Debian Project News - December 10th, 2012
Welcome to this year's twentyfourth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Record number of participants for Mini DebConf Paris
- Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis
- Official Debian images on Amazon Web Services
- Reports from latest BSPs
- Other news
- 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?
Record number of participants for Mini DebConf Paris
The second Mini
DebConf Paris, held over the third weekend of November,
registered a record number of participants for a mini DebConf: more than
a hundred people, including Debian Developers, contributors and enthusiasts
from all over Europe.
The great success of the event was also guaranteed by the high number of talks
and workshops held during the two days, most of
them recorded by the amazing DebConf Video team (and soon available on the
video website).
Josselin Mouette, one of the founders of the Debian GNOME team, held an
interesting talk titled Large
deployment of GNOME from the administrator's perspective
,
consisting of an overview of existing mechanisms for administrating GNOME
systems.
Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader, presented the debian-cloud
initiative during the Lightning Talks
, while
Lucas Nussbaum explained how to get involved in Debian in his
five-minute Get
involved - it's not that hard
talk.
Ben Hutchings and Maximilian Attems presented the
work of the Linux kernel team, while Cyril Brulebois explained how
the Debian Installer is created and how it works.
Some talks were dedicated to the community aspects of Debian, such as Roberto
Di Cosmo's
Free
software and Debian, 20 years after
and the accurate analysis
of social interactions on Debian mailing lists by Alexandre Delanoë
and Bernard Conein.
Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis
Paul Wise documented how to install
Debian on smartphones: while this is technically possible, the process
is complicated by the fact that the Linux mainline kernel doesn't run on
many mobile devices and the Debian Linux kernel maintainers prefer not to
include non-mainline patches.
Paul concluded by saying that the procedures I documented above are not a
great way to support mobile devices at all and could break at any moment
anyway. So everyone, please become a kernel developer and help merge all
of the many many versions of Android Linux into Linux mainline so that
you can have your favourite distribution on your devices
.
The state of the art of support for running Debian on such devices is
documented on the Mobile wiki page,
while people interested in helping can join the discussion on the debian-mobile mailing
list or simply join the #debian-mobile channel on
irc.debian.org.
Official Debian images on Amazon Web Services
James Bromberger announced
the
availability of official Debian images on Amazon Web Services.
Over the last few months, James and others have been working on the creation
of official images to be put on the AWS Marketplace.
After the first contact between Amazon and DPL Stefano Zacchiroli,
a group of Debian Developers and the wider community formed to
generate a set of AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) using
Anders Ingemann’s ec2debian-build-ami script
, explained James.
Those who plan to use it can find the relevant documentation on the
Amazon EC2
Image wiki page,
while the ongoing task of creating and supporting official images is
coordinated via the debian-cloud mailing
list.
Reports from latest BSPs
During the third weekend of November, three simultaneous Debian Bug Squashing Parties were held in different locations across the world: in Tokyo, Japan, in Munich, Germany and in Essen, Germany. The next episode of the Bug Squashing Marathon for Wheezy will be on 15-16 December in Mechelen, Belgium.
Other news
The Debian Women project finally completed the migration of women.debian.org to the main Debian website. The new version is already available in Danish and French. In the announcement you can find instructions and hints on translating it to your language.
Inspired by Nicolas Dandrimont's talk about The state of
mentors.debian.net: GSoC and beyond
, Lucas Nussbaum noted that half of the package
maintainers in Debian are not Debian Developers or Debian Maintainers.
Zaki Akhmad released Indonesian subtitles for the
video recording of Stefano Zacchiroli's Bits from the DPL
talk,
held in Managua, Nicaragua, during DebConf12.
If you want to translate the subtitles to your language, you can fetch
the
original English subtitles and follow the tutorial
on creating video subtitles.
New Debian Contributors
6 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Alberto Fernández Martínez, Dominik George, Mika Pflüger, Wilfried Goesgens, Eric Newberry and Carsten Schoenert 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 360 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 155 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): iceape, iceweasel, xen, mysql-5.1, libxml2, apache2, rssh and libssh. 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
5 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
Work-needing packages
Currently 502 packages are orphaned and 139 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 Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and Justin B Rye.