it needs to support the platform- specific API for creating and managing merge proposals. For each hoster it also needs to have credentials.

At the moment, it supports the GitHub API, Launchpad API and GitLab API. Both GitHub and Launchpad have only a single instance; the GitLab instances it supports are gitlab.com and salsa.debian.org.

This provides coverage for the vast majority of Debian packages that can be accessed using Git. More than 75% of all packages are available on salsa - although in some cases, the Vcs-Git header has not yet been updated.

Of the other 25%, the majority either does not declare where it is hosted using a Vcs-* header (10.5%), or have not yet migrated from alioth to another hosting platform (9.7%). A further 2.3% are hosted somewhere on GitHub (2%), Launchpad (0.18%) or GitLab.com (0.15%), in many cases in the same repository as the upstream code.

The remaining 1.6% are hosted on many other hosts, primarily people’s personal servers (which usually don’t have an API for creating pull requests).

Merge Proposals by Hoster

These proportions are also visible in the number of pull requests created by the Janitor on various hosters. The vast majority so far has been created on Salsa.

Hoster	Open	Merged & Applied	Closed
github.com	92	168	5
gitlab.com	12	3	0
code.launchpad.net	24	51	1
salsa.debian.org	1,360	5,657	126

In this graph, “Open” means that the pull request has been created but likely nobody has looked at it yet. Merged means that the pull request has been marked as merged on the hoster, and applied means that the changes have ended up in the packaging branch but via a different route (e.g. cherry-picked or manually applied). Closed means that the pull request was closed without the changes being incorporated.

Note that this excludes ~5,600 direct pushes, all of which were to salsa-hosted repositories.

See also:

• Historical graphs on trends.debian.net with number of packages per VCS and per hoster (purely based on Vcs-* headers in the archive, with no heuristics applied)
• Zack’s table of number of Vcs-* header by system (Git, Svn, etc)
• current Janitor merge proposal statistics

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

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Debian Janitor: How to Contribute Lintian-Brush Fixers

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Thu 15 October 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.

lintian-brush can currently fix about 150 different issues that lintian can report, but that’s still a small fraction of the more than thousand different types of issue that lintian can detect.

If you’re interested in contributing a fixer script to lintian-brush, there is now a guide that describes all steps of the process:

1. how to identify lintian tags that are good candidates for automated fixing
2. creating test cases
3. writing the actual fixer

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

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Debian Janitor: Expanding Into Improving Multi-Arch

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 19 September 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.

As of dpkg 1.16.2 and apt 0.8.13, Debian has full support for multi-arch. To quote from the multi-arch implementation page:

Multiarch lets you install library packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This is useful in various ways, but the most common is installing both 64 and 32- bit software on the same machine and having dependencies correctly resolved automatically. In general you can have libraries of more than one architecture installed together and applications from one architecture or another installed as alternatives.

The Multi-Arch specification describes a new Multi-Arch header which can be used to indicate how to resolve cross-architecture dependencies.

The existing Debian Multi-Arch hinter is a version of dedup.debian.net that compares binary packages between architectures and suggests fixes to resolve multi-arch problems. It provides hints as to what Multi- Arch fields can be set, allowing the packages to be safely installed in a Multi-Arch world. The full list of almost 10,000 hints generated by the hinter is available at https://dedup.debian.net/static/multiarch-hints.yaml.

Recent versions of lintian-brush now include a command called apply-multiarch-hints that downloads and locally caches the hints and can apply them to a package maintained in Git. For example, to apply multi-arch hints to autosize.js:

 $ debcheckout autosize.js
 declared git repository at https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/autosize.js.git
 git clone https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/autosize.js.git autosize.js ...
 Cloning into 'autosize.js'...
 [...]
 $ cd autosize.js
 $ apply-multiarch-hints
 Downloading new version of multi-arch hints.
 libjs-autosize: Add Multi-Arch: foreign.
 node-autosize: Add Multi-Arch: foreign.
 $ git log -p
 commit 3f8d1db5af4a87e6ebb08f46ddf79f6adf4e95ae (HEAD -> master)
 Author: Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@debian.org>
 Date:   Fri Sep 18 23:37:14 2020 +0000

     Apply multi-arch hints.
     + libjs-autosize, node-autosize: Add Multi-Arch: foreign.

     Changes-By: apply-multiarch-hints

 diff --git a/debian/changelog b/debian/changelog
 index e7fa120..09af4a7 100644
 --- a/debian/changelog
 +++ b/debian/changelog
 @@ -1,3 +1,10 @@
 +autosize.js (4.0.2~dfsg1-5) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium
 +
 +  * Apply multi-arch hints.
 +    + libjs-autosize, node-autosize: Add Multi-Arch: foreign.
 +
 + -- Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@debian.org>  Fri, 18 Sep 2020 23:37:14 -0000
 +
  autosize.js (4.0.2~dfsg1-4) unstable; urgency=medium

    * Team upload
 diff --git a/debian/control b/debian/control
 index 01ca968..fbba1ae 100644
 --- a/debian/control
 +++ b/debian/control
 @@ -20,6 +20,7 @@ Architecture: all
  Depends: ${misc:Depends}
  Recommends: javascript-common
  Breaks: ruby-rails-assets-autosize (<< 4.0)
 +Multi-Arch: foreign
  Description: script to automatically adjust textarea height to fit text - NodeJS
   Autosize is a small, stand-alone script to automatically adjust textarea
   height to fit text. The autosize function accepts a single textarea element,
 @@ -32,6 +33,7 @@ Package: node-autosize
  Architecture: all
  Depends: ${misc:Depends}
   , nodejs
 +Multi-Arch: foreign
  Description: script to automatically adjust textarea height to fit text - Javascript
   Autosize is a small, stand-alone script to automatically adjust textarea
   height to fit text. The autosize function accepts a single textarea element,

The Debian Janitor also has a new multiarch-fixes suite that runs apply-multiarch-hints across packages in the archive and proposes merge requests. For example, you can see the merge request against autosize.js here.

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

comments.

Debian Janitor: All Packages Processed with Lintian-Brush

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 12 September 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.

On 12 July 2019, the Janitor started fixing lintian issues in packages in the Debian archive. Now, a year and a half later, it has processed every one of the almost 28,000 packages at least once.

As discussed two weeks ago, this has resulted in roughly 65,000 total changes. These 65,000 changes were made to a total of almost 17,000 packages. Of the remaining packages, for about 4,500 lintian-brush could not make any improvements. The rest (about 6,500) failed to be processed for one of many reasons – they are e.g. not yet migrated off alioth, use uncommon formatting that can’t be preserved or failed to build for one reason or another.

Now that the entire archive has been processed, packages are prioritized based on the likelihood of a change being made to them successfully.

Over the course of its existence, the Janitor has slowly gained support for a wider variety of packaging methods. For example, it can now edit the templates for some of the generated control files. Many of the packages that the janitor was unable to propose changes for the first time around are expected to be correctly handled when they are reprocessed.

If you’re a Debian developer, you can find the list of improvements made by the janitor in your packages by going to https://janitor.debian.net/m/.

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

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Debian Janitor: The Slow Trickle from Git Repositories to the Debian Archive

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 29 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.

Last week’s blog post documented how there are now over 30,000 lintian issues that have been fixed in git packaging repositories by the Janitor.

It’s important to note that any fixes from the Janitor that make it into a Git packaging repository will also need to be uploaded to the Debian archive. This currently requires that a Debian packager clones the repository and builds and uploads the package.

Until a change makes it into the archive, users of Debian will unfortunately not see the benefits of improvements made by the Janitor.

82% of the 30,000 changes from the Janitor that have made it into a Git repository have not yet been uploaded, although changes do slowly trickle in as maintainers make other changes to packages and upload them along with the lintian fixes from the Janitor. This is not just true for changes from the Janitor, but for all sorts of other smaller improvements as well.

However, the process of cloning and building git repositories and uploading the resulting packages to the Debian archive is fairly time-consuming – and it’s probably not worth the time of developers to follow up every change from the Janitor with a labour-intensive upload to the archive.

It would be great if it was easier to trigger uploads from git commits. Projects like tag2upload will hopefully help, and make it more likely that changes end up in the Debian archive.

The majority packages do get at least one new source version upload per release, so most changes will eventually make it into the archive.

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

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Debian Janitor: > 60,000 Lintian Issues Automatically Fixed

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 22 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.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

from debmutate.control import ControlEditor
from lintian_brush.fixer import report_result, fixed_lintian_tag

with ControlEditor() as updater:
    for para in updater.paragraphs:
        if para.get("Priority") == "extra":
            para["Priority"] = "optional"
            fixed_lintian_tag(
                para, 'priority-extra-is-replaced-by-priority-optional')

report_result("Change priority extra to priority optional.")

comments.

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.

comments.