Upgrades to Jessie, Ruby 2.2 transition, and chef update

Last month I started to track all the small Debian-related things that I do. My initial motivation was to be concious about how often I spend short periods of time working on Debian. Sometimes it’s during lunch breaks, weekends, first thing in the morning before regular work, after I am done for the day with regular work, or even during regular work, since I do have the chance of doing Debian work as part of my regular work occasionally.

Now that I have this information, I need to do something with it. So this is probably the first of monthly updates I will post about my Debian work. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

Upgrades to Jessie

I (finally) upgraded my two servers to Jessie. The first one, my home server, is a Utilite which is a quite nice ARM box. It is silent and consumes very little power. The only problem I had with it is that the vendor-provided kernel is too old, so I couldn’t upgrade udev, and therefore couldn’t switch to systemd. I had to force systemv for now, until I can manage to upgrade the kernel and configure uboot to properly boot the official Debian kernel.

On my VPS things are way better. I was able to upgrade nicely, and it is now running a stock Jessie system.

fixed https on ci.debian.net

pabs had let me know on IRC of an issue with the TLS certificate for ci.debian.net, which took me a few iterations to get right. It was missing the intermediate certificates, and is now fixed. You can now enjoy Debian CI under https .

Ruby 2.2 transition

I was able to start the Ruby 2.2 transition, which has the goal of switch to Ruby 2.2 on unstable. The first step was updating ruby-defaults adding support to build Ruby packgaes for both Ruby 2.1 and Ruby 2.2. This was followed by updates to gem2deb (0.18, 0.18.1, 0.18.2, and 0.18.3) and rubygems-integration . At this point, after a few rebuild requests only 50 out of 137 packages need to be looked at; some of them just use the default Ruby, so a rebuild once we switch the default will be enough to make it use Ruby 2.2, while others, specially Ruby libraries, will still need porting work or other fixes.

Updated the Chef stack

Bringing chef to the very latest upstream release into unstable was quite some work.

I had to update:

  • ruby-columnize (0.9.0-1)
  • ruby-mime-types (2.6.1-1)
  • ruby-mixlib-log 1.6.0-1
  • ruby-mixlib-shellout (2.1.0-1)
  • ruby-mixlib-cli (1.5.0-1)
  • ruby-mixlib-config (2.2.1-1)
  • ruby-mixlib-authentication (1.3.0-2)
  • ohai (8.4.0-1)
  • chef-zero (4.2.2-1)
  • ruby-specinfra (2.35.1-1)
  • ruby-serverspec (2.18.0-1)
  • chef (12.3.0-1)
  • ruby-highline (1.7.2-1)
  • ruby-safe-yaml (1.0.4-1)

In the middle I also had to package a new dependency, ruby-ffi-yajl, which was very quickly ACCEPTED thanks to the awesome work of the ftp-master team.

Random bits

  • Sponsored a upload of redir by Lucas Kanashiro
  • chake, a tool that I wrote for managing servers with chef but without a central chef server, got ACCEPTED into the official Debian archive.
  • vagrant-lxc , a vagrant plugin for using lxc as backend and lxc containters as development environments, was also ACCEPTED into unstable.
  • I got the deprecated ruby-rack1.4 package removed from Debian