Louis-Philippe Véronneau - debian

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2026

2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on February 22^nd for our first meeting of the year!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
released lintian version 2.130.0
upstreamed a patch for python-wilderness, fixed a few things and released version 0.1.10-3
updated python-clevercsv to version 0.8.4
updated python-mediafile to version 0.14.0

lelutin:

opened up a RFH for co-maintenance for smokeping and added Marc Haber who responded really quickly to the call
with mjeanson's help: prepped and uploaded a new smokeping version to release pending work
opened a NM request to become DM

viashimo:

fixed freshrss timer
updated freshrss
installed new navidrome container
configured backups for new host (beelink mini s12)

tvaz:

did NM work
learned more about debusine and tested it
uploaded antimony to debusine
(co-)convinced lelutin to apply for DM (yay!)

lavamind:

worked on autopkgtests for a new version of jruby

Pictures

This time around, we held our meeting at cégep du Vieux Montréal, the college where I currently work. Here is the view we had:

We also ordered some delicious pizzas from Pizzeria dei Compari, a nice pizzeria on Saint-Denis street that's been there forever.

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Amère à boire, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

Reducing the size of initramfs kernel images

2026-01-13T00:00:00-05:00

In the past few years, the size of the kernel images in Debian have been steadily growing. I don't see this as a problem per se, but it has been causing me trouble, as my /boot partition has become too small to accommodate two kernel images at the same time.

Since I'm running Debian Unstable on my personal systems and keep them updated with unattended-upgrade, this meant each (frequent) kernel upgrade triggered an error like this one:

update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.17.11+deb14-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
 error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This would in turn break the automated upgrade process and require me to manually delete the currently running kernel (which works, but isn't great) to complete the upgrade.

The "obvious" solution would have been to increase the size of my /boot partition to something larger than the default 456M. Since my systems use full-disk encryption and LVM, this isn't trivial and would have required me to play Tetris and swap files back and forth using another drive.

Another solution proposed by anarcat was to migrate to systemd-boot (I'm still using grub), use Unified Kernel Images (UKI) and merge the /boot and /boot/efi partitions. Since I already have a bunch of configurations using grub and I am not too keen on systemd taking over all the things on my computer, I was somewhat reluctant.

As my computers are all configured by Puppet, I could of course have done a complete system reinstallation, but again, this was somewhat more involved than what I wanted it to be.

After looking online for a while, I finally stumbled on this blog post by Neil Brown detailing how to shrink the size of the initramfs images. With MODULES=dep my images shrunk from 188M to 41M, fixing my issue. Thanks Neil!

I was somewhat worried removing kernel modules would break something on my systems, but so far, I only had to manually load the i2c_dev module, as I need it to manage my home monitor's brightness using ddcutil.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - September 2025

2025-10-11T00:00:00-04:00

Our Debian User Group met on September 27^th for our first meeting since our summer hiatus. As always, it was fun and productive!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
triaged lintian bugs #960909, #1014162 and #978552

sergiodj:

worked on the following bugs:
- #1097457
- #1097487
- #1097969
- #1097995
- #1096367
- #1096478
- #1096503
- #1097445
- #1097460

LeLutin:

switched from sbuild-qemu to sbuild-unshare
worked on the following bugs:
- #1092937
- #996824
- #1112079
- #1110355

tvaz:

answered applicants (usual Application Manager stuff) as part of the New Member team
dealt with less pleasant stuff as part of the Community team
learned about aibohphobia!

viashimo:

looked at hardware on PCPartPicker
starting to port a zig version of soundscraper from zig 0.12 to 0.15.1

tassia:

set up a local instance of openQA for functionality tests of Debian images
test-drove said instance and suggested improvements to the new documentation based on a Trixie VM

Pictures

This time again, we were hosted at La Balise (formely ATSÉ).

It's nice to see this community project continuing to improve: the social housing apartments on the top floors should be opening this month! Lots of construction work was also ongoing to make the Espace des Possibles more accessible from the street level.

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

One last Bookworm for the road — report from the Montreal 2025 BSP

2025-04-22T00:00:00-04:00

Hello, hello, hello!

This report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal on March 28-29th is very late ... but better late than never? We're now at our fifth BSP in a row¹, which is both nice and somewhat terrifying.

Have I really been around for five Debian releases already? Geez...

This year, around 13 different people showed up, including some brand new folks! All in all, we ended up working on 77 bugs, 61 of which have since been closed.

This is somewhat skewed by the large number of Lintian bugs I closed by merging and releasing the very many patches submitted by Maytham Alsudany (hello Maytham!), but that was still work :D

For our past few events, we have been renting a space at Ateliers de la transition socio-écologique. This building used to be nunnery (thus the huge cross on the top floor), but has since been transformed into a multi-faceted project.

BSPs are great and this one was no exception. You should try to join an upcoming event or to organise one if you can. It is loads of fun and you will be helping the Debian project release its next stable version sooner!

As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue.

Pictures

Here are a bunch of pictures of the BSP, mixed in with some other pictures I took at this venue during a previous event.

See our previous BSPs in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023! ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - December 2024

2025-01-04T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on December 22^nd for our last meeting of 2024. I wasn't sure at first it was a good idea, but many people showed up and it was great!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

migrated to a new Yubikey
merged a lintian MR

anarcat:

fought with the Supersonic flatpak to fix build with latest placebo (failed), but managed to update to the latest upstream
realized that keyring-pass does the inverse of what he needs, whereas pass_secret_service, which does, is poorly maintained and depends on the dead pypass library
uploaded new upstream versions of etckeeper, mdformat and python-internetarchive
improved a lintian warning
opened yet another sbuild bug
started playing with sfwbar

lelutin:

worked on the 2024 Advent of Code in Rust

lavamind:

installed Debian on an oooollld (as in, with a modem) laptop
debugged a FTBFS on jruby

tvaz:

did some simple packaging QA
added basic salsa CI and some RFA for a bunch of packages (python-midiutil, antimony, python-pyo, rakarrack, python-pyknon, soundcraft-utils, cecilia, nasty, gnome-icon-theme-nuovo, gnome-extra-iconsg, nome-subtitles, timgm6mb-soundfont)

mjeanson and joeDoe:

hanged out and did some stuff :)

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Isle de Garde, a pub right next to the venue.

Pictures

This time around, we were hosted by l'Espace des possibles, at their new location (they moved since our last visit). It was great! People liked the space so much we actually discussed going back there more often :)

lintian.debian.org: Episode IV – A New Hope

2024-12-07T00:00:00-05:00

After weeks – dare I say months – of work, it is finally done. lintian.debian.org is back online!

Many, many thanks to everyone who worked hard to make this possible:

Thanks to Nicolas Peugnet, the author of lintian-ssg, who handed us this custom static site generator on a silver platter. I'm happy I didn't have to code this myself :)
Thanks to Otto Kekäläinen, maintainer of the lintian-ssg package in Debian, who worked in tandem with Nicolas to iron out problems.
Thanks to Philipp Kern, who did the work on the DSA side to put the website back online.

All in all, I did very little (mostly coordinating these fine folks) and they should get the credit for this very useful service being back.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2024

2024-11-13T00:00:00-05:00

Our Debian User Group met on November 2nd after a somewhat longer summer hiatus than normal. It was lovely to see a bunch of people again and to be able to dedicate a whole day to hacking :)

Here is what we did:

lavamind:

reproduced puppetdb FTBFS #1084038 and reported the issue upstream
uploaded a new upstream version for pgpainless (1.6.8-1)
uploaded a new revision for ruby-moneta (1.6.0-3)
sent an inquiry to the backports team about #1081696

pollo:

reviewed & merged many lintian merge requests, clearing out most of the queue
uploaded a new lintian release (1.120.0)
worked on unblocking the revival of lintian.debian.org (many thanks to anarcat and pkern)
apparently (kindly) told people to rtfm at least 4 times :)

anarcat:

figured out he still can't figure out how to do 3D printing and should probably just delegate these prints, currently in his wishlist:
- k4vp VHF HT radio case (fits on your phone)
- (tr)uSDX HF radio (fits in your hand!)
- framework expansion card holder (fits in my bag!)
- Ortlieb QUICK-LOCK1 compatible inserts (fits on my bike?)
fixed an RC bug in python-ulid
sponsored fuzzel 1.11.1+ds-2 upload, resolving a FTBFS on non-x86 arches
tried to move the sigal packaging forward a little, failing in obscure pybuild land

LeLutin:

opened an RFS on the ruby team mailing list for the new upstream version of ruby-necromancer
worked on packaging the new upstream version of ruby-pathspec

tvaz:

did AM (Application Manager) work

tassia:

explored the Debian Jr. project (website, wiki, mailing list, salsa repositories)
played a few games for Nico's entertainment :-)
built and tested a Debian Jr. live image

Pictures

This time around, we went back to Foulab. Thanks for hosting us!

As always, the hacklab was full of interesting stuff and I took a few (bad) pictures for this blog post:

A Selection of DebConf24 Talks

2024-08-08T00:00:00-04:00

DebConf24 is now over! I'm very happy I was able to attend this year. If you haven't had time to look at the schedule yet, here is a selection of talks I liked.

What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging

A great talk by Weezel showcasing how easy it is to migrate to PEP-518 for existing Python projects.

This is the kind of thing I've been doing a lot when packaging upstream projects that still use setup.py. I encourage you to send this kind of patch upstream, as it makes everyone's life much easier.

Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next?

A talk by Alper Nebi Yasak, who has done great work on running Debian and the Debian Installer on Chromebooks.

With Chromebooks being very popular machines in schools, it's nice to see people working on a path to liberate them.

Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian

I had the chance to see Justus' talk on Sequoia — an OpenPGP implementation in Rust — at DebConf22 in Kosovo. Back then, the conclusion was that sq wasn't ready for production yet.

Well it seems it now is! This in-depth talk goes through the history of the project and its goals. There is also a very good section on the current OpenPGP/LibrePGP schism.

Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust

A very short talk by Holger on Chameleon, a tool to make migration to Sequoia easier.

TL;DW: apt install gpg-from-sq

Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding

Although I used to enjoy signing people's OpenPGP keys, I completely gave up on this practice around 2019 when dkg's key was flooded with bogus certifications and have been refusing to do so since.

In this talk, Gunnar talks about his PhD work on fixing this issue and making sure we can eventually restore this important function on keyservers.

Bits from the DPL

Bits from the DPL! A DebConf classic.

Linux live patching in Debian

Having to reboot servers after kernel upgrades is a hassle, especially with machines that have encrypted disk drives.

Although kernel live patching in Debian is still a work in progress, it is encouraging to see people trying to fix this issue.

"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends

A fun talk by Samuel Henrique on little changes and tricks one can make to their setup to make life easier.

Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward

Another in-depth talk by Alper, this time on the Debian Installer and his ideas to try to make it better. I learned a lot about the d-i internals!

Lightning Talks

Lighting talks are always fun to watch! This year, the following talks happened:

Customizing your Linux icons
A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
Desktop computing is irrelevant
An introduction to wcurl
Aliasing in dpkg
A DebConf art space
Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
Data processing and visualisation in the shell

Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era?

As an economist, I've been interested in Copyright and business models in the Free Software ecosystem for a while. In this talk, Hatta-san and Bruce Perens discuss the idea of alternative licences that are not DFSG-free, like Post-Open.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - March 2024

2024-04-20T00:00:00-04:00

Time really flies when ~~you are really busy~~ you have fun! Our Montréal Debian User Group met on Sunday March 31st and I only just found the time to write our report :)

This time around, 9 of us we met at EfficiOS's offices¹ to chat, hang out and work on Debian and other stuff!

Here is what we did:

pollo:

did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

tvaz:

organized his custom Application Manager stuff in a private repo
did some coding for the New Maintainers website to make sure applicants agree with the Debian Code of Conduct alongside the SC/DFSG/DMUP
closed #1057910 (new apticron upload)

tassia:

planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
babysat a future contributor!
closed #1067649
learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

viashimo:

uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
updated various services in personal infra
cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
extended GPG key expiry
looked at options for a new backup machine

lavamind:

updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

justin:

opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

Pictures

Here are pictures of the event. Well, one picture (thanks Tassia!) of the event itself and another one of the crisp Italian lager I drank at the bar after the event :)

Maintainers, amongst other things, of the great LTTng. ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2024

2024-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

New Year, Same Great People! Our Debian User Group met for the first of our 2024 bi-monthly meetings on February 4th and it was loads of fun. Around twelve different people made it this time to Koumbit, where the meeting happened.

As a reminder, our meetings are called "Debian & Stuff" because we want to be as open as possible and welcome people that want to work on "other stuff" than Debian.

Here is what we did:

pollo:

tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the problem was indeed with the battery :D)
renewed his expiring OpenPGP key
worked on removing trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure from the DebCI reject_list
helped anarcat with packaging sigal
managed to feed most of the people present :)

LeLutin:

worked with lavamind to upload new upstream release of smokeping

mjeanson:

migrated from lxd to incus on his servers
helped anarcat with flashing his AirGradient

lavamind:

submitted a bug report on r-cran-rserve (promptly fixed/uploaded by maintainer!)
reviewed and uploaded smokeping
bug triaged the facter package
worked on puppet-agent new upstream version 8.4.0

viashimo:

updated puppet-strings from 2.9.0 to 4.2.1
reported upstream test failures on puppet-strings with recent versions of mdl

tvaz & tassia:

drafted a call & request for funding for the Vanier College FLOSS Club hardware marathon at Eastern Bloc
worked on an application to conduct research at Vanier College on Debian usability
babysitted :-)

joeDoe:

worked on his AirGradient
debugged the WiFi and VPN setup on his new laptop

anarcat:

worked on packaging sigal
worked on flashing his AirGradient boards
rewrote a Prometheus exporter for Airgradient devices
brought over a car full of old computer gear to donate

Pictures

I was pretty busy this time around and ended up not taking a lot of pictures. Here's a bad one of the ceiling at Koumbit I took, and a picture by anarcat of the content of his boxes of loot:

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2023

2023-12-06T00:00:00-05:00

Hello from a snowy Montréal! My life has been pretty busy lately¹ so please forgive this late report.

On November 19th, our local Debian User Group met at Montreal's most prominent hackerspace, Foulab. We've been there a few times already, but since our last visit, Foulab has had some membership/financial troubles. Happy to say things are going well again and a new team has taken over the space.

This meetup wasn't the most productive day for me (something about being exhausted apparently makes it hard to concentrate), but other people did a bunch of interesting stuff :)

Kienan & Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl package (now in Sid!), which is needed for smokeping.
Jérôme worked on updating JRuby to the latest upstream version.
I failed to update monitoring-plugins-systemd to the latest upstream version. It seems the entire test suite has been re-written and I couldn't make it work in sbuild...
Tiago and Tassia worked on the Debian Contributors website. More specifically, they added a DSA domains data source and created a scheduler on dcf.debian.net to make daily updates on the data sources in the dc-sources repository.
Michael worked on the 2024 NorthSec badge.
Gerard worked on debugging his broken AirGradient board.

Pictures

Here are a bunch of pictures I took! Foulab is always a great place to snap quirky things :)

More busy than the typical end of semester rush... At work, we are currently renegotiating our collective bargaining agreement and things aren't going so well. We went on strike for a few days already and we're planning on another 7 days starting on Friday 8th. ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023

2023-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"!

It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd, so I didn't try to organise one.

All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :)

This event was also the first time we were hosted by L'Espace des possibles - Petite Patrie, a social venue that aims to provide a space for not-for-profit activities, like repair cafés, sowing classes, board game nights, etc. It was really nice and we will surely meet there again in the future.

Many people came to the event, including some new ones. Although people always tend to come and go during the day, a total of 12 people attended the event.

As always, people worked on very different projects! One of the focus of this D&S was assembling AirGradient DIY basic kits. Our local community has been talking a lot about air quality metrics in the past few months¹. Tiago thus decided to have a company print the PCBs for this kit and graciously gave away a few spares. Michael then took upon himself to order parts on AliExpress and a few of us ended up soldering the kits together while chatting.

Otherwise, some Debian work was also done:

I triaged and closed a bunch of bug reports and started packaging labwc, a Wayland compositor heavily inspired by Openbox.
Jérôme did some work on Clojure libraries that broke when Java 21 became supported in Sid.
Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl library.
Tiago and Tassia continued their work on the new DC Sources project and Tiago applied for a debian.net VM for this service.

The whole event was super fun, the tacos we had for lunch were delicious (and very authentic!), and we ended up at a local microbrewery to share a pint later in the evening.

Looking forward to the next event!

Mostly as a result of the large forest fires in Canada this summer. I myself blogged twice about air quality-related projects recently. ↩

Python 3.11, pip and (breaking) system packages

2023-05-29T00:00:00-04:00

As we get closer to Debian Bookworm's release, I thought I'd share one change in Python 3.11 that will surely affect many people.

Python 3.11 implements the new PEP 668, Marking Python base environments as “externally managed”¹. If you use pip regularly on Debian, it's likely you'll eventually hit the externally-managed-environment error:

error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.

    If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.

    If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
    it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
    virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.

    See /usr/share/doc/python3.11/README.venv for more information.
note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.

With this PEP, Python tools can now distinguish between packages that have been installed by the user with a tool like pip and ones installed using a distribution's package manager, like apt.

This is generally great news: it was previously too easy to break a system by mixing the two types of packages. This PEP will simplify our role as a distribution, as well as improve the overall Python user experience in Debian.

Sadly, it's also likely this change will break some of your scripts, especially CI that (legitimately) install packages via pip alongside system packages. For example, I use the following gitlab-ci snippet to make sure my PRs don't break my build process²:

build:flit:
  stage: build
  script:
  - apt-get update && apt-get install -y flit python3-pip
  - FLIT_ROOT_INSTALL=1 flit install
  - metalfinder --help

With Python 3.11, this snippet will error out, as pip will refuse to install packages alongside the system's. The fix is to tell pip it's OK to "break" your system packages, either using the --break-system-packages parameter, or the PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 environment variable³.

This, of course, is not something you should be using in production to restore the old behavior! The "proper" way to fix this issue, as the externally-managed-environment error message aptly (har har) informs you, is to use virtual environments.

Happy hacking!

Kudos to our own Matthias Klose, Stefano Rivera and Elana Hashman, who worked on designing and implementing this PEP! ↩
Which is something that bit me before... You push some changes to your git repository, everything seems fine and all the tests pass, so you merge it and make a new git tag. When the time comes to build and upload this tag to PyPi, you find out some minor thing broke your build system (which you weren't testing) and you have to scramble to make a point-release to fix the issue. Sad! ↩
Don't go searching for this environment variable in pip's code though, as you won't find it! All of pip's command line options can be passed as env vars using the PIP_<UPPER_LONG_NAME> format. Useful for tools that use pip indirectly, like flit. ↩

Goodbye Bullseye — report from the Montreal 2023 BSP

2023-03-04T00:00:00-05:00

Hello World! I haven't really had time to blog here since the start of the semester, as I've been pretty busy at work¹.

All this to say, this report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal last weekend is a little late, sorry :)

First of all, I'm pleased to announce our local community seems to be doing great and has recovered from the pandemic-induced lull. May COVID stay away from our bodies forever.

This time around, a total of 9 people made it to what has become somewhat of a biennial tradition². We worked on a grand total of 14 bugs and even managed to close some!

It looks like I was too concentrated on bugs to take a picture of the event... To redeem myself, I hereby offer you a picture of a cute-but-hairless cat I met on Sunday morning:

You should try to join an upcoming BSP or to organise one if you can. It's loads of fun and you'll be helping the project make the next release happen sooner!

As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue.

Goodbye Bullseye!

Which I guess is a good thing, since it means I actually have work this semester :O ↩
See our previous BSPs in 2017, 2019 and 2021. ↩

Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report

2022-12-08T00:00:00-05:00

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022.

Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

Étienne Mollier (emollier)
Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)
Athos Ribeiro (athos)
Stuart Prescott (stuart)
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo)
Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi)
James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
Emmanuel Arias (eamanu)
Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)

Here is a list of issues we worked on:

pybuild autodep8 feature

About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests.

This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon.

Fixing packages that run tests via `python3 setup.py test`

Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build.

Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild.

if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it!

Fixing packages that use `nose`

nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015.

During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive.

Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it!

Removal of the remaining Python2 packages

With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug.

It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release.

Working on Lintian tags for the Team

During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely:

the addition of a "missing-cpython-extension" tag to flag packages that do not build CPython extensions for all the supported Python versions.
fixing a false-positive in the "missing-prerequisite-for-pyproject-backend" tag.

I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself.

I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made.

I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library.

Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs

It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened.

Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed.

During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page.

Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite.

Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one

pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now.

As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release.

To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained.

Other work

Many other things were done during the sprint, such as:

improving existing packages (for example, adding or fixing autopkgtests)
triaging and fixing Python 3.11 bugs
updating packages to the latest upstream release
sponsoring uploads

Thanks

Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - October 2022

2022-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday October 30th to chat, work on Debian and do other, non-Debian related hacking :) This time around, we met at EfficiOS's¹ offices. As you can see from the following picture, it's a great place and the view they have is pretty awesome. Many thanks for hosting us!

This was our 4th meeting this year and once again, attendance was great: 10 people showed up to work on various things.

Following our bi-monthly schedule, our next meeting should be in December, but I'm not sure it'll happen. December can be a busy month here and I will have to poke our mailing list to see if people have the spoons for an event.

This time around, I was able to get a rough log of the Debian work people did:

pollo:

followed up with the DPL for upcoming Debian Python Team Sprint
opened a wishlist bug (#1023140) on the devscripts package for uscan to verify git tags signed with SSH keys
updated python-mediafile and mutagen to the latest upstream version

mjeanson:

fixed RC bug #1022419 on babeltrace
kindly hosted us, with the help of Mathieu Desnoyers

viashimo:

started updating puppet-strings to 3.0.1
was blocked in the process by tests requiring ruby-mdl, which is not packaged yet
was blocked in packaging ruby-mdl by rubocop not being >= ~1.2x

lavamind:

updated jnffi to 1.3.9, as part of the work on jruby he's been doing

anarcat:

updated g10k to latest upstream

babelouest:

updated node-jose to 4.10.4
worked on bug #1021779 in libical3

tvaz:

worked on updating apticron

As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to buy some food!

Makers of the awesome LTTng project, amongst other things. ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - August 2022

2022-09-07T00:00:00-04:00

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday August 28th¹ at the very hackish Foulab for the August 2022 edition of our "Debian & Stuff" meetings.

As always, the event was a success and we had lots of fun. Nine people showed up, including some new faces and people I hadn't seen in a while:

Animated picture of the people present at the event.

On my side, although I was badly sleep-deprived ², I still managed to be somewhat productive!

One of the WiFi Access Points we use in our 4-apartment LAN had been boot-looping for a few weeks, after a failed sysupgrade to the latest version of OpenWRT. lavamind and I suspect the flash got corrupted in a way or another during the upgrade process...

Lucky for us, this model has a serial port and runs U-Boot. After a bit of tinkering, some electrical tape and two different serial adapters³, we managed to identify the pin layout and got a shell on the machine. The device has a reset button, but since the kernel panic was happening too soon in the boot process, we weren't able to get into OpenWRT's failsafe mode this way.

Once we had serial access, wiping the flash and re-installing OpenWRT fixed our problem. A quick ansible-playbook run later, the device was back to being usable and configured :)

I was too tired to keep track of what others did, but I took some nice pictures of the pizza we got, and of this nice blow-up Tux wearing a Foulab t-shirt. Enjoy!

As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to rent the venue and to buy some food.

Please excuse the late blog post, it's Harvest Season here and I've been quite busy. ↩
A bad case of wry neck kept me from sleeping properly for a while in August. ↩
As it turns out, serial connections work better when you use the right pins for TX and RX! ↩

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - June 2022

2022-06-22T00:00:00-04:00

As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists' hacklab) to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise.

Although there were fewer people than at our last meeting¹, we still did a lot of work!

I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Clojure packages², LeLutin worked on podman and packaged libinfluxdb-http-perl and anarcat worked on internetarchive, trocla and moneta. Olivier also came by and worked on debugging his Kali install.

We are planning to have our next meeting at the end of August. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre.

Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizza! Here is a nice picture anarcat took of (one of) the glasses of porter we had afterwards, at the next door brewery:

Summer meetings are always less populous and it also happened to be Father's Day... ↩
#1012824, #1011856, #1011837, #1011844, #1011864 and #1011967. ↩

Clojure Team 2022 Sprint Report

2022-05-18T00:00:00-04:00

This is the report for the Debian Clojure Team remote sprint that took place on May 13-14th.

Looking at my previous blog entries, this was my first Debian sprint since July 2020! Crazy how fast time flies...

Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

Rob Browning (rlb)
Elana Hashman (ehashman)
Jérôme Charaoui (lavamind)
Leandro Doctors (allentiak)
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo)

Sadly, Utkarsh Gupta — although having planned on participating — ended up not being able to and worked on DebConf Bursary paperwork instead.

rlb

Rob mostly worked on creating a dh-clojure tool to help make packaging Clojure libraries easier.

At the moment, most of the packaging is done manually, by invoking build tools by hand. Having a tool to automate many of the steps required to build Clojure packages would go a long way in making them more uniform.

His work (although still very much a WIP) can be found here: https://salsa.debian.org/rlb/dh-clojure/

ehashman

Elana:

Finished the Java Team VCS migration to the Clojure Team namespace.
Worked on updating Leiningen to 2.9.8.
Proposed an upstream dependency update in Leiningen to match Debian's most recent version.
Gave pollo Owner access on the Clojure Team namespace and added lavamind as a Developer.
Uploaded Clojure 1.10.3-1.
Updated sjacket-clojure to version 0.1.1.1 and uploaded it to experimental.
Added build tests to spec-alpha-clojure.
Filed bug #1010995 for missing test dependency for Clojure.
Closed bugs #976151, #992735 and #992736.

lavamind

It was Jérôme's first time working on Clojure packages, and things went great! During the sprint, he:

Joined the Clojure Team on salsa.
Identified missing dependencies to update puppetdb to the 7.x release.
Learned how to package Clojure libraries in Debian.
Packaged murphy-clojure, truss-clojure and encore-clojure and uploaded them to NEW.
Began to package nippy-clojure.

allentiak

Leandro joined us on Saturday, since he couldn't get off work on Friday. He mostly continued working on replacing our in-house scripts for /usr/bin/clojure by upstream's, a task he had already started during GSoC 2021.

Sadly, none of us were familiar with Debian's mechanism for alternatives. If you (yes you, dear reader) are familiar with it, I'm sure he would warmly welcome feedback on his development branch.

pollo

As for me, I:

Fixed a classpath bug in core-async-clojure that was breaking other libraries.
Added meaningful autopkgtests to core-async-clojure.
Uploaded new versions of tools-analyzer-clojure and trapperkeeper-clojure with autopkgtests.
Updated pomegranate-clojure and nrepl-clojure to the latest upstream version and revamped the way they were packaged.
Assisted lavamind with Clojure packaging.

Overall, it was quite a productive sprint!

Thanks to Debian for sponsoring our food during the sprint. It was nice to be able to concentrate on fixing things instead of making food :)

Here's a bonus picture of the nice sushi platter I ended up getting for dinner on Saturday night:

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - April 2022

2022-04-28T00:00:00-04:00

After two long years of COVID hiatus, local Debian events in Montreal are back! Last Sunday, nine of us met at Koumbit to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise.

Even though these events aren't always the most productive, it was super fun and definitely helps keeping me motivated to work on Debian in my spare time.

Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizzas! Here are a few pictures I took during the event:

If everything goes according to plan, our next meeting should be sometime in June. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre.

Louis-Philippe Véronneau - debian

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2026

Pictures

Reducing the size of initramfs kernel images

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - September 2025

Pictures

One last Bookworm for the road — report from the Montreal 2025 BSP

Pictures

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - December 2024

Pictures

lintian.debian.org: Episode IV – A New Hope

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2024

Pictures

A Selection of DebConf24 Talks

What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging

Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next?

Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian

Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust

Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding

Bits from the DPL

Linux live patching in Debian

"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends

Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward

Lightning Talks

Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era?

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - March 2024

Pictures

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2024

Pictures

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2023

Pictures

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023

Python 3.11, pip and (breaking) system packages

Goodbye Bullseye — report from the Montreal 2023 BSP

Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report

pybuild autodep8 feature

Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test

Fixing packages that use nose

Removal of the remaining Python2 packages

Working on Lintian tags for the Team

Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs

Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one

Other work

Thanks

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - October 2022

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - August 2022

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - June 2022

Clojure Team 2022 Sprint Report

rlb

ehashman

lavamind

allentiak

pollo

Montreal's Debian & Stuff - April 2022

Fixing packages that run tests via `python3 setup.py test`

Fixing packages that use `nose`