Comment 0 for bug 1644368

Revision history for this message
Joshua Powers (powersj) wrote :

[Availability]
The package is currently in universe with no deltas with Debian.

[Rationale]
iotop [1] is a Python program with a UI similar to the "top" utility. The program watches input-output (I/O) usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. It is used in debugging a system or understanding how a particular process is getting hung up in I/O related tasks versus CPU or memory bound issues.

[1] http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

[Security]
There are no previous or active CVEs against the package.

The program is required to be run as root due to CVE-2011-2494 [2] causing I/O statistics from the taskstats kernel subsystem to be accessible only to root users. The result is the primary binary lives in /usr/sbin

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/iotop/+bug/879767

[Quality assurance]
There is no configuration required and no debconf questions asked by the package. The package currently is built and ran across all release architectures.

The package does have a debian/watch file [3].

There are a 8 bugs in the Ubuntu bug tracker [4] and 3 in the Debian bug tacker [5]. None of which are related to data corruption, system crashing, or other catastrophic issues.

[3] https://sources.debian.net/src/iotop/0.6-2/debian/watch/
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/iotop
[5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?repeatmerged=no&src=iotop

[Dependencies]
Run time dependency python3 is satisfied in main.

Build dependencies debhelper, dh-python,and python3 are also in main.

[Standards compliance]
The package does not report any lintian issues.

[Maintenance]
We can continue to keep this package synced directly with Debian. It is not a volatile package with many changes coming.

[Background information]
The general purpose and context of the package is explained in the package's debian/control file. This package has not had a different name in the past.