November 30th 2017

Free software activities in November 2017

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

Reproducible builds


Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

I have generously been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund my work in this area.

This month I:

  • Presented at the Open Compliance Summit 2017 in Yokohama, Japan and had many follow-up conversations regarding using reproducible builds as a way of ensuring the long-term sustainability of civil infrastructure.
  • Created pull requests upstream for fswatch, bitz-server, stetl, nbsphinx & stardicter.
  • Updated diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, to only parse DTB's version number, not any -dirty suffix. (#880279)
  • Expanded the documentation for disorderfs, our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues, highlighting the non-intuitive recommendation to sort instead of shuffle. [...]
  • Made some brief changes to buildinfo.debian.net, my experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them:
    • Add a by-hash API endpoint. [...]
    • Support ?key__uid=X&key__uid=Y filtering. [...]
  • Updated our website:
    • Move the "contribute" page from the Debian wiki to /contribute/. [...]
    • Add a (redirecting) /docs/source-date-epoch/ page so we have a canonical URL. [...]
    • Add recent talks to Resources page. [...]
    • Cachebust CSS files. [...]
  • In Debian:
  • Categorised a large number of packages and issues in the Reproducible Builds "notes" repository.
  • Made some changes to: jenkins.debian.net which uns our comprehensive testing framework:
    • Ignore "warning" strings in commit messages causing builds to be marked as unstable. [...]
    • Update the email subject of status change mails away from Debian-specific URI. [...]
    • Move some IRC announcements to #debian-reproducible-changes. [...]
  • Worked on publishing our weekly reports. (#132, #133, #134 & #135)


Debian

My activities as the current Debian Project Leader are covered in my "Bits from the DPL" email to the debian-devel-announce mailing list.

Patches contributed

  • dget: Please support downloading packages over gopher://. (#880649)
  • gpaw: Incorrectly creates logging files called - instead of logging to standard output. (#882638)
  • pk4: Please avoid the use of avail in package descriptions. (#881343)

Debian LTS


This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:

  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 1161-1 for the redis key-value storage database to fix cross-protocol scripting attack.
  • Issued DLA 1162-1 & DLA 1163-1 to fix out-of-bounds memory vulnerabilites in apr and apr-util, portability libraries for various Apache applications.
  • Issued DLA 1173-1 for procmail, a tool used to sort incoming mail into various directories and filter out spam messages to fix a heap-based buffer overflow.
  • Issued DLA 1174-1 to correct a denial of service vulnerability in the konversation IRC client related to parsing of color formatting codes.
  • Issued DLA 1175-1 for the lynx-cur web browser, preventing a use-after-free vulnerability in the HTML parser which could lead to memory/information disclosure.

Uploads

  • python-django:
  • redis:
    • 4.0.2-6 — Correct locations of redis-sentinel pidfiles. (#880980)
    • 4.0.2-7 — Add a redis metapackage. (#876475)
    • 4.0.2-8 — Use get_current_dir_name over a PATHMAX, etc. (#881684), don't rely on taskset existing for kFreeBSD-* (#881683), drop "memory efficiency" tests on advice from upstream (#881682) and allow the package be bin-NMUable.
    • 4.0.2-9 — Modify aof.c for MAXPATHLEN issues. (#881684)
    • 4.0.2-9~bpo9+1 — Upload to stretch-backports.
  • bfs:
    • 1.1.4-1 — New upstream release.
    • 1.1.4-2 — Use upstream's new manpage.
  • python-daiquiri:
    • 1.3.0-2 — Ensure all dependencies are available for DEP-8 tests. (#882876)
  • redisearch (0.90.0~alpha1-1, 0.90.1-1, 0.99.0-1 & 0.99.2-1) — New upstream releases.

Finally, I also made a non-maintainer upload (NMU) of cpio (2.12+dfsg-5) to the experimental distribution.

Debian bugs filed

  • cappuccino: Broken symlink in /usr/games. (#880714)
  • statsmodels: Accesses raw.github.com during build. (#882641)
  • python-lti: Please run the upstream testsuite. (#880834)
  • git-buildpackage: gbp dch needs a better workflow description. (#880552)
  • audacity: New upstream release. (#880717)
  • python-djangorestframework: New upstream release. (#880538)
  • djangorestframework: New upstream release. (#880558)

I also filed 2 FTBFS bugs against django-axes & plinth.




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