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Contributing to Debian Long Term Support

The Debian LTS team is always looking for more volunteers to do a better job. With more resources, we could for example:

If you want to get involved in the LTS team and help keep Debian packages secure for 5 years, have a look at this page. We are assuming that you are familiar with the repository layout described in LTS/Using and that you are subscribed to the mailing list: http://lists.debian.org/debian-lts/

You can help in many ways:

Test updated packages and report regressions

As a simple user, you can test packages that have been updated (or that are in the process of being updated). If you find a regression (i.e. something that used to work and that no longer works), then please report it to debian-lts@lists.debian.org and put the person who prepared the update in copy (in case they are not subscribed to the list).

Many LTS contributors are looking for testers of their updated packages. They send call for tests on the mailing list, so please subscribe to it and test the packages they provide when you can, and report back whether they worked for you.

Debian Security Tracker

The Debian LTS team makes extensive use of the Debian Security Tracker. This is a database of all known security issues in Debian.

Developers check out the SVN source (see instructions), commit changes, and the website automatically updates to reflect the changes.

LTS Developers are strongly encouraged to keep the data in the security tracker up-to-date. This includes updating the following files:

Make sure to read its documentation on the Debian Security Team website.

Prepare security updates for Wheezy LTS

Claim the issue in the security tracker (in dla-needed.txt)

In order to prevent duplication of effort, make sure the issue is listed in the data/dla-needed.txt file from the security tracker and add your name to it. (As mentioned in the previous section, make sure to also review and update the relevant information in data/CVE/list when claiming a package for LTS work.)

Checkout the subversion repository of the security tracker:

$ svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/secure-testing
$ cd secure-testing

Then edit the data/dla-needed.txt file:

$ editor data/dla-needed.txt
$ svn commit -m "Claim foo in dla-needed.txt"

Write access to the secure-testing repository

Debian Developers automatically have commit access to the secure-testing repository. Otherwise you need to be a member of the secure-testing alioth project, please request membership through the Alioth project page or through the debian-lts mailinglist.

Build the update

Backport the fix to the version in wheezy (in case there's already been an earlier update). You need to set the target distribution in debian/changelog to "wheezy-security". The versioning follows the conventions already used in security.debian.org. Historically codenames have been used as version numbers, but this was changed some time ago as version numbers are more deterministic.

Test the update

Now build the package and run your tests.

Depending on the urgency of the security fix, and your confidence on your own work, you might want to seek reviews from interested parties (such as upstream authors, Debian maintainers, security team, LTS team, etc.). If you ask reviews, you should indicate when you plan to upload the updated package and you should supply the following information:

  1. A generated debdiff against the previous version in wheezy.
  2. A link to a test package that can be downloaded and tested.

It is common for LTS workers to upload their packages to a personal repository in people.debian.org, but any public repository or even simple webserver will do. If you sign your packages (which is nice for users who want to verify the origin of the update), make sure to have the target distribution set to UNRELEASED so that nobody else can upload them before they are ready.

Upload the update

Make sure you used a clean chroot for building the binary packages because the binary packages that you upload end up in the repository (they are not discarded and rebuilt). Using sbuild/pbuilder is recommended.

If you're satisfied, upload to security-master, using dput or dput-ng:

dput security-master hello_1.0_amd64.changes

Once uploaded the package will be auto-built for the architectures not covered by your upload (if it's an arch:any package). The architectures currently supported are amd64, i386, armel and armhf.

If you use dput-ng, you need to apply the patch from 745806. After that "dput CHANGES file" is sufficient.

Claim an DLA ID in DLA/list

Run bin/gen-DLA in the top directory of the SVN repository. It automatically generates an entry in data/DLA/list and asks you to commit the changes to ensure that no IDs are used twice. The following command would add an entry for src:hello fixing CVE-2014-0666 and creates an advisory template in the top directory of secure-testing for you.

$ bin/gen-DLA --save hello CVE-2014-0666

That list of CVE will make sure that the security tracker is aware of the fix and mark the issues as resolved for that specific package.

Announce the update

Once the upload is completed, an email will be sent to you and to the debian-lts-changes mailing list. confirming the update has been released into the Debian archive.

Send mail to the debian-lts-announce mailing list. The mail needs to be signed by a GPG key in the debian or debian-maintainers keyring. Inline signatures always work (PGP/MIME works with mutt but fails with Enigmail).

The advisory template has been created by bin/gen-DLA (see before) and generally looks like this:

Subject: [SECURITY] [DLA $DLA-1] $SOURCEPACKAGENAME security update

Package        : $SOURCEPACKAGENAME
Version        : $wheezy_VERSION
CVE ID         : CVE-2014-0001 CVE-2014-0002
Debian Bug     : 12345

DLA text goes here
[...]

If you use mutt, a simple way to send it is to use mutt -H DLA-123.

Only when you have confirmed that the package was processed after upload (once you get the accept email) should you send the DLA to the mailing list.

When all this is done, you should remove the package from other locations it was uploaded to in the test section, if any.

Prepare regression updates for Wheezy LTS

If an upload introduces a regression, it needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

Steps for a regression update

  1. Fix the package.
  2. Do a test build and test installation. Verify the regression issue and also the original issue are really resolved now.
  3. Make sure you used a clean chroot for building the binary packages because the binary packages you upload end up in the repository (they are not discarded and rebuilt). Using sbuild/pbuilder is recommended.
  4. Upload the fixed package to wheezy-security.
  5. Use gen-DLA script to add a DLA entry to data/DLA/list and to provide you with an announcement email template. Two possible options:
    1. The regression fixes the previous upload of the package:

      $ bin/gen-DLA  --save $SOURCEPACKAGENAME regression
    2. The regression fixes an earlier than the previous upload of the package:

      $ bin/gen-DLA  --save $PREVIOUS_DLA_ID $SOURCEPACKAGENAME regression
  6. Commit the updated data/DLA/list to the secure-testing SVN repository.

  7. Wait for the uploaded package to arrive in the wheezy-security repository.
  8. In the base folder of the secure-testing SVN repository, you can find an auto-generated LTS announcement template file with name DLA-$DLA-{2,3,4...}. Use this file as the template for your regression fix announcement. Don't commit this file to SVN(!). Copy+paste the announcement template to your email application, complete/edit it manually and finally send the regression fix DLA email to debian-lts-announce@lists.debian.org.

Triage new security issues

The security team and the LTS team cooperate to process the flow of new security issues that are reported. Since each security issue is assigned a CVE number, we often call this "CVE triage".

If you want to help with this, you must first get familiar with the security tracker. It's the infrastructure we use to track how security issues are affecting Debian packages. Please read carefully this page: http://security-team.debian.org/security_tracker.html

You will need write access to the secure-testing repository.

CVE triaging in the LTS release

Now let's go into detail for the work concerning LTS in particular. We start from the list of open issues in the LTS release.

You can start with the list on the web at this url: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/oldstable Or you can run bin/lts-cve-triage.py (script in the secure-testing repo) to get a pre-filtered list (packages in dla-needed.txt are excluded, and the issues are grouped by "status").

For each CVE/package listed on this page, there are only 2 desirable outcomes:

Guidelines for CVE triaging

Now the tricky part. How do you decide whether an issue should be added to dla-needed.txt or if it should be tagged in some other way? There's no perfect answer, you should use your best judgment after having carefully analyzed the issue, the risks involved, etc.

That said the security team is taking similar decisions all the time and we usually follow their decisions. If the security team has added a vulnerable package to "data/dsa-needed.txt", you can usually safely add it to "data/dla-needed.txt". If the security team has tagged the issue "no-dsa" with "Minor issue" description, you can safely do the same. Note that when the reason is "Maintainer will update via stable-proposed-updates" blindly following is not always the best idea...

Note that some packages have special instructions. Checkout packages/*.txt in the secure-testing repository. This might influence your decision and possibly prompt you to behave differently (for example by not contacting the maintainer since some pre-determined agreement is already in place).

Contact the maintainer

Whenever you take a decision for a new issue (that is real and affecting the LTS release), you should inform the corresponding package maintainers to offer them a chance to help us. We use the bin/contact-maintainers script in the secure-testing repo to this end.

When we add a package to dla-needed.txt, you can use it this way for example:

$ bin/contact-maintainers --lts sudo CVE-2014-9680 CVE-2014-0106

When we tag issues as "no-dsa", and don't plan to take care of the updates by ourselves, then we use it in this way:

$ bin/contact-maintainers --lts --no-dsa sudo CVE-2014-9680 CVE-2014-0106

Note that the list of CVE is optional and that this script assumes that you use mutt to send mails. If not, you should consider using the --mailer option to use something else (see bin/contact-maintainer --help for details). You must customize the mail sent (at least to drop the list of uploaders and possibly to adjust the recipients list).

Frontdesk duties

As described in this email, there is an assigned person for the "LTS frontdesk". The allocations are managed in the lts-frontdesk.2016.txt page.

Frontdesk work currently involves CVE triage and making sure queries on the mailing list get an answer. In particular, make sure to followup on package upload sponsorship requests and questions from new contributors to make sure things flow smoothly. Following up on stale and stalled issues is also a good idea. Contributors should feel free to contact frontdesk for any questions regarding LTS.

We're tracking LTS related bugs in the Debian bug tracker using two usertags:

To add a certain usertag to a bug you can use the bts command:

bts user debian-lts@lists.debian.org , usertags <bugnumber> ease-lts

Switching to the next LTS release


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