Free Software Activities for 2020
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, but I did a report of my Free Software Activities for 2019 and thought I’d do another for 2020. I ended up not doing as much as last year; I put a lot of that down to fatigue about the state of the world and generally not wanting to spend time on the computer at the end of the working day.
Conferences
2020 was unsurprisingly not a great year for conference attendance. I was fortunate enough to make it to FOSDEM and CopyleftConf 2020 - I didn’t speak at either, but had plenty of interesting hallway track conversations as well as seeing some good talks. I hadn’t been planning to attend DebConf20 due to time constraints, but its move to an entirely online conference meant I was able to attend a few talks at least. I have to say I don’t like virtual conferences as much as the real thing; it’s not as easy to have the casual chats at them, and it’s also harder to carve out the exclusive time when you’re at home. That said I spoke at NIDevConf this year, which was also fully virtual. It’s not a Free Software focussed conference, but there’s a lot of crossover in terms of technologies and I spoke on my experiences with Go, some of which are influenced by my packaging experiences within Debian.
Debian
Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian.
As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you’re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it.
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 2020.02.02, 2020.03.24, 2020.06.24, 2020.09.24 + 2020.12.24
For Debian New Members I’m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I’ll look at stepping in to help, but I don’t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there’s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present.
In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (5, 6 + 7). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-2, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-2 as well as a new upstream release of Pulseview 0.4.2-1 and a fix to cope with change to QT 0.4.2-2. Due to the sigrok-firmware requirement on sdcc I also continued to help out there, updating to 4.0.0+dfsg-1 and doing some fixups in 4.0.0+dfsg-2.
Despite still not writing an VHDL these days I continue to try and make sure ghdl is ok, because I found it a useful tool in the past. In 2020 that meant a new upstream release, 0.37+dfsg-1 along with a couple of more minor updates (0.37+dfsg-2 + 0.37+dfsg-3.
libcli had a new upstream release, 1.10.4-1, and I did a long overdue update to sendip to the latest upstream release, 2.6-1 having been poked about an outstanding bug by the Reproducible Builds folk.
OpenOCD is coming up to 4 years since its last stable release, but I did a snapshot upload to Debian experimental (0.10.0+g20200530-1) and a subsequent one to unstable (0.10.0+g20200819-1). There are also moves to produce a 0.11.0 release and I uploaded 0.11.0~rc1-1 as a result. libjaylink got a bump as a result (0.2.0-1) after some discussion with upstream.
OpenOCD
On the subject of OpenOCD I’ve tried to be a bit more involved upstream. I’m not familiar enough with the intricacies of JTAG/SWD/the various architectures supported to contribute to the core, but I pushed the config for my HIE JTAG adapter upstream and try and review patches that don’t require in depth hardware knowledge.
Linux
I’ve been contributing to the Linux kernel for a number of years now, mostly just minor bits here and there for issues I hit. This year I spent a lot of time getting support for the MikoTik RB3011 router upstreamed. That included the basic DTS addition, fixing up QCA8K to support SGMII CPU connections, adding proper 802.1q VLAN support to QCA8K and cleaning up an existing QCOM ADM driver that’s required for the NAND. There were a number of associated bugfixes/minor changes found along the way too. It can be a little frustrating at times going round the review loop with submitting things upstream, but I do find it quite satisfying when it all comes together and I have no interest in weird vendor trees that just bitrot over time.
Software in the Public Interest
I haven’t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 but I was still acting as the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor) and hosting it on my own machine. I managed to finally extricate myself from this role in August. I remain a contributing member.
Personal projects
2020 finally saw another release (0.6.0, followed swiftly by 0.6.1 to allow the upload of 0.6.1-1 to Debian) of onak. This release finally adds various improvements to deal with the hostility shown to the OpenPGP keyserver network in recent years, including full signature verification as an option.
I fixed an oversight in my Digoo/1-wire temperature decoder and a bug that turned up on ARM but not MIPS in my mqtt-arp code. I should probably package it for Debian (even if I don’t upload it), as I’m running it on my RB3011 now.