The Debian WordPress package was updated tonight to version 6.4.1. Version 6.4 got missed before they updated to a minor update.
The major change I can see is the introduction of a new theme called twentytwentyfour plus some easier, or more confusing, ways of writing posts. If you want more control on how they look, you’ll love it but if you just want to bang something out you won’t.
Previously I posted a short article about the WordPress package for Debian and how that SID was getting the updated WordPress 4.0.1 which had some security fixes.
The question a lot of people were asking was: What about stable (or Wheezy). After way too much time due to other pressing issues, I have just uploaded the patched WordPress debian package for stable. The fixed version has the catchy number of 3.6.1~deb7u5. This package has all of the relevant patches that went in from WordPress 3.7.4 to 3.7.5 and there are even CVE IDs for this package (and 4.0.1 which all this stems from).
The Debian package of WordPress version 3.9.1 was uploaded to the ftp master recently. While the update was pretty simple, the upload took a lot more doing. I’m not sure why the Debian ftp-master server didn’t like me, but it was so slow. Strangely, even dcut uploads were slow and they are only a few lines of text.
Apologies for the delay too, I’m not sure why I didn’t notice the update from 3.9 to 3.9.1 but there you go.
The other change is that the package uses the system CA certificates rather than the ones pre-shipped with wordpress. This is done so that if the administrator makes decisions on what certificates to trust, then the wordpress client http libraries will follow that decision.
Well if you can read this then you know it’s working. After way too many weeks, Debian will have WordPress version 3.8. Thanks to Raphaël for his kind assistance and answering my questions about how it was built. The upload is still gurgling along and will make it there in its own time. He said Handing over packages is hard, I’d agree but say taking over them is too.
So, what does WordPress 3.8 look like? From the “frontend” I didn’t really notice much. The big changes, at least cosmetically, seem to be for the admin backend. It just look slicker and cleaner.
Hopefully Debian users find the update useful and I’ve not broken anything. There’s always the BTS if there is. I’ve deliberately tried to minimise the changes for this version to limit the breakage.
While the upstream procps which was released last week has a new pidof, the Debian package will continue to not have that binary and the
Debian sysvint-utils package will continue to have that file. That stops any messy procps splits and putting one part into Essential etc.
This may mean that one distributions pidof doesn’t quite work like anothers, but that has been like that already; which is why when I discussed the change as upstream I wondered where they found some of those flags I don’t have.
pidof is a program that finds the PID of a named program. In some ways it is like a cut-down pgrep found in the procps package. pidof currently sits in sysvinit-tools.
There are plans to move all utilities that use the proc filesystem under one package which will make the maintenance of them simpler, which in effect means moving pidof from sysvinit-tools to procps. The short-term bump should make it better in the long term.
Now as I wear two hats (Debian maintainer and procps upstream) there are two very important things I/we need to know.
Debian developers can chime in on the debian-devel email list, or email myself. If its an upstream issue then either email me, or even better, the procps email list
psmisc version 22.16 was released today. It is a bugfix release that bascially fixes a problem around strings in C. Process name lengths are only supposed to be 16 characters long, so a 17 bye buffer is ok; until you have processes with brackets which means the string is 18 characters.
The next wrinkle is that at times the brackets are stripped out so matches fail because the lengths don’t quite line up. You’ll see this with the Debian 22.15-2 version of psmisc where killall won’t find long-named processes.
So, 22.16 fixes all that.
It really shows that psmisc needs a set of tests like procps has already. The difficulty with both is that its not simple in the DejaGNU framework to make test processes. These are not the programs within the package but other processes that the programs can work on. There really needs to be an equivalent to touch for processes just for this sort of thing. Creating processes is rather simple, but ensuring they go away is the tricky part, or they die with certain signals.
Following up from the upstream release of a new procps, the Debian packages have also been updated. This upload has a significant change in that, I hope, procps is now multi-arch compliant. To make this happen, the libprocps library is now in it’s own package, separate from the binaries. It also means that if you have programs not from procps that link to this library they are now broken. I put in a Breaks: line for the three I know about (xmem, guymager and open-vm-tools) which will need a recompile with a small tweak in the control file and linked statements.
As suggested in the multi arch implementation wiki page, I tested the libprocps0-dev package by compiling something against it, in this case another Debian package xmem. Doing this was very useful for teasing out some bugs on the dev package itself that did not appear while linking the library to the procps binaries.
In short, the new procps has a lot fewer patches than the old ones and the next version will have less as I have already included the current changes into the upstream git repository. The main differences are now
The three are really bugs, especially the last, which is why the patches will disappear next release.
Procps-ng, the Debian, Fedora and OpenSuSE fork of procps had another release today. This is a bugfix release that fixes some important bugs that have cropped up in 3.3.0
pgrep crashes, pgrep -u not finding processes and a problem with top forest view have all been fixed.
An important addition to this release is that test scripts have now been added using the Dejagnu framework. This framework tests most of the programs that ship with procps-ng. There is only 100 tests so far and they are only tested for Linux architecture, but we expect to increase this test count and sophistication with each release.
The test scripts even found long-present but unknown bugs in the package. For example, running ps with output flags around the signal masks work as expected in Linux, but fail on kFreeBSD. This is due to the unusual output of the relevant lines on that architecture. This is not a new bug, bug has been around for quite some time; noone ever noticed (or reported) it.
The Debian package has already been built and uploaded to the master FTP server.
Oh, and it is the first package with my new GPG key!
