Debian Project News - November 14th, 2014

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

The Debian Community combats Global Warming with a Freeze

The Release Team is proud to announce that Debian 8.0 "Jessie" is frozen. Further updates to this release will be restricted to bug fixes only.

With the freeze occurring as planned on November 5, Lucas Nussbaum blogged: This is quite an achievement from the project as a whole, and the Release Team specifically. First, we froze on the date announced more than a year ago, and the freeze seems to have been well respected by all maintainers. Second, with 310 RC bugs at the time of the freeze, we are probably breaking a record for all recent Debian releases. Could we have the shorter Debian freeze ever? Given that FOSDEM is 12 weeks away, could we even release before FOSDEM, and have a big party there to celebrate?

Richard Hartmann posted the Release Critical Bug report for Week 45 which highlights the work that needs to be done to push Jessie into release. There are 1,154 bugs of which 295 directly affect Jessie, which we need to get down to zero. Of these, 229 are bugs which affect both Jessie and unstable and 66 affect Jessie only. He also posts a table of data which compares our current status to the Squeeze release cycle. Not to be lost in the pretty data and graph is the request that if you are able, please look into the key packages which need the most help.

Tokyo area Debian study group

The Tokyo area Debian study group held its 119th meeting starting with a Debian common sense quiz, moving on to a discussion of the LibreOffice package in Debian and desires to see more upstream and downstream support. They also had a hands-on event for debian-installer beta2 for Debian 8 "Jessie".

First Jessie based Debian Edu released

Petter Reinholdtsen announced the first Jessie based Debian Edu release. Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a complete operating system for schools, with support for servers, workstations, and laptops working together on a school network. The creation of a multi-user multi-machine study environment can be completed in a few hours with hundreds of applications pre-installed. Further details of the release include information about its current distribution, documentation, and status.

LTS Reports for October 2014

Raphaël Hertzog reported on ten hours of paid LTS work with the CVE triage of 23 commits to the security tracker, the filing of several bug reports, a sponsored upload, and mysql-5.1 and apache2 security updates. This month he shares some thoughts on the workflow and user base of the project. The project still needs help from its users, who are asked to subscribe to the mailing list and to test some of the packages being submitted, and help by way of organisations joining the project by providing help directly or sponsoring others to do the work.

Thorsten Alteholz reported that he was assigned a workload of 13.75 hours towards Squeeze LTS which allowed him to upload new versions of rsyslog, torque, and libxml2 among others. He was also able to prepare a new upload of wget, and sends congratulatory kudos to the Security Team who deal with support on a daily basis.

Other Reports

Thorsten Alteholz also blogged his other October Debian activities which started with working in the FTP assistant role, which has seen a spike of uploads as developers try to get their packages in prior to the freeze.

Thomas Goirand greatly detailed his OpenStack packaging activity for October. His work involved patch submissions, uploads of multiple release candidates through various stages, and the writing of a new system in openstack-pkg-tools. He also backported python-libvirt, python-setuptools, and some needed JavaScript packages. The OpenStack Juno packages were all uploaded and ready by the day of the upstream release.

Raphaël Hertzog updated his free software activities for the month of October with packaging work towards the upcoming Jessie freeze, bug fixes for Publican, the first point release of Django 1.7.1 to unstable, and package sponsorship. Work on the Distro Tracker continued, along with a request for others to contribute to the project with plenty of easy bugs to fix. All of the Distro Tracker instances he manages are now running Django which he opted to make mandatory.

Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Fall

Hideki Yamane blogged about the Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Fall. Over 1,500 attendees participated over two days at the event which focused on FOSS. The Tokyo area Debian study group maintained a booth, giving out fliers, DVDs and information. In the Debian community session Nobuhiro Iwamatsu spoke about Debian 8 "Jessie".

Who's using Debian Audit

The Who's using Debian page lists Educational, Commercial, Government and non-profit organisations that use Debian. Over the course of time the page has collected a few stale entries that need to be removed or updated in order to keep the listing relevant and current. Toward that goal, the page and entries will undergo an audit. Comments, suggestions, and interested parties are welcome.

Jessie removals/updates

Matthias Klumpp shared via his blog the state of AppStream/GNOME-Software in Debian Jessie. When GNOME was updated to 3.14, the normal functionality for update notifications was moved from gnome-settings-daemon to GNOME-Software. As GNOME-Software requires additional integration work by the distributors, GNOME systems are currently without update notifications as AppStream metadata is not yet available in Debian and its full integration to Jessie has been postponed though with an option to include some metadata for GNOME and KDE to use via normal .deb packages. All is not lost as GNOME-Software is in unstable, but because it uses offline-updates by default, which don't work well yet in Debian, it currently has an RC bug, preventing it from entering Testing. We need a way forward to bring update-notifications back, and there is currently work going on to do that. For all Debian users: Please be patient while we resolve the situation. For all developers: If you would like to help, please contact me or Laurent Bigonville, there are some tasks which could use some help. On the Xfce front, Debian will soon have a new pk-update-icon package, which is currently in NEW. That will resolve the situation there. This situation does not affect KDE which uses Apper, which covers all its update-notification needs.

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer of the Debian QT/KDE Team gave an early warning of the removal of Qt4 for Debian Stretch (Jessie+1). Qt4 has been deprecated since the release of Qt5 on December 19, 2012, almost 2 years ago now. While the team did support bug-fix-only releases, upstream has announced they will end support for Qt4 in 2015, which means from that point on bug fixes for Jessie will require a special effort. As Qt5 is available the decision to no longer support Qt4 was made. As there is still a lot of software that relies on using Qt4 and to ease the transition there is a backport for Wheezy for Qt5.

2014 Mini-DebConf in Cambridge at ARM

Andrew Cater took us through the start of the 2014 Mini-DebConf at the ARM offices in Cambridge, UK, getting to meet and speak to individuals in person rather than via email, surrounded by Debian Developers who've taken on help desk roles solving issues with broken laptops, and the release sprint with the Release Team.

New Debian Contributors

13 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Richard Sellam, James Marsh, Pierre Mavro, Benda Xu, Nicolas Schier, Wolfgang Fuetterer, Balasankar C, Josh Triplett, Reiner Herrmann, Kurashiki Satoru, Daniel Gröber, Jakub Warmuz, and Dmitry Borisyuk 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 Jessie, is currently affected by 427 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 268 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): libtasn1-3, libxml2, torque, dokuwiki, linux, icedove, wget, quassel, php5, libxml-security-java, qemu, qemu-kvm, konversation, curl, kfreebsd-9, and nss. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

The Debian team in charge of Squeeze Long Term Support released security update announcements for these packages: libtasn1-3, torque, dokuwiki, libxml2, openssl, wget, curl, and libxml-security-java. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 613 packages are orphaned and 140 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, Justin B Rye and Thomas Vincent.