Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in January 2018 (previous month):

• Updated travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds:
  • Only include the output of debc if less than 500 lines to prevent issues with log truncation. [...]
  • Add support for TRAVIS_DEBIAN_LINTIAN. [...]
• Submitted a pull request for the Promise JS framework to make the build reproducible. [...]
• Submitted a number of pull requests to ffs, a set of filesystem API helpers for Python:
  • Initial support for Windows. [...]
  • Pass genuine str instances to os.path.abspath, not our wrapper class. [...]
  • Explicitly pass str instances to shutil methods. [...]
  • Correct a "treat" typo. [...]
  • Correct reference to getwd(). [...]
• Suggested improvements to Turtlecoin, a private and fast cryptocurrency:
  • Prevent potential output truncation issue when formatting. [...]
  • Avoid (eg.) logical 'or' of equal expressions warnings with GCC 7. [...]
  • Be explicit about a conditional with misleading indentation. [...]
  • Add explicit fallthrough statements to silence warnings with GCC 7. [...]
• Updated the Opal web framework for building usable healthcare applications:
  • Fix Windows testsuite and main management comments. [...]
  • Get the testsuite working under Windows. [...]
  • Add ghetto --failfast support to runtests.py. [...]
  • Ensure runtests.py does nott exit with return code of zero if we have a multiple of 256 errors. [...]
• Created a pull request for the RediSearch search engine module for Redis to fix a -Wformat error for the "long unsigned int type. [...]
• Filed a PR against openSUSE's hardware information tool to ensure the CDBISDN_DATE variable ignores timezone in order to make the build reproducible. [...]
• Submitted a pull request to python-stdnum, A Python library to provide functions to handle, parse and validate standard numbers to not rely on stable set ordering to ensure a reproducible build. [...]
• Even more hacking on the Lintian static analysis tool for Debian packages:
  • New features:
    • Check for files under debian/patches that are not mentioned in any series file. (#887817)
    • Check for upstream tarballs that ship examples but none are installed in any binary package. (#539326)
    • Ask maintainers to add a header to debian/copyright if their package is in contrib or non-free. (#773562)
    • Check for override_dh_auto_test targets that do not check DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS. (#712394)
    • Add support for passing .buildinfo files to Lintian. (#853274)
    • Check for inconsistencies between Files and Checksums- sections in .changes files. (#658542)
    • Check for packages that with dependencies on packages such as cdbs or debhelper. (#700953)
    • Warn about packages that specify a Files-Excluded header without a valid Format header. (#745743)
    • Check for .jar files that do not match the Debian Java policy. (#791552)
    • Emit a pedantic warning for packages using dpatch. (#884500)
    • When looking for the source of subdir/foo/bar.min.js, also check src/foo/bar.js etc. (#832027)
    • Check for packages that mention planned features in their description. (#782990)
    • Improve the description-synopsis-might-not-be-phrased-properly tag also detect multiple sentences. (#778427)
    • Warn about Multi-Arch: same packages that ship arch-specific overrides. (#787469)
    • Add a warning for comaintained packages not managed in a revision control system. (#884497)
    • Warn when a "Files: *" DEP-5 paragraph exists but isn't the first paragraph. (#879235)
    • Detect "backports" as an overly generic Python module name. (#888559)
    • Allow debian/missing-sources/foo.js directories to represent the source for foo.js. (#836771)
    • Add a check for packages that specify dh --with quilt whilst not using the 3.0 (quilt) source format. (#886566)
    • Warn about warn packages that use dh_systemd_* overrides whilst using debhelper level 11. (#887899)
    • Emit a warning about documentation packages that end with -docs. (#664520)
    • Emit an error if packages ship files in /etc/skel. (#887120)
    • Detect overly-compressed xz packages. (#829100)
    • Warn about packages that ship Python modules but are missing dependencies on an interpreter. (#887083)
    • Ensure Name Services Switch modules are placed in the admin section. (#886961)
    • Warn about insecure DEP-5 Format: URIs. (#886930)
    • Check for packages that should specify Rules-Require-Root. (#886479)
    • Emit pedantic warnings for packages that refer to a non-Git VCSs hosted in the Debian infrastructure. (#885974)
    • Change ancient-standards-version policy to "a release of Policy from the previous stable release cycle". (#886219)
    • Warn for packages that ship (non-reproducible) Python Hypothesis examples. (#886101)
    • Warn about orphaned packages not maintained in the Debian infrastucture. (#886057)
    • Warn about packages that ship (eg.) test_foo.py files in the global Python module namespace. [...]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don't emit new-package-should-not-package-python2-module if the maintainer can justify its inclusion. [...]
    • Avoid false positives in spelling-error-in-description where the repetition is part of an acronym expansion. (#883719)
    • Ignore Rust .rs files in extra-license-file. (#887715)
    • Support the latest binutils when parsing ELF files as this was causing a testsuite failure. (#888456)
    • When checking for a Python 3 variant of a Python package, consider any package that declares a binary dependency on ${python3:Depends}. (#886303)
    • Fix issue where bad-section-in-changes-file, file-size-mismatch-in-changes-file and checksum-mismatch-in-changes-file were not being checked. [...]
    • Don't emit license-problem-php-license when the source comes from pecl.php.net. (#810780)
    • Avoid false positives and remove an existing (incorrect) test for apparent brace expansions in config files that do not include a comma. (#888304)
    • Avoid a false positive for spelling-error-in-binary that was causing a FTBFS on armhf. (#888074)
    • Avoid false positives for missing-notice-file-for-apache-license by looking for files with a .txt extension. (#886343)
    • Avoid false-positives when checking Windows PE files. (#886555)
    • Ensure xfonts-foo are recognised as part of the x11 section to match the definition on packages.debian.org. (#878609)
    • Fix Use of uninitialized value in string ne warnings. (#887428)
    • Only run files-multiarch-foreign-files test on amd64. (#886163)
    • Don't warn about unknown template type entropy when a package depends on cdebconf. (#677870)
    • Ignore TeX \section titles when checking for GFDL licenses. (#863384)
    • Only test for packages shipping gschemas.compiled files in specified dirs. (#884142)
    • Fix a programming error in the src-orig-index collection script. (#886586)
    • Ensure bugs-field-does-not-refer-to-debian-infrastructure can be overridden by not emitting them for -dbgsym packages. (#886426)
    • Don't warn about extra license files installed via Sphinx. (#885968)
    • Don't warn about django-package-does-not-depend-on-django for -doc packages, etc. [...]
    • Skip Objective-C libraries for no-symbols-control-file. (#749202)
    • Install files-multiarch-foreign-files tests to a multi-arch directory on all architectures. (#886163)
    • Skip comment lines when matching autotools-pkg-config-macro-not-cross-compilation-safe. (#886297)
    • Identify both python-foo-dbg and python3-foo-dbg as known debug packages. (#886271)
  • Output/reporting improvements:
    • Make previously-hidden package anchor links visible. [...]
    • Include the offending context and line when emitting brace-expansion-in-debhelper-config-file. [...]
    • Include the date the Standards-Version was released in output of ancient-standards-version and out-of-date-standards-version. [...]
    • Include the value in the output of debian-rules-should-not-use-DH_EXTRA_ADDONS. [...]
    • Append the URI in the output of vcs-deprecated-in-debian-infrastructure. [...]
    • Include offending package name in new-package-should-not-package-python2-module output. [...]
    • Include Bugs field value in the output of bugs-field-does-not-refer-to-debian-infrastructure. [...]
    • Add more context to xz-compression-level-too-high output. [...]
  • Severities:
    • Upgrade the severity of missing-debian-source-format from wishlist to normal. (#702671)
    • Downgrade extra-license-file (#740118), dependency-on-python-version-marked-for-end-of-life (#886259), wrong-section-according-to-package-name (#883772) & newer-standards-version (#886210).
  • Documentation:
    • Clarify paragraph ordering matters in the description for unused-file-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright. (#762261)
    • Remark that new-package-should-not-package-python2-module's appearance on lintian.debian.org can be ignored. (#887124)
    • Also mention Recommends and Suggests in the opening paragraph of python-script-but-no-python-dep. (#687141)
    • Add missing initials in debian/copyright. (#831729)
  • Misc:
    • Rename debian-watch-does-not-check-gpg-signature to avoid confusion around "may check". (#735040)
    • Bump arch-dep-package-has-big-usr-share thresholds. (#648755)

You can subscribe to new posts via email or RSS.