Debian Project News - June 28th, 2010

Welcome to this year's sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Bits from the Release Team

Release manager Adam D. Barratt sent Bits from the release team, in which he welcomes Mehdi Dogguy to the team. Other enthusiastic Debian Developers who are interested are invited to contact the team.

Lots of transitions are finished, and in order to make the boot process faster, parallel booting should be enabled by default. Squeeze will release with GNOME 2.30 along with the already transitioned KDE 4.4.3. With EGLIBC 2.11 already in testing, Python 2.6 and Perl 5.12 (among a few others) should be able to transition before the freeze.

As announced earlier, new transitions are in freeze in order to make it easier to finish current and already scheduled transitions. Squeeze will be frozen when Python 2.6 and the other transitions are completed, maybe during late August if everybody works together.

Call for volunteers for DebConf10

Gabriella Coleman sent out a call for volunteers for DebConf10 on her blog. She mentioned a list of things that DebConf needs from volunteers, so if you are in New York or environs you might consider helping out if something on the list matches your skills and interests. There is also an amazing list of free events, events that take place before, during and after DebConf. The list has theatre, movies and music as well as other types of events to choose from; during DebConf alone there are free concerts from Gil Scott Heron and Basia Bulat, just to name a couple.

Debian Live Web Images Builder

Daniel Baumann announced that thanks to outstanding Debian Live contributor Richard Nelson a live-helper web-frontend of the Debian Live Project is now available: it lets users get their own customised images without needing to install live-helper and build them on their own.

Results from the Debian community poll

Torsten Werner published the results of his Debian community poll (followed by a second part) and thanks all participants. With over 80% answering that they do not contribute directly to Debian, this is the biggest ever survey of Debian's user base, giving hints on how Debian should deal with its non-free section, its release policy, and the importance of the Debian Free Software Guidelines to its user base.

FAI workshop 2010

Michael Prokop mentioned on his blog that there will be an FAI workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. FAI stands for Fully Automated Install and is an important tool when dealing with large numbers of computers, for example. As Michael writes: As the name states the workshop is targeted towards FAI developers. We — the FAI developers — want to get FAI into shape for Squeeze, discuss pending issues like Ubuntu packaging, release management and of course meet in real life for networking and socialising. Sounds like fun.

Debian Project at LSM/RMLL 2010

The Debian Project will be represented at the Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (LSM/RMLL) event in Bordeaux, France, this year. Debian related talks have been organised, as well as a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). Everyone interested in helping Debian is welcome at the BSP; there will be enough developers around to sponsor your NMUs.

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny updated

The fifth update of Debian's stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny) has been released. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Further updates include the Linux kernel itself as well as debian-installer.

Other news

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl announced he has again started publishing statistics of the release critical bug reports on a weekly basis.

Martin Michlmayr announced that Debian support for eSATA SheevaPlug is now available. He has updated the install guide accordingly and provided a trick to add eSATA support for an already running Debian eSATA SheevaPlug installed as a regular SheevaPlug.

Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli proposed some guidelines for meetings inside the Debian Project. His goal is to help organisers to provide prerequisites in a community-compatible way, with a process that includes announcements before the meeting and minutes after.

FTP master Mark Hymers announced that Etch has been moved to archive.debian.org, following the last Etch point release published last month.

Debian Auditor Luk Claes sent an overview of the most important financial flows of money held on Debian's behalf.

GRUB maintainer Colin Watson gave a small report on the status of the grub package with regard to several release issues.

initramfs maintainer Michael Prokop called for testing of initramfs-tools 0.97, a tool used to create an initial ramdisk file to boot a system. The packages available should work on all Debian systems and should be checked on a wide variety of platforms.

Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli reported on his recent invitation to the European Commission. In a joint session of academic and industrial research projects and EC commissioners, Stefano helped summarise best and worst practices in the interaction between research projects and FOSS communities.

New Developers and Maintainers

Three applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Carl Chenet, Mathias Behrle and Thomas Koch into our project!

Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the unofficial RC-bugs count, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 Squeeze, is currently affected by 419 release critical bugs. 65 of them have already been fixed in Debian's unstable branch. Of the remaining 354 release critical bugs, 55 already have a patch (which might need testing) and 19 are marked as pending.

Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in contrib or non-free, 170 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): bind9 (updated), samba, sudo, pmount, xulrunner and kvirc. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others):

Work-needing packages

Currently 619 packages are orphaned and 143 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help.

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Jeremiah Foster, David Prévot and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl.