Morten Linderud

F/OSS Developer, Arch Linux Developer and security team.

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FOSS Activities in October 2020
Nov 1, 2020
7 minutes read
Tags: Foss Monthly Archlinux English

I wanted to start writing these for myself as I have been reading quite a few monthly resports from Chris Lamb and other Debian contributors. They make for interesting content for readers curious about what distribution maintainers do during a month, and motivation for myself as not everything one does is visible work.

I’ll try have some sort of structure with them, by starting off with the menial tasks, and add the meeting notes and misc contributions at the bottom.

If you have any feedback feel free to email me on morten@linderud.pw!

Package Updates to [community]

  • toolbox update to 0.0.95-1
  • influxdb update to 1.8.3-1
  • buildah update to 1.16.4-1, 1.16.5-1
  • python-reportlab update to 3.5.52-1, 3.5.53-1, 3.5.54-1
    • 3.5.52-1: Removed the ChangeLog which has been there for close to a decade with 0 modifications 😱
  • gopls update to 0.5.1-1, 0.5.2-1
  • font-awesome update to 5.15.1-1
  • github-cli update to 1.1.0-1, 1.2.0-1
  • jp2a update to 1.1.0-1
  • fzf update to 0.23.0-1, 0.23.1-1, 0.24.0-1, 0.24.0.1-1, 0.24.1-1
  • qmk update to 0.0.36-1
  • python-rope update to 0.18.0-1
  • python-sqlparse update to 0.4.0-1, 0.4.1-1
  • fuse-overlay update to 1.2.0-1
  • mypy update to 0.790-1
  • nano-syntax-highlighting update to 2020.10.10-1
  • staticcheck update to 2020.1.6-1
  • python-xlib update to 0.28-1
  • python-sqlobject update to 3.8.1-1
  • qutebrowser update to 1.14.0-1
  • python-language-server update to 0.35.1-1
  • go update to 2:1.15.3-1
  • perl-moox-handlesvia update to 0.001009-1
  • v2ray update to 4.31.1-1
  • nvme-cli update to 1.13-1
  • i3-gaps update to 4.18.3-1
  • python-milc updated to 1.0.9-1, 1.0.10-1
  • lostfiles update to 4.02-2
  • rclone update to 1.53.2-1
  • helm update to 3.4.0-1
  • plocate update to 1.0.5-2, 1.0.6-1, 1.0.7-1

Package additions to [community]

Potential new packages for [community]

  • vgrep
  • git-publish
  • oomd
  • psi-notify
  • adblock stuff for qutebrowser
  • b4
  • kubernetes

Bugfixes

  • neofetch: merged a PR from Max
    • It doesn’t need pacman-contrib to detect package count.
  • toolbox: FS#68066 fixed missing flatpak dependency
  • qmk: FS#68212 Fixed missing runtime dependencies in qmk.
  • go: fix colors in error
  • python-milc: FS#68380 conflicting test files.
    • Also created a todo with packages that also contains the test directory.
  • fzf
  • plocate
    • 1.0.5-2: Forgot tmpfiles.d when adding the package. So the database was never initialized properly.

Security Team

The security team released 11 advisories this month.

Other things….

Arch Linux Conf 2020

Participating pulling of Arch Conf 2020, which was a community focused conference. The last time we had something similar was back in 2010, last years conference was mostly an internal workshop with Arch contributor, thus it was quite exciting to organize something for the larger community.

I’ll be writing a bit more about how this all went down on the production and streaming site. Currently we are expecting the videoes to be up through the first week in November.

Reproducible Builds

The reproducible builds has started their IRC meetings again. It was briefly just a discussion how we should proceed with the meeting and what we should focus on going forward. The start of these meetings where largely prompted by COVID as we can’t have a yearly summit like previous years.

Some form of meeting cadence is a good way to hash out details and draw new contributors curious about the project. The quick recap of this meeting was to establish some cadence of the meeting, how we should decide on meeting times and potential topics for future meetings. We also had a quick status update by the different projects.

Summary of the meeting.

Bergen Linux User Group Presentation

After my ArchConf talk Solskogen from the local LUG emailed me and asked if I could hold a talk. BLUG usually have a talk the last thursday each month, but because of COVID this has been hard to pull off.

The presentation was held in Norwegian and is more a general overview of the reproducible builds project and the current progress. It was the first online talk held by the local BLUG and I think it went quite well!

https://youtu.be/Tzc8arUBiRM?t=765

Open-Source Security Foundation

Third Meeting

Attended the third meeting at the OpenSSF Vulnerability Disclosure Working Group where we discussed mainly 3 topics.

The first was the current standards in the space. This being the OASIS CSAF 2.0 standard, which is a JSON schema for declaring vulnerability management, along with current automation work going on over at MITRE. This was presented by Martin Prpic from Red Hat Product Security.

The second topic was whether or not it would be interesting to have a presentation about the VINCE platform would be interesting for us. The platform is suppose to be open-sourced soon and it might be interesting to the goals of our working group. It was quickly declared interesting and hopefully there is a presentation on a future meeting.

The third topic of the meeting was the goals of the working group as a whole. So far we have had presentation of the workflows of different vulnerability disclosure groups; Ruby, Arch and RedHat. But it’s however important to understand the direction of the group.

After some discussion it was declared the goals are:

  1. Identifying vulnerability disclosure pain points for OSS maintainers, consumers, and reporter/finders and take steps to address them through techniques like automation and standardized data formats.

  2. Documenting and promoting reasonable vulnerability disclosure and coordination practices within the OSS ecosystem for component maintainers and community members by providing documented standards and educational materials.

  3. Facilitate the development and adoption of standards-based OSS Vulnerability information that uses existing industry formats. and allows OSS projects of all sizes to be able to report, share, and learn about vulnerabilities within OSS components.

Which I think are great goals of the working-group and hopefully not too broad for it to be achievable. The details can be found in PR#52.

Meeting notes.

Fourth Meeting

This meeting was recorded.

The fourth meeting about some agreement how to proceed with meeting times and if we should consider changing the meeting cadence. However nothing has been explicitly decided at this moment.

Next topic was who are we really trying to solve pain-points for. The main stakeholders defined so far has been “Maintainers”, “Consumers” and “Security Researchers”.

Maintainers are the upstream project maintainers that might receive security reports about their software. The main issue is “what do you do now”. Some might be interested handling this properly, but the current documentation is spread across several resources and confusing at best. How do you handle an embargo, who do you contact? How does downstream distribution handle security issues?

Security Researchers is in this case anyone looking and finding security issues. They should, in many cases, be interested handling the disclosure of this vulnerability properly. But again, how to contact the upstream, distributions and how to relay information is spread and usually not an easy thing.

Consumers on the other hand is downstream distributions, or companies, that consume information about security vulnerabilities. How to consume the information, how to correlate the different product IDs to their provided software isn’t necessarily easy.

So how do we improve all of these things? The main thought so far is to try our best gather the spread documentation and ensure there is a place to find it. Giving some form of recommendation along with it. This can help people that are interested in learning more get the relevant information instead of having to rediscover everything.

Meeting notes.

The vuln-disclosure group also has a mailing list for us to use. I encourage anyone reading this and are interested in this Working Group to subscribe.

https://lists.openssf.org/g/openssf-wg-vul-disclosures

Cheers!


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