Free Software Activities for 2019
As a reader of Planet Debian I see a bunch of updates at the start of each month about what people are up to in terms of their Free Software activities. I’m not generally active enough in the Free Software world to justify a monthly report, and this year in particular I’ve had a bunch of other life stuff going on, but I figured it might be interesting to produce a list of stuff I did over the course of 2019. I’m pleased to note it’s longer than I expected.
Conferences
I’m not a big conference attendee; I’ve never worked somewhere that paid travel/accommodation for Free Software conferences so I end up covering these costs myself. That generally means I go to local things and DebConf. This year was no exception to that; I attended BelFOSS, an annual free software conference held in Belfast, as well as DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil. (FOSDEM was at an inconvenient time this year for me, or I’d have made it to that as well.)
Debian
Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian.
As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various minor requests for advice from within the project.
The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We’re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2019.03.24, 2019.06.25, 2019.08.23, 2019.09.24 + 2019.12.23.
For Debian New Members I handled a single applicant, Marcio de Souza Oliveira, as an application manager. I had various minor conversations throughout the year as part of front desk.
I managed to get binutils-xtensa-lx106 + gcc-xtensa-lx106 packages (1 + 1) for cross building ESP8266 firmware uploaded in time for the buster release, as well as several updates throughout the year (2, 3 + 2, 3, 4). There was a hitch over some disagreements on the package naming, but it conforms with the generally accepted terms used for this toolchain.
Last year I ended up fixing an RC bug in ghdl, so this year having been the last person to touch the package I did a couple of minor uploads (0.35+git20181129+dfsg-3, 0.35+git20181129+dfsg-4). I’m no longer writing any VHDL as part of my job so my direct interest in this package is limited, but I’ll continue to try and fix the easy things when I have time.
Although I requested the package I originally uploaded it for, l2tpns, to be removed from Debian (#929610) I still vaguely maintain libcli, which saw a couple of upstream driven uploads (1.10.0-1, 1.10.2-1).
OpenOCD is coming up to 3 years since its last stable release, but I did a couple (0.10.0-5, 0.10.0-6) of minor uploads this year. I’ve promised various people I’ll do a snapshot upload and I’ll try to get that into experimental at some point. libjaylink, a dependency, also saw a couple of minor uploads (0.1.0-2, 0.1.0-3).
I pushed an updated version of libtorrent into experimental (0.13.8-1), as a pre-requisite for getting rtorrent updated. Once that had passed through NEW I uploaded 0.13.8-2 and then rtorrent 0.9.8-1.
The sigrok project produced a number of updates, sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw 0.1.7-1, libsigrok 0.5.2-1 + libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-1.
sdcc was the only package I did sponsored uploads of this year - (3.8.0+dfsg-2, 3.8.0+dfsg-3). I don’t have time to take over maintainership of this package fully, but sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw depends on it to build so I upload for Gudjon and try to help him out a bit.
Personal projects
In terms of personal projects I finally pushed my ESP8266 Clock to the outside world (and wrote it up). I started learning Go and as part of that wrote gomijia, a tool to passively listen for Bluetooth LE broadcasts from Xiaomi Mijia devices and transmits them over MQTT. I continued to work on onak, my OpenPGP key server, adding support for the experimental v5 key format, dkg’s abuse resistant keystore proposal and finally merged in support for signature verification. It’s due a release, but the documentation really needs improved before I’d be happy to do that.
picolibc
Back when picolibc was newlib-nano I had a conversation with Keith Packard about getting the ESP8266 newlib port (largely by Max Filippov based on the Tensilica work) included. Much time has passed since then, but I finally got time to port this over and test it this month. I’m hopeful the picolibc-xtensa-lx106-elf
package will appear in Debian at some point in the next few months.
Snort
As part of my work at Titan IC I did some work on Snort3, largely on improving its support for hardware offload accelerators (ignore the fact my listed commits were all last year, Cisco generally do a bunch of squashed updates to the tree so the original author doesn’t always show).
Software in the Public Interest
While I haven’t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 I’m still the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor). The main work carried out this year was fixing up some issues seen with the upgrade from Stretch to Buster.
Talks
I talked about my home automation, including my use of Home Assistant, at NIDC 2019, and again at DebConf with more emphasis on the various aspects of Debian that I’ve used throughout the process. I had a couple of other sessions at DebConf with the Data Protection and Keyring teams. I did a brief introduction to Reproducible Builds for BLUG in October.
Random
I had a one liner accepted to systemd to make my laptop keyboard work out of the box. I fixed up Xilinx XRT to be able to build .debs for Debian (rather than just Ubuntu), have C friendly header files and clean up some GCC 8.3 warnings. I submitted a fix to Home Assistant to accept 202 as a successful REST notification response. And I had a conversation on IRC which resulted in a tmux patch to force detach (literally I asked how do to this thing and I think Colin had whipped up a patch before the conversation was even over).