Debian Activities of the last few months

I haven’t written about specific Debian activities in recent times, but I haven’t been lazy. In fact I have been very active with a lot of new packages I am contributing to.

TeX and Friends

Lots of updates since we first released TeX Live 2019 for Debian, too many to actually mention. We also have bumped the binary package with backports of fixes for dvipdfmx and other programs. Another item that is still pending is the separation of dvisvgm into a separate package (currently in the NEW queue). Biber has been updated to match the version of biblatex shipped in the TeX Live packages.

Calibre

Calibre development is continuing as usual, with lots of activity for getting Calibre ready for Python3. To prepare for this move, I have taken over the Python mechanize package which has been not updated for many years. At the moment it is already possible to build a Calibre package for Python3, but unfortunately by now practically all external plugins are still based on Python2 and thus fail with Python3. As a consequence I will keep Calibre at Python2 version for the time being, and hope that Calibre officially switches to Python3, which would trigger a conversion of the plugins, too, before Bulleye (the next Debian release) is released with the aim to get rid of Python2.

Cinnamon

The packages of Cinnamon 4.0 I have prepared together with the Cinnamon Team have been uploaded to sid, and I have uploaded packages of Cinnamon 4.2 to experimental. We plan to move the 4.2 packages to sid after the 4.0 packages have entered testing.

Onedrive

Onedrive didn’t cut it into the release of buster, in particular because the release masters weren’t happy with an upgrade request I made to get a new version (scheduled to enter testing 1 day after the freeze day!) with loads of fixes into buster. So I decided to remove onedrive altogether from Buster, better nothing than something broken. It is a bit a pain for me – but users are advised to get the source code from Github and install a self compiled version – this is definitely safer.

All in all quite a lot of work. Enjoy.