Debian Project News - May 9th, 2008

Welcome to this year's 2nd issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. We would like to thank everyone for his feedback on the last issue of the Debian Project News! We didn't reckoned a tiny newsletter would cause such an sensation — we were even mentioned in some print magazines! So many, many thanks! We'll try our very best to come up and exceed your expectations!

While Stefano Zacchiroli visited the www 2008 conference in China Sir Tim Berners-Lee offered Debian kudos for its well thought-out encapsulation/packaging of libraries. Paul Wise will close his Debian user and Debian new contributor surveys on June 1st so that analysis of the results can begin. Please participate if you haven't done so yet.

Debian and Google Summer of Code

The Debian Project announced to participate again in Google Summer of Code Program. Twelve students will get the opportunity to work on different projects during their summer vacation while Google will fund them.

Development progress

The development efforts to release the next stable Debian release codenamed Lenny in September continue. While the transition to Python 2.5 as default python version is already completed, the transition to Perl 5.10 is still ongoing. So the freeze, the phase when developers will concentrate on fixing bugs instead of adding new features, will be called soon.

Andreas Barth, release manager for Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Sarge and Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch announced, that Marc Brockschmidt joined the team of release managers, while he steps back as release wizard.

Debian Project Leader interviews

In two recently published interviews with the new elected Debian Project Leader, Steve McIntyre presented a bit more about the Debian Project. The interviews can be found at ZDNet, and ComputerWorld UK.

debimg, a new software to replace debian-cd

debimg is a piece of software designed to replace debian-cd. Its current feature set is very limited, but building single disks for i386 and amd64 is possible (netinst disks build in about 5 seconds). It still lacks many features like disk sets and multi-arch.

19 new Debian Developers this week: The Debian Project improves its New Maintainer process

At Friday the 18th of April 2008, 19 new Debian Developers (DD) accounts were created.

One of the bottlenecks is the Debian Account Management (DAM), and Sam Hocevar delegated some important tasks to more people, distributing future workload. While the batch of new DD accounts were created, he issued a Debian Project Leader (DPL) announcement just before transferring position to the new elected DPL, Steve McIntyre.

At Monday the 28th of April 2008, the DPL announced one more DAM to the team, distributing workload. Read more.

Christoph Berg, who has recently been added to the DAM team thanked Martin Michlmayr, who has been Application Manager for more than 120 Applicants interested in joining the Debian Project as official Debian Developer.

Planets for Debian Contributors up again, ready for new feeds and languages

Holger Levsen reported that after a severe hardware failure, now all local planets for Debian contributors are up again. Currently there are only English, Italian and German planets, but the guys at Debian-community.org are doing a great job and encourage new contributors to submit their feeds or request new localized planets.

Debian Project will be at Swiss Linux Days 2008

From Wednesday the 21st of May 2008 to Thursday the 22nd of May 2008, Geneva, Switzerland, Debian Project will participate with a booth at Swiss Linux Days 2008. Debian-Med will also be presented at a talk. Please see our events page for further details.

Debian Project will be at LinuxTag 2008

From Wednesday the 28th of May 2008 to Saturday the 31st of May 2008, Berlin, Germany, the Debian Project will participate with a booth at LinuxTag 2008. Please see our events page for further details.

Other news

Lior Kaplan reported, that he finished triage of over 300 bugs reported against the iceweasel / firefox packages. Of those 300 bugs only 70 are still valid for a version of firefox shipped in a Debian release.

Christian Perrier reported progress in his campaign to fix outstanding bugs related to internationalization. Three languages finished translating more than 90% of the Debconf translation (and two might reach the 100% mark before the release of Lenny), while a fourth one just crossed the 80% mark.

Ana Guerrero summarized the meetings different teams had during the last year in the Region Extremadura in Spain. The regional goverment is a heavy user of Debian and sponsored teams to meet in person and work together. Amongst those teams were the Debian Edu team, the Quality Assurance team, the VoIP team, the Zope team, the Qt/KDE team and the i18n team.

Want to continue reading DPN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see our HOWTO contribute page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.


To receive this newsletter in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.

Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Andre Felipe Machado, Adrian von Bidder, Luca Bruno, Jeff Richards, Julian Andres Klode, Martin F- Krafft and Alexander Schmehl.