FOSS Activites in January 2021

6-minute read
debian • open-source • conference
debian • monthly • minidebconf

Here’s my (sixteenth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 25th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! \o/

This month was bat-shit crazy. Why? We’ll come to it later, probably 15th of this month?
Anyway, besides being crazy, hectic, adventerous, and the first of 2021, this month I was super-insanely busy. With what? Hm, more about this later this month! ^_^

However, I still did some Debian stuff here and there. Here are the following things I worked on:

Uploads and bug fixes:

Other $things:

  • Attended the Debian Ruby team meeting.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.
  • Sponsored golang-github-gorilla-css for Fedrico.

Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.

And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).

This was my sixteenth month as a Debian LTS and seventh month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 26.00 hours for LTS and 36.75 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(however, I worked extra for 9 hours for LTS and 9 hours for ELTS this month, which I intend to balance from the next month!)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other (E)LTS Work:

  • Front-desk duty from 28-12 until 03-01 and from 25-01 until 31-01 for both LTS and ELTS.
  • Triaged dropbear, gst-plugins-bad1.0, phpmyadmin, qemu, firefox-esr, thunderbird, openldap, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tzdata, jasper, ckeditor, liblivemedia, wavpack, and ruby-redcarpet.
  • Marked CVE-2019-12953/dropbear as postponed for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2019-12953/dropbear as postponed for stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2018-19841/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2019-1010315/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2019-1010317/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2021-21252/phpmyadmin as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2021-20196/qemu as postponed for stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2021-21252/phpmyadmin as no-dsa for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2021-20196/qemu as postponed for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2020-11947/qemu as postponed for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2021-3326/glibc as no-dsa for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2021-3326/glibc as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2020-35517/qemu as not-affected instead of postponed for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2021-2627{1,2}/ckeditor as postponed for jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2020-24027/liblivemedia as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2021-2627{1,2}/ckeditor as postponed for stretch.
  • Auto EOL’ed csync2, firefox-esr, linux, thunderbird, collabtive, activemq, and xen for jessie.
  • Got my first ever CVE assigned - CVE-2021-3181 for mutt. Weeeehooooo! \o/
  • Attended the monthly LTS meeting. Logs here.
  • General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

Interesting Bits!

  • This January, on 23rd and 24th, we had Mini DebConf India 2021 online.
    I had a talk as well, titled, “Why Point Releases are important and how you can help prepare them?".

    It was a fun and a very short talk, where I just list out the reasons and ways to help in the preparation of “point releases”. I did some experimentation with this talk, figuring out what works for the audience and what doesn’t and where can I improve for the next time I talk about this topic! \o/
    You can listen to the talk here and let me know if you have any feedback!

    Anyway, the conference lasted for 2 days and I also did some volunteering (talk director, talk miester) in Hindi and English, both! It was all so fun and new. Anyway, here’s the picture we took:

  • In another exciting news, I got my first CVE assigned!!! \o/
    No, it is not something that I found, it was discovered by Tavis Ormandy. I just assigned this a CVE ID, CVE-2021-3181.
    This is my first, so I am very excited about this! ^_^

  • Besides, there’s something more that is in the pipelines. Can’t talk about it now, shh. But hopefully very sooooooon!

Other $things! \o/

This month was tiresome, with most of the time being spent on the Debian stuff, I did very little work outside it, really. The issues and patches that I sent are:

  • Issue #700 for redcarpet, asking for a reproducer for CVE-2020-26298 and some additional patch related queries.
  • Issue #7 for in-parallel, asking them to not use relative paths for tests.
  • Issue #8 for in-parallel, reporting a test failure for the library.
  • Issue #2 for rake-ant, asking them to bump their dependencies to a newer version.
  • PR #3 for rake-ant, bumping the dependencies to a newer version, fixing the above issue, heh.
  • Issue #4 for rake-ant, requesting to drop git from their gemspec.
  • PR #5 for rake-ant, dropping git from gemspec, fixing the above issue, heh.
  • Issue #95 for WavPack, asking for a review of past security vulnerabilites wrt v4.70.0.
  • Reviewed PR #128 for ruby-openid, addressing the past regression with CVE fix merge.
  • Reviewed PR #63 for cocoapods-acknowledgements, updating redcarpet to v3.5.1, as a safety measure due to recently discovered vulnerability.
  • Issue #1331 for bottle, asking for relevant commits for CVE-2020-28473 and clarifying other things.
  • Issue #5 for em-redis, reporting test failures on IPv6-only build machines.
  • Issue #939 for eventmachine, reporting test failures for em-redis on IPv6-only build machines.

Until next time.
:wq for today.