Debian Project News - April 16th, 2012

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

Debian project leader elected

The Debian project has just reelected Stefano Zacchiroli for a third year as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers.

Stefano's large majority over his opponents shows how satisfied the Debian project is with his work so far, and its wish for him to represent the project during one last term — Stefano has already announced he won't be seeking reelection again next year. Wouter Verhelst and Gergely Nagy also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming hundreds of votes ahead of the "None of the above" ballot choice.

Registration open for DebConf12

The Debian project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the DebConf12 conference, which will take place in Managua, Nicaragua, from Sunday 8 July to Saturday 14 July 2012. The conference will be preceded as usual by a week-long DebCamp, from Sunday 1 July to Saturday 7 July. It will only be possible to apply for food and accommodation grants and/or travel grants until 15 May.

Debian also invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for DebConf12 until 1 June 2012.

Personal BSP initiatives

We usually give information about BSPs where a group of people meet over a weekend, but today we'd like to mention two personal initiatives. Gregor Herrmann has reported every week over ten Release-Critical bugs squashed. Gerfried Fuchs also regularly reports on stable Release-Critical bugs squashed, and has managed to squash over thirty bugs each month. We would like to thank Gregor Herrmann, Gerfried Fuchs and all other RC bug addicts who are constantly helping to make our distribution better.

The state of Debian s390x

Philipp Kern posted an update on the current state of the Debian s390x port. Work started on this port last summer, during DebConf11, and in less than a month it already had almost 65% of packages built. Unfortunately, a new GLib release created some problems on this architecture; but recently a new major release of GLib fixed all the issues. The next steps for this port will be to fix open bugs and to make Iceweasel build successfully.

Interviews

Raphaël Hertzog published a People behind Debian interview with Francesca Ciceri, a member of the Debian press and publicity teams, while Petter Reinholdtsen interviewed Wolfgang Schweer, Justin B Rye and Andreas Mundt for his Debian Edu interviews series.

Other news

Guido Günther sent out some bits from the fifth Debian Groupware Meeting, which was held at the Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany. During the weekend the group fixed various issues and was able to push new versions of icedove and d-push to unstable while iceowl (dead upstream) remains in experimental. Some work was also done on OpenChange, Zarafa ZCP and SOGo, and several evolution bugs were worked on.

Michael Larabel did some benchmarks to compare Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.0 on a dual AMD Opteron 2384 system with 4 GB of RAM and a 160 GB Western Digital SATA drive. It appears that Linux is generally faster than kFreeBSD for now, but kFreeBSD won on a few tests. For more details, you can consult the complete results page.

Sebastian Harl called for help with handling the Debian booth at the Grazer Linuxtage. If you are interested in helping out, please add yourself to the wiki page.

Mònica Ramírez Arceda wrote a useful tutorial for new Debian Developers where she explained the useful configuration changes people may want to apply just after they become DDs.

Upcoming events

There are several upcoming Debian-related events:

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

New Debian Contributors

Five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Mike Miller, Elena Grandi, Pierre Chambart, Prach Pongpanich and Corentin Labbe into our project!

Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Wheezy, is currently affected by 726 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 517 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libpng, tiff, inspircd, sqlalchemy, samba and puppet. 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 (and the separate backports list, and stable updates list) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

282 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Work-needing packages

Currently 406 packages are orphaned and 160 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing 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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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.