It’s all in a day’s work

Update: The maintainer of the wordpress package released “my” bugfix. It’s available now for those using unstable (sid). I guess it will be available in testing (lenny) soon, since the bug is listed in the release critical bugs list. To bad he credited me with the name Del Gurt, but well… The only thing I did was finding the missing methods in Wordpress 2.6. But it’s my first fix in Debian, yeh.

I just ran an apt-get update + apt-get upgrade and after that my Wordpress homepage was broken when I’m logged in, it gives a nice "Fatal error: Call to undefined function admin_url() in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/link-template.php on line 470". And so is it for all people using the debian unstable package for Wordpress, for example this guy.

I quickly searched what functions where missing and created a patch and submitted it to the related debian bug. I hope they will accept it soon, but well. My Wordpress works fine again now.

Creating a patch took me a while, since I never created a patch for a debian package before. Lucky me, there are tutorials on how to create patches for debian packages, so I just had to read up on that. I read about how to submit the patch in the tutorial on how to help squashing Release-Critial bugs.

And I had to read up on dpatch, because the other patches on Wordpress where created using that. Lucky me, someone has created a nice short tutorial on how to use dpatch already. Dpatch seems like a good way to keep your patches separated from the original code, so when the original code is updated, you can determine easily if that conflicts with your patches or not.

And then I had to create a GPG key to sign my patch. Since dpkg-buildpackage complains about it otherwise.

So in the end, what I had to do to patch my Wordpress and submit the patch (besides generating the GPG key):

Install the required tools

sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts lintian linda diff patch patchutils dpatch

Get the Wordpress package source

apt-get source wordpress

Enter the root directory of the extracted source

cd wordpress-2.5.1

Let the package know I’m making the changes

dch -i

Start the dpatch process

dpatch-edit-patch 009CVE2008-3747.addendum

Make the changes

Exit dpatch process

exit

The wordpress patches are all called .patch so rename it

mv debian/patches/009CVE2008-3747.addendum.dpatch debian/patches/009CVE2008-3747.addendum.patch

Change the e-mail address in the patch

EDIT debian/patches/009CVE2008-3747.addendum.patch

Add the patch to the list of patches

echo "009CVE2008-3747.addendum.patch" >> debian/patches/00list

Test the patch

fakeroot debian/rules binary && sudo dpkg -i ../wordpress_2.5.1-6.1_all.deb

Build the source package

dpkg-buildpackage -kMYKEY -rfakeroot

Create the patch

interdiff -z ../wordpress_2.5.1-6.diff.gz ../wordpress_2.5.1-6.1.diff.gz > ../bug_497524.patch

Email the bugs list with the patch

Email bug control to inform them that a patch has been made for the bug

That was it. Not that hard, if you know the commands + procedure. Now wait and see what the package maintainer is going to do with the patch I created.

Update: seems I forgot to check the edit link itself after the fatal error was gone… It didn’t work anymore. Fixed that as well now.

Update2: for those who find my post and do not want to wait on the maintainer to release the patch, I’ve “released” it. The MD5 of wordpress_2.5.1-6.1_all.deb is: dc46d35743122d933def7db431c8f49e.