Debian Project News - July 3rd, 2014

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

Google Summer of Code updates

S.M. Floris gives an status update to Muon package integration with apt-listbugs: apt-listbugs will warn users when installing packages if those packages have serious, grave, or critical bugs. The muon package is available in the Git repository for the muon package on Alioth under the gsoc-floris-2014 branch. Ian S. Donnelly takes us through his 4 week experience and process of implementing a Three-Way merge algorithm for Elektra KeySets in C++ towards the kdb merge tool. Andrew Schurman shares his latest update on the Java Project Dependency Builder which aims to check all of the dependencies in a project to assure that the sources are actually "free".

The first set of talks for DebConf14 have been accepted!

These are just the first accepted talks and we are still accepting talks about Debian-related ideas, proposals, and stories. Details on how to submit your own talk are available on the events page.

Debian is moving (back) to GLIBC

Five years ago Debian moved from using GLIBC to the EGLIBC fork as the standard C library. Now that course of action is being reversed and Debian is switching back to GLIBC due to the demise of the EGLIBC project and the dissolution of the GLIBC steering committee. With the GLIBC committee gone, GLIBC became open for peer review, shared repositories, removal of the ports/ directories, and has had most of the important EGLIBC features merged back into it. The new glibc package is available in experimental.

Other news

The HackFest of the Tails (the amnesic incognito live system) project will take place on July 5-6 in Paris, hosted by IRILL. The Tails HackFest will bring together anyone interested in making Tails more usable and more secure. If you want to learn about the challenges faced by Tails, and how you can be part of the solution, this open event will be an intense mix of teaching, drawing, coding, sharing, learning and celebrating, supported by Debian, IRILL, Mozilla and the Tor project.

New Debian Contributors

15 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Gustavo Paniagua dos Santos, Michael Jeanson, Valentin OVD, Punit Agrawal, Andrew Ayer, Thomi Richards, Aurélien Joga, David Steele, Klaus Ethgen, Fabien Spindler, Graeme Gott, Yusuke Yatsuo, Alexander Alemayhu, Ulrike Uhlig, and Clément Schreiner into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): kfreebsd-9, dpkg, dovecot, iceweasel, icinga, mediawiki, apt, chromium-browser, icedove, php5, nspr, lucene-solr, iodine, tiff, samba, gnupg, gnupg2, libemail-address-perl, and cacti. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for these packages: clamav, tzdata (for wheezy and, squeeze), and duo-unix. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

The Debian team in charge of squeeze long term support released a security update announcement for these packages: dovecot, apt, scheme48, and linux-2.6. 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, stable updates list, and long term support security updates list) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 577 packages are orphaned and 139 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, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Donald Norwood and Paul Wise.