Debian Project News - June 11th, 2012

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

Debian archive rebuilds on Amazon Web Services

Lucas Nussbaum has been doing some full archive rebuilds on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Archive rebuilds play an important role in Debian Quality Assurance and Release Management efforts, according to Lucas, who has been running Debian archive rebuilds on the Grid’5000 testbed since 2007, and has filed over 6000 release-critical bugs in the process. Lucas managed to get Amazon to award Debian $10,000 in order to run about 60 full archive rebuilds on their infrastructure, allowing developers interested in custom tests to do them themselves.

Debian welcomes diversity

A diversity statement for the Debian project has been approved by a large majority of the project members. The statement explicitly welcomes and encourages participation by everyone. This statement marks a new stage in the process of welcoming contributors to our project, said Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader. Community diversity goes hand in hand with community richness.

armhf and s390x on their way to Wheezy

Adam D. Barratt, Release Team manager, announced that the armhf and s390x ports are now one step closer to being part of Wheezy: they are now officially being considered as release architectures. Adam thanks everyone involved in getting both architectures to this point.

DebConf13 logo contest

Luca Capello announced that the DebConf13 organisers are seeking logo designs for next year's DebConf. Some ideas are already present on the DebConf wiki, but they would like to expand these a bit more in line with their vision. There are only a few days left if you would like to participate: the deadline for DebConf13 logo submissions is Sunday 17 June.

First bug squashing party in Shanghai

Thomas Goirand published a report from the first bug squashing party in Shanghai. About twenty people participated, including three Debian members, and twenty-five bugs were fixed.

Bits from the Ruby Team

Antonio Terceiro posted some bits from the Ruby Team in which he announced that the default Ruby interpreter for Wheezy would be Ruby 1.9. Ruby 1.8 will be available in Debian during the Wheezy life cycle, but since security support from upstream will end in the next year, it will not be shipped in subsequent major releases. With this switch, Debian users will benefit from the improvements, especially in performance, that Ruby 1.9 brings over Ruby 1.8. People who still want to use Ruby 1.8 as the default interpreter may find the ruby-switch or rbenv packages useful. More information is available on the dedicated wiki page.

Interviews

There have been Debian Edu interviews with Ralf Gesellensetter and Mike Gabriel, who both describe, among other things, how they got involved in Debian Edu and their views about it.

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

Two applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and eleven people have started maintaining packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Tobias Stefan Richter, Mike Miller, cento, Nikolaus Valentin Hänel, Simon Busch, René Moser, Christoph Gille, Ask Hjorth Larsen, David Weber, William Dauchy, Chris Frey, Benjamin Eltzner, and Giulio Paci 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 734 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 495 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): arpwatch, libgdata, strongswan, nut, imp4, bind9, request-tracker3.8 (updated announcement), openoffice.org, iceweasel, iceape, nss, postgresql-8.4, and php5. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: request-tracker4 and nginx. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 455 packages are orphaned and 150 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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