Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in August 2017 (previous month):

• Created ZeroCoolOS, a live operating system that plays the film Hackers (1995) on a continuous loop.
• Sent a patch for pristine-tar to allow storage of detached upstream signatures. (#871809)
• Worked more on Lintian, a static analysis tool for Debian packages, reporting on various errors, omissions and quality-assurance issues to the maintainer (previous changes):
  • Fix an apache2-unparsable-dependency false positive by allowing periods in dependency names. (#873701)
  • Ignore "repacked" packages when checking for upstream source tarball signatures as they will never match.
  • Downgrade the severity of orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature. (#870722)
  • From a suggestion by Theodore Ts'o, expand the explanation of orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature to include the location of where dpkg-source looks.
  • Address a number of issues in the copyright-year-in-future tag including preventing false positives in port numbers, email addresses, ISO standard numbers and street addresses (#869788), as well as "meta" or testing statements (#873323). In addition, report all violating years in a line and expand the testsuite.
  • Don't match quoted "FIXME" variants of file-contains-fixme-placeholder (#870199), avoid checking copyright_hints files (#872843) and downgrade the tag's severity.
  • Apply a patch from Alex Muntada to recommend "substr" over of "substring" in mentions-deprecated-usr-lib-perl5-directory. (#871767)
  • Prevent missing-build-dependency-for-dh_-command false positives exposed by following the advice in useless-autoreconf-build-depends. (#869541)
  • Ensure readme-debian-contains-debmake-template also checks for files containing "Automatically generated by debmake".
  • Check python3-foo packages have a Section: python, not just python2-foo. (#870272)
  • Check for packages shipping compiled Java class files. (#873211)
  • Additionally consider .cljc files to avoid codeless-jar warnings. (#870649)
  • Prevent desktop-entry-lacks-keywords-entry false positives for Link and Directory-style .desktop files. (#873702)
  • Split out Python checks from checks/scripts.pm check to a new, source check of type source.
  • Check for python-foo without a corresponding python3-foo package. (#870681)
  • Complain about packages that Build-Depend on python-sphinx only. (#870730)
  • Warn about packages that alternatively Build-Depend on the Python 2 and Python 3 versions of Sphinx. (#870758)
  • Check for packages that depend on Python 2.x. (#870822)
  • Correct false positives in unconditional-use-of-dpkg-statoverride by detecting "if !" as a shell prefix. (#869587)
  • Alert on for missing calls to dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) in maintainer scripts. (#872042)
  • Check for packages using sensible-utils without declaring a dependency after splitting from debianutils. (#872611)
  • Warn about scripts using nodejs as an interpreter now that the nodejs script provides /usr/bin/node. (#873096)
  • Remove recommendations to add a Testsuite: autopkgtest field to debian/control and emit a new tag the package if it does so. (#865531)
  • Recognise autopkgtest-pkg-elpa as a valid test suite. (#873458)
  • Add note to /etc/bash_completion.d's obsolete path warning output regarding stricter filename requirements. (#814599)
  • Add 4.0.1 and 4.1.0 as known Policy standards versions.
  • Apply a patch from Maia Everett to avoid British spellings under the en_US locale. (#868897)
  • Stop emitting {maintainer,uploader}-address-causes-mail-loops for @packages.debian.org addresses. (#871575)
  • Modify Lintian::Data's all subroutine to always return keys in insertion order.
  • Apply a patch from Steve Langasek to accomodate binutils outputting symbols in a different format on the ppc64el architecture. (#869750)
  • Add an explicit test for packages including external fonts via the Google Font and TypeKit APIs. (#873434)
  • Add missing entries in internal Test-For fields to make development/testing workflow less error-prone.
• Sent three pull requests to git-buildpackage, a tool to assist in Debian packaging from Git repositories:
  • Make pq --abbrev= configurable. (#872351)
  • Use build profiles to avoid installation of test dependencies. (#31)
  • Correct "allow to" grammar. (#30)
• Updated travis.debian.net (my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform for testing):
  • Move away from deb.debian.org; Travis appears to be using a HTTP proxy that strips SRV records. (commit)
  • Highlight double quotes are required for TRAVIS_DEBIAN_EXTRA_REPOSITORY. (commit)
  • Use force-unsafe-io. (commit)
  • Clarify docs when upstream already has a travis.yml file. (#46)
  • Make documentation easier to copy-paste. (commit)
• Merged a pull request in django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility, where instantiation of a SlackException was failing. (#71)
• Assigned two pull requests to the Redis key-value database store to correct "did not received" and "faield" typos. (#4216 & #4215).

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