Free software log (July and August 2017)

I've wanted to start making one of these posts for a few months but have struggled to find the time. But it seems like a good idea, particularly since I get more done when I write down what I do, so you all get a rather belated one. This covers July and August; hopefully the September one will come closer to the end of September.

Debian

August was DebConf, which included a ton of Policy work thanks to Sean Whitton's energy and encouragement. During DebConf, we incorporated work from Hideki Yamane to convert Policy to reStructuredText, which has already made it far easier to maintain. (Thanks also to David Bremner for a lot of proofreading of the result.) We also did a massive bug triage and closed a ton of older bugs on which there had been no forward progress for many years.

After DebConf, as expected, we flushed out various bugs in the reStructuredText conversion and build infrastructure. I fixed a variety of build and packaging issues and started doing some more formatting cleanup, including moving some footnotes to make the resulting document more readable.

During July and August, partly at DebConf and partly not, I also merged wording fixes for seven bugs and proposed wording (not yet finished) for three more, as well as participated in various Policy discussions.

Policy was nearly all of my Debian work over these two months, but I did upload a new version of the webauth package to build with OpenSSL 1.1 and drop transitional packages.

Kerberos

I still haven't decided my long-term strategy with the Kerberos packages I maintain. My personal use of Kerberos is now fairly marginal, but I still care a lot about the software and can't convince myself to give it up.

This month, I started dusting off pam-krb5 in preparation for a new release. There's been an open issue for a while around defer_pwchange support in Heimdal, and I spent some time on that and tracked it down to an upstream bug in Heimdal as well as a few issues in pam-krb5. The pam-krb5 issues are now fixed in Git, but I haven't gotten any response upstream from the Heimdal bug report. I also dusted off three old Heimdal patches and submitted them as upstream merge requests and reported some more deficiencies I found in FAST support. On the pam-krb5 front, I updated the test suite for the current version of Heimdal (which changed some of the prompting) and updated the portability support code, but haven't yet pulled the trigger on a new release.

Other Software

I merged a couple of pull requests in podlators, one to fix various typos (thanks, Jakub Wilk) and one to change the formatting of man page references and function names to match the current Linux manual page standard (thanks, Guillem Jover). I also documented a bad interaction with line-buffered output in the Term::ANSIColor man page. Neither of these have seen a new release yet.