Debian Project News - September 3rd, 2012
Welcome to this year's seventeenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Debian's presence at RMLL 2012
- 64-bit PC: primary Debian architecture
- New mirrors closer to Debian users
- Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis
- Other news
- Upcoming events
- New Debian Contributors
- Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
Debian's presence at RMLL 2012
The yearly Libre Software Meeting, better known
by its French name Rencontres Mondiales du
Logiciel Libre (RMLL), took place in Geneva, Switzerland, from 7 to
12 July; Anne Forker
sent a report
about the Debian presence there, completing the
report
by Andreas Tille mentioned in a
previous issue.
The Debian project was well represented with a booth, four lectures and a
workshop. At the booth, T-shirts, umbrellas, Swiss army knives and other
goodies could be purchased. The booth was also a meeting point for fans and
contributors of Debian, a place to discuss computer issues and for socialisation
between conference attendees.
Some pictures of the event taken by Marc Duck
Dequènes are available on his
website.
64-bit PC: primary Debian architecture
According to the Debian Popularity Contest, 64-bit PC is now the primary architecture in terms of number of submissions via the popularity-contest package, which periodically and anonymously sends statistics about the usage of installed packages. With a bit more than 60,000 submissions, 64-bit PC just overtook 32-bit PC. These leading architectures are followed by armel and powerpc, for which the number of submissions is several orders of magnitude behind.
New mirrors closer to Debian users
The Debian mirrors team, together with our sponsors, is happy to announce three
new mirrors: in Russia, provided
by the National Research Nuclear University
MEPhI
whose administrators are pleased to provide a full Debian mirror
to Russian users
; in Vietnam,
provided by MAYCHU; and in Malaysia,
provided by the Multimedia University of Malaysia.
For other countries, the full list of mirrors
is available online, as well as the experimental redirector which will
automatically take into account these new mirrors.
There are still countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror;
sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the mirrors team.
Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis
Laura Arjona recently defended her
Master's degree thesis
entitled Translations in
libre software
. Many aspects of Debian are included,
such as a case study about translation projects and teams in Debian;
another one about The Debian Administration Handbook
; and an interview
with Javier Taravilla, a member of the l10n-spanish (Spanish localisation) team.
The more I see of the Debian community, the more I like it and it amazes
me
, she said when she announced her project to the Debian mailing list.
Laura started to contribute to the spam cleaning efforts, and she plans to help
in the l10n-spanish team soon.
The manuscript of her thesis as well as the slides are available from her
blog.
Other news
Andrea Mennucci announced that the new GPG key for the debdelta package is now available.
Upcoming events
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
- September, 8-9, Dublin, Ireland — Debian Bug Squashing Party
- September, 14-16, Berlin, Germany — Debian Bug Squashing Party
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
Three applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, and two people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Cleto Martín Angelina, Benjamin Mesing, Andreas Rütten, and Zang MingJie 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 454 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 264 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): libapache2-mod-rpaf, pcp, postgresql-8.4, rtfm, otrs2, and typo3-src. 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
Two packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently: the installation guides for the two new official architectures armhf and s390x.
Work-needing packages
Currently 454 packages are orphaned and 143 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 Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Simon Paillard, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.