Debian Project News - February 4th, 2013

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

DebConf13 venue and dates

Moray Allan and Didier Raboud gave some updates on the upcoming DebConf13 to be held at Le Camp in Vaumarcus, Switzerland. In the blogpost, they confirmed that the conference will take place from 11 to 18 August. With regard to the DebCamp, during which usually the various Debian teams meet to work on specific issues and projects, the authors explained that it will probably be held the same week as the conference: For budget reasons, current plans are to merge the two weeks’ activities into an 8 day period. If you think that’s a pity, it’s not too late to change it — just join the fundraising team and start working quickly!. Registration will probably open around the start of March.

In related news, the DebConf team sent a call for bids for DebConf14. If you are interested in putting forward a bid for DebConf14, send a message to their mailing list. You are also invited to think about possible venues for DebConf15.
People interested in helping with the organisation of DebConf are welcome to join the team, and find out how they can help by contacting them on their mailing list or on the #debconf-team channel on irc.debian.org.

Automating Debian bootstrapping

Johannes Schauer wrote a detailed report of the status of his Port bootstrap build-ordering tool, which was started as a Debian GSoC project last year and aims to solve cyclic build dependencies, making it possible to automate the bootstrapping of Debian on new architectures. Since November 2012 the project has reached some important milestones such as providing a less "monolithic" toolset, a new dependency graph definition, two new ways to break dependency cycles, and an adjustment of the algorithm to allow a more precise final build order.

Interviews

There has been an interview with Florian Weimer of the Debian security team about his talk "Trends in Open Source Security" at FOSDEM 2013.

Other news

According to W3Techs, Debian is the most popular Linux distribution for webservers. It currently has a market share of 32.9% of all websites that use Linux, and growing.

Ben Hutchings published the fourth part of his What's in the Linux kernel for Debian 7.0 Wheezy series. Ben also asked for help in testing SAS drivers for the next point release of Debian stable.

Neil McGovern sent some bits from the Release team where he reported about the current status of the freeze. Neil also asked for volunteers to help with the Release Notes, and particularly for someone with kFreeBSD experience to create the Release Notes for this port.

On the debian-project mailing list, an interesting discussion is underway about how young people's experience of computers has changed over the years and how this affects Debian, both in terms of contributors and users.

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

Four applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, two applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers and five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Anton Gladky, Andreas Beckmann, Brian Thomason, Laszlo Kajan, Jean-Michel Vourgère, Richard Hartmann, Vincent W. Chen, Willem van den Akker, James Bennet, Casper Gielen and Stein Magnus Jodal 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 224 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 92 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): ganglia, movabletype-opensource, ircd-ratbox, rails, libupnp, libupnp4, samba and nagios3. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 530 packages are orphaned and 141 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.


To receive this newsletter in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.

Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.