My free software activities in December 2015
I am hereby joining the crowd of Debian and free software developers doing a monthly and public summary of their work.
Debian Long Term Support (LTS)
This is the first month when I have been paid to work on Debian LTS. I wasn't nearly as available as I hoped, but i was still able to work the 8 hours I committed to. It was mostly a learning process at this point. For example, I spent a rather long time working on the Redmine security issues, only to notice, at the end of December, that Redmine is not actually supported in LTS releases (mainly due to Rails itself not being supported).
Still, the work is not completely lost: some patches were backported, and patches sources and status were clarified. I also made a tool to track patches through git and SVN merges in Redmine's history, which can sometimes be really complicated.
However, because I lack the resources to setup a Squeeze Redmine instance and the feedback I received so far for the work has been mostly that Redmine is unsupported, I will not push those updates into LTS for now (until users explicitly ask for it, in which case I can perform the updates in January, with the help of testers).
I also got more familiar with the security team infrastructure. One of the reasons that I didn't notice Redmine was unsupported was that it is not clear at all from the Security Tracker's perspective, which versions are supported and which are not. I have proposed a small patch to ignore CVEs that are affecting only unsupported version and the discussion on this is ongoing. I will hold off work on the security tracker for now and try to focus on actual uploads for the upcoming month.
Feed to tweet
I have worked quite a bit on the [feed2tweet tool][], which allows me
to connect this blog to twitter. I
have filed the first 17 issues or pull requests 
of the
project, basically rewriting almost all the code to tailor my needs,
make it faster and easier to configure. I am wondering if it wouldn't
have been simpler to write something from scratch using
libturpial, especially since this brings in GNU Social support
and maybe, eventually, pump.io support, which is on the way to be
standardized by the W3C.
Hopefully, this post will confirm the software still works after all my changes...
Miscellaneous projects
I have also worked on my plethora of random projects in December.
- i am looking for co-maintainers for bup-cron, a tool I wrote a while back to automate bup backups and related operations, which I only use now for my offsite backups, which are likely to be replaced with borg backup
- i have updated the Debian package for sopel, which was renamed from Willie in Debian, and filed two related issues
- my brain got eaten by Sudokus in the christmas vacations and i found an easy way to generate new sudokus for basically zero money (small booklets can cost up to 8$ here!) using the sudoku software, packaged in Debian. Unfortunately, it only generates a single sudoku per page - if people have better knowledge of Postscript than me, this would be a great and easy contribution (probably)
- i have contributed significantly to the tuptime project by performing a fairly detailed code review and helping with the Debian packaging (that was november, but still) - tuptime is pretty cool: i use it to guess how long my next reboot will be...
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