Debian Project News - November 12th, 2012

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

Code search engine for Debian

Michael Stapelberg announced the birth of Debian Code Search, a search engine for source code within Debian. It allows you to search all ≈ 17000 source packages, containing 130 GiB of FLOSS source code (including Debian packaging) with regular expressions, explained Michael. The search engine is already available for use.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report of DPL activities for October: among other things, Stefano reported the boost of activity in the recently created debian-cloud mailing list. This new mailing list is dedicated to discussions of the development and use of Debian on public and private clouds, such as for instance the ongoing discussion about the integration of Debian on popular clouds like Windows Azure or the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

One step closer to Wheezy

Neil McGovern sent an update on the state of the Wheezy freeze, explaining that the Release Team is now particularly focused on managing unblock requests (where these comply with the freeze policy) and removing buggy leaf packages. Meanwhile, the Release Critical bug count is decreasing, thanks also to the great number of Bug Squashing Parties held during recent months. More Debian Bug Squashing Parties are scheduled for the upcoming weeks: you can help Debian to release sooner by participating!

Other news

The Polish Debian User Group created a nice graph of the number of Release Critical bugs in Debian over the last year.

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 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Hendrik Jaeger and Steven Chamberlain 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 425 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 220 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. Richard Hartmann published some more detailed statistics.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): request-tracker3.8, rtfm, icedove, openoffice.org, libproxy, and iceape. 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.

Work-needing packages

Currently 486 packages are orphaned and 138 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 Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.