Debian Project News - November 9th, 2017

Welcome to this year's fourth 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

Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released

The second update of the stable distribution Debian 9 Stretch was published on 7 October 2017. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems.

After the 9.2.0 release was made and published, a bug was found with the sorting of packages in the full DVD, BD and DLBD sets (other images were not affected). The 9.2.1 build fixes this bug, and the build scripts have also been updated to ensure this cannot happen again in future. For more details about this, see the related note at the images download server.

OpenSSL 1.0 and Qt4 removal in Buster

For the next release, Debian 10 Buster, it's planned to remove OpenSSL 1.0, the old version of the toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols, in favour of the more modern OpenSSL 1.1 version. Meanwhile, Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers are also actively working to remove Qt4, which is long dead upstream. Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer, for the Debian Qt/KDE Team, has blogged about the specific plans related to the OpenSSL support for Qt4 and Qt5 applications in Debian.

FTP services shutdown

As previously announced, the public-facing debian.org FTP services shut down on November 1, 2017. Debian Developers can use FTP for the uploads to the security archive at ftp://ftp.security.upload.debian.org/pub/SecurityUploadQueue. More details and other options at https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/10/msg00000.html.

DebConf mailing lists moved to lists.debian.org

In order to simplify infrastructure and maintenance, the DebConf mailing lists have been moved to lists.debian.org (including their archives and subscriptions). Appropriate redirections have been put in place, but it is recommended for everybody to update any documentation or bookmarks with the new addresses or web links. Read the blog post from Alexander Wirt for more details.

New and noteworthy packages

Among many other packages that were added to the unstable Debian archive in the last weeks, we can find:

Events

There will be a Debian booth at T-DOSE in Eindhoven, Netherlands, next 18 and 19 November 2017. Everybody is invited to pass by and of course, to help spreading the word about Debian in the booth (visit the wiki page for more details and coordination).

The Toulouse MiniDebConf 2017 will take place during the Capitole du Libre event on November 18 and 19 2017, and MiniDebConf Cambridge (UK) will happen the following weekend, from Thursday 23 to Sunday 26 November 2017.

Reports

The Debian Cloud team gathered in a Sprint from 16 to 18 October 2017, to resolve some of the open issues that were discussed at the cloud sprint 2016 and the Cloud BoF discussion session at Debconf17.

A Debian Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg, Austria, took place on the weekend of October 20–22 2017.

MiniDebConf Cuba took place during CubaConf 2017, the Free Technologies Cuban Conference from 7 to 9 November 2017, with several talks related to Debian and other activities.

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

Packages needing help

Currently 1153 packages are orphaned and 151 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 210 bugs available tagged newcomer.

More than just code

Contributors

1799 people and 20 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2017.

Once upon a time in Debian:

Outside News

The Reproducible Builds Summit 2017 took place between October 31 and November 2 2017. Debian has participated together with other free software distributions and projects in order to continue working in providing a verifiable path from software source code to its compiled binary form.

During the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 in Tokyo this October, Hideki Yamane gave a talk about openSUSE tools on Debian.

GitLab Inc. is switching from Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) for its source code contributions. This change gives developers greater flexibility and portability, and aims to encourage contributions to their web-based Git repository manager. GitLab Community Edition is the basis for Salsa, the upcoming collaborative development server that will host the Debian git repositories that are currently on Alioth.

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).

November

October

September

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Jean-Pierre Giraud.