Debian Project News - October 1st, 2012

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

Update for Debian 6.0: 6.0.6 released

The sixth update for Debian 6.0 (codenamed Squeeze) has been released. This update mainly adds corrections of security problems to the stable release, along with some adjustments for serious problems.

Reports from the latest BSPs

The bug squashing party held in Dublin on Saturday, 8 September was hosted in Google office space and gathered 15 people. In addition to its impact on the Release-Critical bugs list it triggered the bootstrapping of a local Debian community with the desire to hold a second such party in October.

The following weekend, another bug squashing party held in Berlin gathered approximately 25 people who also worked on German translations besides dealing with Release-Critical bugs.

Results from Debian's Google Summer of Code

Ana Guerrero sent a report about Debian's Google Summer of Code. Debian has been participating in the Google Summer of Code since 2006, and sponsored 15 projects this year, of which 12 finished successfully. Students supervised by Debian mentors worked on various aspects of the project, including improvements to mentors.debian.net, the development of multi-arch cross-toolchains, and metrics for team activities, to name just three. Some of these results have already been included into Debian. The Debian project thanks those who took part, including especially the students for their contributions, and invites them to continue being involved in making Debian better.

Mini DebConf in Paris

Sylvestre Ledru, on the behalf of the organisation team, announced that the second Mini DebConf in Paris will take place on 24 and 25 November and will be hosted by EPITA. His message mentions that a BSP will be in progress through the entire event, and that they're currently soliciting talks for the event.

Interviews

There has been a Debian Edu interview with Giorgio Pioda who describes, among other things, how he got involved in Debian Edu and his views about it.

Other news

Since the CIA service for monitoring VCS repositories via IRC is now dead, Martín Ferrari proposed KGB as a replacement.

Ansgar Burchardt, on behalf of the FTP team, announced some changes to the Debian Maintainer upload permissions system. The new interface replaces the old DMUA field, which will stop working on 24 November 2012.

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

Eight applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, six applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and two people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Tobias Hansen, Cédric Boutillier, Sébastien Villemot, Thibaut Jean-Claude Paumard, Nicolas Boulenguez, Janos Guljas, Asias He, Per Andersson, Emilien Klein, Sascha Steinbiss, Ahmed Toulan, Bernhard Schmidt, Jeroen Dekkers, Andreas Rönnquist, Josue Ortega, and Kai Lüke 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 480 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 266 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): devscripts, asterisk, isc-dhcp, iceweasel, iceape, and tiff. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 470 packages are orphaned and 137 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

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