Debian Project News - February 10th, 2014

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

Call for projects and mentors for Debian GSoC 2014

Nicolas Dandrimont asked all Debian contributors for projects and mentors to help Debian participate in the tenth year of the Google Summer of Code. Everyone (member of the Debian project or not, student or not) is welcome to submit their ideas, and to try and find people willing to mentor the projects, explained Nicolas in his mail. If you have an idea, please publish it on the wiki page, and send an email to the coordination mailing list. You can also contact Nicolas and the other GSoC administrators for Debian on their mailing list or on their IRC channel, #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.

Bits from the Release Team

Niels Thykier sent some bits from the Release Team. The Release Team recently reviewed the status of the architectures in sid, and decided that IA64 should be removed from testing, and will soon be removed from unstable and experimental. Niels also indicated in his message that auto-removal from testing of non-leaf RC-buggy packages has been suspended until there is a way to properly notify the maintainers of reverse-dependencies that the removal will occur. In the meantime, thanks to the work of Ivo De Decker and Paul Wise, the Package Tracking Service will now display a warning for packages that are about to be auto-removed from testing. The auto-removals are also listed, thanks to Lucas Nussbaum, on the Debian Maintainer Dashboard and by the how-can-i-help package.

Reports from recent Debian Sprints

Antonio Terceiro sent a report of the Debian Ruby Sprint, held in Paris on January 15–17, as a satellite event of the Paris Mini-DebConf. He explained in his message the efforts of the team regarding the removal of the now deprecated 1.8 version of the Ruby interpreter, and the goals of the Ruby team for Jessie.

The Debian Med team organised their fourth sprint in Aberdeen from January 31 until February 2. Several members of the team posted reports of their activities during the sprint, including packaging, bug fixing, and presentations of software.

The Ruby Team thanks IRILL for hosting the meeting, and both teams thank the generous Debian sponsors for funding the expenses required for the sprints.

Other news

Lucas Nussbaum, Debian Project Leader, recently updated the delegation for Debian Policy Editors, and reappointed Kurt Roeckx as Project Secretary for another term.

Johannes Schauer posted on his blog some updates about botch, a tool to solve cyclic build dependencies and to generate an order in which packages have to be built so that Debian can be bootstrapped easily on new architectures.

The fourth update of the stable distribution of Debian (codename Wheezy) was released on February 8.

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

Seven people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Pierre Rudloff, Adam Sampson, Rebecca Palmer, Dariusz Dwornikowski, Raoul Snyman, Iain R. Learmonth, and Joseph Herlant into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): curl, libyaml, drupal6, libgadu, horde3, mumble, and libav. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 512 packages are orphaned and 152 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 and Justin B Rye.