News for Debian developers

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-- Your Name

Conversion of source packages to 3.0 (quilt/native)

-- Raphaël Hertzog

DEHS now supports format 3.0 source packages

Although support for format 3.0 source packages on DEHS was expected to be added until DEHS2 was released, thanks to a contributed patch they are now supported.

Kudos to Didier Raboud for the patch!

-- Raphael Geissert

userdir-ldap mail gateway updated

db.debian.org's mail gateway has been updated to support the export of ssh keys to only a subset of debian.org machines. This can be done by prepending "allowed_hosts=fqdn1,fqdn2 " to the ssh public key. For more information read the mail gateway instructions.

-- Martin Zobel-Helas

piuparts.d.o

RFH: Help is needed for filing bugs based on the available piuparts logfiles, as well as for fixing them! Currently piuparts has found more then 500 policy violating packages (in more then 19000 binary packages) but only about 60 have been submitted as open bugs, though at the time of writing 28 are serious (usually easy ones, I believe). The bug filing efforts have concentrated on the important policy violations so far.

Patches for the existing bugs filed against piuparts would also be very much appreciated! The BTS has some very nice ideas how to improve piuparts usefulness (and usability) even more!

It is planned to reorganize the piuparts tests being done: at the moment there is a sid test (for installation, removal and purge in sid) and one (called squeeze) that installs the lenny version of the package in lenny, then upgrades to squeeze, removes and purges and then does those tests in squeeze alone. The plan is to switch this to do sid, squeeze and lenny2squeeze, so the same tests but in three (instead of two different) setups. Then the test failure for not so serious policy violations, like files existing after purge, can be disabled for lenny2squeeze and squeeze, and enabled for sid. In the general the tests in sid should be the most pedantic, less pedantic in squeeze and quite relaxed for lenny2squeeze tests. I hope to have this setup ready for when the squeeze freeze begins, ideally earlier.

Until this has happened, if you want to see more packages tested with the current setup, fix "527063 ([shared-mime-info] owned and unowned files after purge)".

As final words, I like to emphasize that this is not about making piuparts happy, but about complying to policy, which will make users happy, as there are real world benefits. Fails to install is an obvious one, but think DEBCONF_FRONTEND=non-interactive also, which is used in millions of automated installs.

-- Holger Levsen

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