Debian Project News - February 18th, 2013

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

Debian Installer 7.0 RC1 released

The first release candidate of the installer for Debian Wheezy was released on 17 February. Many fixes are included in this release of the installer, along with new improvements, including better speech synthesis support, various improvements for GNU/kFreeBSD, fixes for the grub2 package, new supported hardware, etc.

A full list of known issues with details is collected on the errata page. Everyone is encouraged to test the installer and report bugs; media and further information are available on the Debian Installer pages.

This release was delayed a few weeks because of a technical disagreement about one package. Thanks to prompt action in response to the problem, a solution has now been implemented.

700,000th bug reported

Christian Perrier won the 700,000th bug contest, by betting more than two years ago on the date of bug #700000, which was recently reported by Cédric Boutillier. He now invites everyone to participate in contests to predict the dates when Debian's 800,000th and 1,000,000th bug reports will be filed.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report of DPL activities for January 2013. Stefano reminded readers that the election process for the next DPL term will start in early March, so there are only a few days left to convince Debian developers to run. He confirmed that he will not run again for another term. Meanwhile he is also looking for help in organising Debian activities in the Google Summer of Code program, and in maintaining an authoritative list of DFSG-free licenses. Among other things, Stefano also mentioned an updated policy draft for Debian marks.

Reports from FOSDEM

During the first weekend of February, the Debian Project participated at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. In addition to the official Debian booth, several project members delivered talks about different topics: among others, Andreas Tille presented the Debian Med project (video), Tollef Fog Heen and Michael Biebl gave an overview of systemd in Debian (video), Samuel Thibault reported on the GNU/Hurd architecture in Debian, and Ian Campbell spoke about the future of paravirtualisation under Xen. Most of the FOSDEM talks are available as video recordings.

Update on Clang and Debian

Sylvestre Ledru posted an article on his blog about the results of rebuilding the archive using Clang 3.2. To make the results more visible, Paul Wise has integrated them into the Package Tracking System. In the meantime, Hideki Yamane has written a patch to make it easier to use Clang instead of gcc when building with pbuilder. You can find more information about current efforts related to building Debian with Clang and other alternative compilers in Sylvestre's FOSDEM talk.

Other news

Stefano Zacchiroli renewed Kurt Roeckx's appointment as Project Secretary.

Julien Danjou wrote an article about Cloud tools for Debian, explaining the basics and giving hints about the tools needed to run a cloud platform.

Francesca Ciceri published instructions on making your own Debian swirl plush keyring.

Raphael Geissert has continued his A bashism a week series, now containing more than ten articles.

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

Three people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Paul Belanger, Jakub Safarik and Andrew Bartlett 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 194 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 66 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): samba, ircd-hybrid, xen-qemu-dm-4.0, rails, openssl, polarssl, openconnect, ffmpeg, wireshark, lighttpd and nginx. 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 531 packages are orphaned and 141 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Sylvestre Ledru, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.