Debian Project News - September 20th, 2017

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

Welcome to the Debian Project News!

We hope that you are enjoying this edition of DPN.

For other news, please read the official Debian blog Bits from Debian, and follow https://micronews.debian.org which feeds (via-RSS) the @debian profile on several social networks.

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2017). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list.

At the end of this Project News we've added a Quick Links section which links to a selection of the posts made through our other media streams.

Internal News/Happenings

Debian Installer Buster Alpha 1 release

The Debian Installer team announced the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 10 Buster. Installer CDs, other media and everything else you will need to try it and help finding bugs are available at the Debian Installer web page.

The future of Alioth

Alioth, the Debian forge, is based on Debian 7 Wheezy and a modified version of Fusionforge. On 18–20 August 2017 a sprint was held in Hamburg, Germany, to discuss options and the future of the several services currently provided by Alioth. A service based in GitLab is being worked on as the future git service. As for the mailing lists hosted on lists.alioth.debian.org, some of them will be retired and others are elegible to be moved to the lists.debian.org service. See the related mail about mailing lists for how to proceed, and the Alioth sprint minutes for more details.

Outreachy

Debian is participating in the 15th Round of Outreachy as a way to increase the diversity of contributors to the project. Until 23 October 2017 the applicants can choose a project and contact the corresponding mentors in order to send their small contribution related to the project and their application. By November 9 the two interns selected to participate in this program will be announced.

Upcoming events

Debian Mini Event at the FTSL (IX Fórum de Tecnologia em Software Livre)

The Brazilian Debian community will gather in a Mini Event at the FTSL - IX Fórum de Tecnologia em Software Livre (Forum of Technology and Free Software), from 27 to 29 September 2017. More info (in Brazilian Portuguese) in https://wiki.debian.org/Brasil/Eventos/MiniDebConfCuritiba2017

Debian Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg

There will be a Debian Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg, Austria, on the weekend of October 20–22 2017. Team meetings/sprints during the BSP are welcome too. Please register on the wiki page to ease the organisation of the event. On the same page you will find information regarding transport, (sponsored) accommodation and other useful things.

Toulouse MiniDebConf 2017

The Toulouse MiniDebConf 2017 will take place during the Capitole du Libre event on November 18 and 19 2017. This event will welcome everyone with an interest in the Debian project for a series of talks and workshops about Debian. Talk proposals are open until 30 September 2017.

MiniDebConf Cambridge 2017

The weekend of November 23–26 2017 a Mini-DebConf will be held in Cambridge, UK. It will start with two days for a mini-DebCamp, for dedicated development, sprints or team meetings, and then two days for a more regular mini-conf (more general talks). For more details and to sign up to attend, please visit the wiki page at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/gb/2017/MiniDebConfCambridge

Reports

Debian Day 2017 in Brazil and the rest of the world

From August 16 to 23, 2017, seven cities in Brazil organised meetings to celebrate the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Debian Project, and some of them have photos:

In 2016 only two Brazilian cities organised a Debian Day. This year we had an increase in the number of cities because we encouraged the local communities to organise their meetings.

Other cities in the world celebrating this Debian birthday were: Varese (Italy), La Paz (Bolivia), Montreal and Quebec (Canada), Stockholm (Sweden), Caracas and Cumaná (Venezuela).

LTS Freexian Monthly Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Reproducible Builds status update

Follow the reproducible builds blog to get the weekly reports on their work in the Stretch cycle.

Help needed

Help spreading the word about Debian Astro 1.0

Debian Astro was released last June together with Debian Stretch. Let's help to make Debian Astro 1.0 known to the astronomy community! If you happen to attend any astronomy related conference or meeting, don't hesitate to talk to your colleagues about this Debian Pure Blend focused for both professional and hobby astronomers, and the software packages covering telescope control, data reduction, presentation and other fields.

Devscripts needs you

James McCoy has blogged about help needed for maintaining devscripts, a set of scripts to make the life of a Debian Package Maintainer easier. If you're interested in helping out, you can join #devscripts on OFTC and/or send a mail to the list devscripts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org.

A Debian theme for the Debian Policy (and other documentation)

The Debian Policy team is seeking volunteers to design a Debian documentation Sphinx theme, to be used by the Debian Policy versions 4.1.0.0 and newer and probably other core pieces of Debian documentation as they move to the Sphinx documentation generator. Contact the Debian Policy Team to submit your proposal, or the Debian Design Team for more design work needed in Debian.

Packages needing help

Currently 1112 packages are orphaned and 154 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Newcomer bugs

Debian has a newcomer bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. There are 205 bugs available tagged newcomer.

More than just code

Contributors

1717 people and 20 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2017.

New translation team: Albanian

The second edition of Free Libre Open Source Camp (FOSScamp) took place from 31 August to 03 September 2017 in Syros, Greece. The Debian Developer Lior Kaplan attended and facilitated the localisation of Debian installer and other software into Albanian. See the blogposts about this and other good outcomes of the event. Albanian translators are continuing the work using the newly created debian-l10n-albanian mailing list.

Once upon a time in Debian:

Outside News

Public Money, Public Code

The Free Software Foundation Europe has recently launched the campaign Public Money, Public Code, to request the implementation of legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.

Forty organisations, Debian among them, and more than 7,400 individuals have supported this call for action by signing the open letter of the campaign. Visit the website https://publiccode.eu to learn more details, sign the letter, and find other ways of taking action or spreading the word.

Videos in Portuguese from Free Software Events

The Debian Maintainer Paulo Santana (phls) created the website http://videos.softwarelivre.org to index videos of lectures in Portuguese from Free Software events in Brazil like MiniDebConf Curitiba 2017. There are also other videos of Debian collaboration talks at many of these events.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the micronews.debian.org feed, in which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue. You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social, Mastodon or Twitter). The items are given unformatted and in descending order by date (recent news at the top).

September

August

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Jean-Pierre Giraud and Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana.