FOSS Activities in March 2021

Yoooo!

Another month has passed which means another status update.

The python2 removal has been steady and several packages has been removed this month. Currently a query for python2 on archweb returns 139 matches. At the start of the month it was around 160-170. Progress!

I have suggested we remove checkdepends on python2 packages to ease the cleanup of dependency cycles. The response has been lukewarm at best so we’ll see how that progresses. Hopefully more is being removed in the upcoming months.

Support for debug in Arch Linux is in large parts written and under review. The dbscripts patches, which is how we administer packages to our repositories, has all the needed patches and a passing test suite! But it is currently missing a review from the current maintainer. I have also shaped up the infrastructure part so we can provide debuginfod. The general goal is to start providing debug packages through debuginfod and at a later date decide if we want to distribute the packages to some or all mirrors.

Hopefully it’s just a few weeks left until we can provide this to our users!

Arch recent got a new RFC process which is intended to create more structure around changes to the distribution. This is a neat change and there have already been 3 RFCs up for discussion this month from Allan.

Something that was brought up in 2019 was to move our license field in packages from loosely defined strings to SPDX identifiers. This allows us to standardize our license fields and allow people to better figure out which license a package has. This is going to a lot of work as we need to restructure our current license package with SPDX identifiers, update the archwiki license guidelines and formulate an RFC. Hopefully we’ll have some work done on this through April and an RFC before next month :)

And for the polarizing news. Richard Stallman was secretly reelected back on the board of the FSF. I personally think this is a move that firmly cements the Free Software Foundation as organization suffering from “Founder’s Syndrome” and incapable of modernizing. FSF is struggling with relevance and replacing the board, along with Stallman, is a better course of action to ensure the organization doesn’t die out.

I have signed the open letter along with several Arch maintainer and people I have got to know over the years which got me into FOSS development in the first place.

https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

And last I’d like to congratulate Kristian Klausen for being accepted as junior devops. They have done great work for Arch Linux on the infrastructure side of things and I hope there are more things to come :)

Cheers and happy holidays!

• bash-bats updated to 1.2.1-2
• docker updated to 1:20.10.5-1
• lxd updated to 4.12-1, 4.12-2
• github-cli updated to 1.7.0-1, 1.7.0-2, 1.8.0-1
• udiskie updated to 2.3.3-1
• buildah updated to 1.19.7-1, 1.19.8-1, 1.20.0-1
• python-google-api-core updated to 1.26.1-1
• plocate updated to 1.1.5-3, 1.1.5-4
• cni-plugins updated to 0.9.1-3
• qmk updated to 0.0.40-1, 0.0.45-1
• v2ray updated to 4.35.1-1
• python-docs updated to 3.9.2-1
• go updated to 2:1.16.1-1, 2:1.16.2-1
• conmon updated to 1:2.0.27-1
• staticcheck updated to 2020.2.3-1
• bash-bats updated to 1.3.0-1
• python-reportlab updated to 3.5.65-1
• python-pandas updated to 1.2.3-1
• python-sqlobject updated to 3.9.1-1
• python-prompt_toolkit updated to 3.0.17-1, 3.0.18-1
• qutebrowser updated to 2.1.0-1
• lostfiles updated to 4.10-1
• borg updated to 1.1.15-1, 1.1.15-1, 1.1.16-1
• tailscale updated to 1.4.6-1, 1.6.0-1
• python-language-server updated to 0.36.2-3
• helm updated to 3.5.3-1
• python-pyserial updated to
• nageru updated to 1.8.6-9
• font-awesome updated to 5.15.3-1
• gopass updated to 1.12.4-1, 1.12.5-1
• python-adblock updated to 0.4.3-1
• poke updated to 1.1-1
• step-ca updated to 0.15.10-1, 0.15.11-1
• k9s updated to 0.24.3-1, 0.24.6-1
• python-reportlab updated to 3.5.66-1
• yubikey-manager-qt updated to 1.2.0-1, 1.2.1-1
• podman-dnsname updated to 1.1.1-1, 1.2.0-1
• dns-over-https updated to 2.2.4-2, 2.2.5-1
• git-lfs updated to 2.13.2-2, 2.13.3-1
• go-md2man updated to 2.0.0-4
• runc updated to 1.0.0rc93-2
• fuse-overlayfs updated to 1.5.0-1
• k9s updated to 0.24.4-1
• raft updated to 0.10.0-1
• salt updated to 3002.6-1
• python-milc updated to 1.2.0-1, 1.3.0-1
• podman updated to 3.1.0-1

• podman-dnsname
  • For proper docker-compose support with podman.
• python-dotty-dict
  • New dependency for qmk

• python2-bcrypt
• syncthing-gtk
• python2-pyserial
• python2-futures
• python2-tornado
• dep

Potential new packages for

• oomd
• vgrep
• git-publish
• psi-notify
• etcd
• gosec
• kind
• nomad
• distrobuilder
• hunspell-nb
• hunspell-nn
• magic-wormhole

Bugfixes

• bash-bats: FS#63099
• github-cli: FS#69787
• lxd: FS#69352
• plocate: FS#69884
• cni-plugins: FS#69626
• gopass: FS#70097
• jp2a: FS#6997
• qmk: FS#69908
• podman: FS#70087

Security Team

The security team has released 27 advisories. The most notable this month has been the OpenSSL security advisory ASA-202103-10.

Other Things

Helped fix the “granite 6.0.0 rebuild” which was blocking the Gnome 40 update. This resulted in 2 patches for some vala code I have no clue about.

• torrential
• vocal

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