Debian Project News - June 9th, 2008

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

Release Update

Marc Brockschmidt reported about the status of the upcoming stable release. After some major transitions, like the ocaml transition Lenny is in good shape, but still a lot of work needs to be done. Since the armel architecture made great improvements the release team decided to upgrade it to a proper release architecture.

Regarding Lenny the Qt/KDE Packaging Team decided that the upcoming release will be shipped with KDE 3.5.9 (and with the KDE 4.1 development platform: kde4libs, kdepimlibs and kdebase-runtime).

Debian Installer for Lenny Beta-2 ready for testing

The second beta version of the Debian Installer for the upcoming release Lenny has been released. Some new or improved features are:

Images for different installation media and architectures are available for testing. After using the Debian-Installer, please send an installation report, even if there weren't any problems.

Bits from the ftp-masters

Joerg Jaspert sent out bits from the ftp-masters containing recent activities of that team, including some personnel changes as well as a lot of code changes regarding Debian's infrastructure improving the overall teamwork, for example by making it easier for the release team to handle transitions. He also asked for volunteers for new ftp assistants. Later he reported that he already got four volunteers as well as several other suggestions for improvements.

Report from LinuxTag 2008

Bastian Venthur and Noel Koethe reported about this year's Debian booth at the LinuxTag 2008, a major conference about free software in Europe. Marko Jung, one of the organisers, added thanks for the good job the booth staff did. He also notes, that there was a high demand from the visitors' side for a Debian sub-conference at next year's LinuxTag.

Handling of removed packages

Marc Brockschmidt wondered about the proper way to handle packages removed between two releases. One of his major concerns are packages becoming unsupported without users noticing it. Several people replied, that package management tools are already trying to notify users, while Frans Pop pointed out, that the release notes have a chapter handling this issue.

French debconf translations completed

Christian Perrier reported that the french translation team finished translating all templates for the debconf system, helping users to configure packages on installation time. He notes, that some of these packages still need to add the translated templates. German, Czech and Portuguese are also quite close to the 100% mark.

Call for help by the German translation team

The German translation team sent a call for help for the translation of package descriptions. The upcoming stable release will support showing users translated descriptions of available packages, but currently only 2100 of the more than 18000 package descriptions are translated to German. The statistics for other languages are similar. Information on how to help the ongoing translation effort is available at our website.

Other News

The 8th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: Minor update to the mailing list code of conduct, Document aimed at upstreams in preparation, d-i beta2 in preparation (breaks beta 1), New transition check tool.

Christian Perrier reported some news from samba packages development team. He later asked for tests of his Samba 3.2.0-rc1 packages.

Petter Reinholdtsen found some ways to reduce the boot time of his Debian system by 37,5% and asked for further ideas.

Norbert Tretkowski reported, that backports.org, a service providing unofficial updated packages for the current stable release, turned 5 years old on May 27th. Congratulations!

Sandro Tosi uploaded a new version of reportbug, which is now maintained in a team.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages Samba, Linux 2.6.18 and tomcat 5.5. Please look at them and take the proper measures.

Please note, that those are only the most important security advisories of the last two weeks. If you would like to be always up to date regarding security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to our mailing list for security announcements.

Work-needing packages

Currently 450 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting help.

Want to continue reading DPN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see our HOWTO contribute page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.


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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Meike Reichle, Ana Guerrero and Alexander Schmehl.