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Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject.

In this issue:
+ anacron might be disabled if 2.3-33 was ever installed
+ riscv64 porterbox
+ porterbox DNS alias maintainers needed
+ debtags.d.o maintainers needed
+ lintian contributors needed
+ Experimental manual migration pseudo-excuses
+ CPU instruction selection documentation

anacron might be disabled if 2.3-33 was ever installed ------------------------------------------------------

If you run Debian testing/unstable and ever installed anacron 2.3-33 on
a systemd based system, then anacron will no longer be enabled and the
daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs will not be run until it is.

Since not all cron jobs have migrated to systemd timers, Debian
testing/unstable systems with systemd and anacron may be missing
some essential cron jobs, such as making backups of aptitude state.

To see if a system is affected you can use these commands:

zgrep -i anacron.*2.3-33 /var/log/apt/history.log*
systemctl status anacron.service anacron.timer

To re-enable anacron you can use these commands:

sudo systemctl enable anacron.service anacron.timer
sudo systemctl start anacron.service anacron.timer

More details of this problem are available in these bugs:

https://bugs.debian.org/1019554
https://bugs.debian.org/1020966
https://bugs.debian.org/1021496

-- Paul Wise

riscv64 porterbox
-----------------

There is now a porterbox for riscv64[1] available for Debian contributors
to use[2] for porting packages to RISC-V.

Thanks to SiFive for providing the HiFive Unmatched board, OSUOSL for
assembling and hosting the hardware and Aurélien Jarno and Manuel A.
Fernandez Montecelo for installing/setting up/admining the porterbox.

-- Paul Wise

[1] https://blog.aurel32.net/riscv64-porterbox.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/PorterBoxHowToUse

porterbox DNS alias maintainers needed
--------------------------------------

Jakub Wilk has mentioned[3] that the DNS aliases to Debian porterboxes are
now unmaintained and in need of new maintainers.

-- Paul Wise

[3] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20221107213046.atgukd2iogsaynxo@jwilk.net

debtags.d.o maintainers needed
------------------------------

Enrico Zini has announced debtags.d.o[4] is in need of new maintainers
and will be shut down if none are forthcoming.

-- Paul Wise

[4] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20221019132043.d4c4liyt6s6qewgy@enricozini.org

lintian contributors needed
---------------------------

The primary lintian contributors have stopped[5] working[6] on it. Axel
Beckert has stepped up[7] to provide maintenance work, but requests help
adding new tags, performance tuning and other important work.

If you are interested in working on it, please join the lintian group on
salsa[8] (DD will be accepted instantly, non-DD should show some
contributions first, e.g. via Merge Requests), add yourself to the
lintian team wiki page[9], join the debian-lint-maint[10] mailing list,
and review the bugs filed against lintian[11], issues on salsa[12] and
merge requests on salsa (1[13] 2[14]).

-- Paul Wise + Axel Beckert

[5] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/5e4d0e28-a3f4-4302-8364-5afd93d8ae17@www.fastmail.com
[6] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/CAFHYt550_6hc-2SRjqYv0z9kgpWuLpGnnxVOonPOHP3R+pAQZA@mail.gmail.com
[7] https://bugs.debian.org/1012289
[8] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian
[9] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Lintian
[10] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/
[11] https://bugs.debian.org/src:lintian
[12] https://salsa.debian.org/groups/lintian/-/issues
[13] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests
[14] https://salsa.debian.org/groups/lintian/-/merge_requests

Experimental manual migration pseudo-excuses --------------------------------------------

The experimental pseudo-excuses[15] (warning: large file) help
maintainers discover problems that will be introduced when they manually
migrate packages from experimental to unstable. These excuses are now
imported into the Debian QA excuses page[16], which allows checking
individual package excuses for testing migration and now also
pseudo-excuses for experimental manual migration. This is much more
convenient than loading the very large excuses and pseudo-excuses HTML
files. Help[17] is needed[18] from Python/Django developers to integrate
the pseudo-excuses into the Debian Package Tracker[19], see the guide to
contributing[20] if you would like to help.

[15] https://release.debian.org/britney/pseudo-excuses-experimental.html
[16] https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php
[17] https://bugs.debian.org/944737
[18] https://bugs.debian.org/991237
[19] https://tracker.debian.org
[20] https://qa.pages.debian.net/distro-tracker/contributing.html

CPU instruction selection documentation
---------------------------------------

New documentation has been written summarising all the options for
selection of CPU instructions[21], including porting between SIMD
instructions, emulating atomic instructions, manual runtime code path
selection, manual runtime function selection, compiler function
multi-versioning, glibc hwcaps library selection, runtime binary
selection, blocking installation and blocking running binaries. When you
discover a package has limited portability due to a higher baseline, use
of SIMD/atomic instructions, or other CPU instruction related problem,
please consider perusing the new documentation, improving the portability
using the documented techniques and contributing your changes upstream
where possible. If you see others discovering these issues, please
suggest they take a look at the documentation.

-- Paul Wise, Gioele Barabucci and Bastien Roucaries

[21] https://wiki.debian.org/InstructionSelection

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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