Free Software Efforts (2017W38)
Published:
Here’s my weekly report for week 38 of 2017. This week has not been a great week as I saw my primary development machine die in a spectacular reboot loop. Thanks to the wonderful community around Debian and free software (that if you’re reading this, you’re probably part of), I should be back up to speed soon. A replacement workstation is currently moving towards me and I’ve received a number of smaller donations that will go towards video converters and upgrades to get me back to full productivity.
Debian
I’ve prepared and tested backports for 3 packages in the tasktools packaging team: tasksh, bugwarrior and powerline-taskwarrior. Unfortunately I am not currently in the backports ACLs and so I can’t upload these but I’m hoping this to be resolved soon. Once these are uploaded, the latest upstream release for all packages in the tasktools team will be available either in the stable suite or in the stable backports suite.
In preparation for the shutdown of Alioth mailing lists, I’ve set up a new mailing list for the tasktools team and have already updated the maintainer fields for all the team’s packages in git. I’ve subscribed the old mailing list’s user to the new mailing list in DDPO so there will still be a comprehensive view there during the migration. I am currently in the process of reaching out to the admins of git.tasktools.org with a view to moving our git repositories there.
I’ve also continued to review the scapy package and have closed a couple more bugs that were already fixed in the latest upstream release but had been missed in the changelog.
Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #774962, #850570
Tor Project
I’ve deployed a small fix to an update from last week where the platform field on Atlas had been pulled across to the left column. It has now been returned to the right hand column and is not pushed down the page by long family lists.
I’ve been thinking about the merge of Compass functionality into a future Atlas and this is being tracked in #23517.
Tor Project has approved expenses (flights and hotel) for me to attend an in-person meeting of the Metrics Team. This meeting will occur in Berlin on the 28th September and I will write up a report detailing outcomes relevant to my work after the meeting. I have spent some time this week preparing for this meeting.
Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #22146, #22297, #23511
Sustainability
I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report.
The loss of my primary development machine was a setback, however, I have been donated a new workstation which should hopefully arrive soon. The hard drives in my NAS can now also be replaced as I have budget available for this now. I do not see any hardware failures being imminent at this time, however should they occur I would not have budget to replace hardware, I only have funds to replace the hardware that has already failed.