Debian Project News - August 14th, 2014

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

Debian Day 2014

Debian Day is celebrated on August 16 of each year and this year it falls on a Saturday. So far it looks as if sixteen towns or cities in six countries will be celebrating Debian Day in 2014. If you have a celebration planned, please register on the wiki and add a page about it. If you don't yet have one planned, why not join us in celebrating Debian?

Help needed with ejabberd testing

If you are a user of the ejabberd package (an XMPP server), Philipp Huebner is looking for help testing the latest version which he recently uploaded.

2014-Debian Developers per Country

Christian Perrier's annual report on the number of Debian Developers per Country has been updated for 2014. The report includes data for each year from 2009 to the present.

OpenAmbit is now in unstable

As reported by Christian Perrier in a weblog entry, OpenAmbit, a project which is developing open software for the Suunto Ambit sports watch, is now in unstable.

Debian arm64 port at 85%

Wookey posted to the Debian ARM list declaring the arm64 port open and making a request for help. The port is 84.5% built with 180 packages currently queued, which places the overall project extremely close to the 85% needed for qualification. There are many packages not yet built from Debian sources which need assistance towards the goal of bootstrapping arm64 in time for Jessie. A list of the arm64 port blocking packages is generated once a day.

First steps towards source-only uploads

As a first step towards mandatory source-only uploads, Ansgar Burchardt announced that source-only uploads into the Debian archive are now accepted, under some conditions: in particular, the source packages must be already present in the archive and must not create new binary packages, and only architecture specific binary packages can be dropped from the list of files upload.

Check the schedule for DebConf14

DebConf, the annual conference of the Debian project, will be held this year in Portland, Oregon, USA, from August 23 to August 31. For people who cannot attend the conference, DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet where possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides. Please check the full schedule on the website of the DebConf14 conference.

Interviews

There has been a DebianEdu interview with Bernd Zeitzen (in English) who describes, among other things, how he got involved in Debian Edu and his views about it.

Other news

The sixth update of the stable distribution of Debian (codename Wheezy) was released on July 12.

The tenth and last update of the old stable distribution of Debian (codename Squeeze) was released on July 19. Squeeze will receive no further security updates. Users of the amd64 and i386 architectures who cannot upgrade to Wheezy should consider using the Squeeze-LTS distribution.

The technical comittee published their decision on the default libjpeg implementation and on continuing support for multiple init systems.

Lucas Nussbaum, Debian project leader, updated the DebConf Chairs delegation. Martín Ferrari and Tássia Camões replace Holger Levsen and Gunnar Wolf, and will work together with Moray Allan and act as a liaison and a constitutional link between the DebConf team and the Debian project to ensure the success of DebConf.

New Debian Contributors

10 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 7 applicants have have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and 32 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome YunQiang Su, Andrey Rahmatullin, Timo Aaltonen, Andreas Rönnquist, Christophe Siraut, Joao Eriberto Mota Filho, Markus Frosch, Maarten Bernardus Lankhorst, Klee Dienes, Tobias Frost, Sandro Knauß, Dimitri Fontaine, Brett Parker, Jean Schurger, Louis Bouchard, Thomas Moulard, Daniel Jared Dominguez, Chen Baozi, Alin Andrei, Hans Zandbelt, Samuel Lidén Borell, Jussi Pakkanen, Nigel Kukard, Marcio de Souza Olivera, Sophie Brun, Alessio Garzi, Olivier Aubert, Caitlin Matos, Sascha Steinbiss, Chris Cormack, Yoshino Yoshihito, Evan Hanson, Jean Baptiste Favre, George Ormond Lorch III, Alex Henrie, Harald Dunkel , Adrien Grellier, Breno Leitao, Arnd Hannemann, Wolfgang Silbermayr, Alexandre Dantas, Kristof Ralovich, Anthony F McInerney, Alessandro Ranellucci, Jesse Norell, Pierangelo Mancusi, Ghislain Antony Vaillant, Joachim Bauch, and Mathieu Parent into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): dbus, linux, vlc, php5, phpmyadmin, eglibc, libav, libxml2, fail2ban, openjdk-6, polarssl, ruby-activerecord-3.2, drupal7, acpi-support, mysql-5.5, iceweasel, openjdk-7, transmission, apache2, cups, modsecurity-apache, linux, tor, nss, lzo2, icedove, reportbug, openssl, drupal7, krb5, wordpress, wireshark, libav, and kde4libs. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package: libreoffice. Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

The Debian team in charge of squeeze long term support released a security update announcement for these packages: openssl, lxml, php5, libemail-address-perl, gnupg, tiff, phpmyadmin, linux-2.6, cacti, libxml2, fail2ban, postgresql-8.4, cups, python-scipy, nss, poppler, file, python2.6, and tor. 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

1037 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Work-needing packages

Currently 596 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, Donald Norwood, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.