13 Nov 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2026)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Congratulations!

13 Nov 2026 10:00am GMT

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 339 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 339. This version includes the following changes:

[ Jay Burstin ]
* Rework including .zip-related differences for .odt files.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add some comments to recent OdtFile changes.
* Update copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

13 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.15 transition, OpenSSH GSS-API package split improvements and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-10

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian's mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Python 3.15 transition, by Stefano Rivera with a little help from Colin Watson

Debian has started the transition to add Python 3.15 as a supported version alongside 3.14, which is still the default version. Stefano uploaded Python 3.15.0 final to unstable.

Maximiliano Curia has been test-rebuilding the archive in Debusine with Python 3.15 as a supported version and prepared some patches to dh-python to smooth over some common failure points. Stefano reviewed these MRs, applying some and implementing alternative approaches for some of the issues.

Debian only has multiple supported Python versions during the transition to a new version, and typically this shows up some bugs in packages. This time was no different, the common failure was many packages that installed intermediate build artifacts into the Python module tree. Some of these artifacts would differ between Python versions. We decided to detect both of these and fail the package build, rather than silently ship garbage in the binary packages. Colin helped to fix quite a bit of the build fallout from this.

OpenSSH GSS-API package split improvements, by Colin Watson

The recent GSS-API package split has largely gone relatively smoothly, but there was a subtle problem for people switching from one variant to the other: installing the replacement packages followed by purging the old one would cause some configuration files to disappear. Colin fixed this, and also reviewed and merged some autopkgtest contributions from Andreas Hasenack to make sure that this doesn't regress in future.

Miscellaneous contributions

13 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT