LTS & ELTS Report for October 2024

In October I spent 1 hours on Debian LTS, and 2.5 on ELTS.

Updating the distro-info-data database. A straightforward data update, but I ran into a bug in sbuild+autopkgtest that made my sbuild unable to build on old ELTS releases. Once understood, it was trivial to fix.

I also re-investigated the current state of the PEP-440 issue that affects Python virtulenvs on older releases, that have system site package exposed to the virtualenv. Newer Python tooling (likely to be installed in a virtualenv) does not accept that Python packages can have versions that don't parse under PEP-440's rules. Some Debian packages include nonsense Python package versions, because it didn't matter at the time. For supported packages, we have corrected this.