This was my third month working on Debian LTS, and the first where I actually uploaded packages. I also worked on userland packages for the first time.

In the middle of February I finished and uploaded a security update for the kernel package (linux-2.6 version 2.6.32-48squeeze11, DLA 155-1). I decided not to include the fix for CVE-2014-9419 and the large FPU/MMX/SSE/AVX state management changes it depends on, as they don't seem to be worth the risk.

The old patch system used in linux-2.6 in squeeze still frustrates me, but I committed a script in the kernel subversion repository to simplify adding patches to it. This might be useful to any other LTS team members working on it.

In the past week I uploaded security updates for cups (version 1.4.4-7+squeeze7, DLA 159-1) and sudo (1.7.4p4-2.squeeze.5, DLA 160-1). My work on the cups package was slowed down by its reliance on dpatch, which thankfully has been replaced in later versions. sudo is a more modern quilt/debhelper package, but upstream has an odd way of building manual pages. In the version used in squeeze the master format is Perl POD, while in wheezy it's mandoc, but in both cases the upstream source includes pre-generated manual pages and doesn't rebuild them by default. debian/rules is supposed to fix this but doesn't (#779363), so I had to regenerate 'by hand' and fold the changes into the respective patches.

Finally, I started work on addressing the many remaining security issues in eglibc. Most of the patches applied to wheezy were usable with minimal adjustment, but I didn't have time left to perform any meaningful testing. I intend to upload what I've done to people.debian.org for testing by interested parties and then make an upload early in March (or let someone else on the LTS or glibc team do so).

Update: I sent mail about the incomplete eglibc update to the debian-lts list.