Debian Project News - June 14th, 2010
Welcome to this year's fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Debian Community Poll
- Automatic installation of hardware-specific packages
- Desktop artwork and themes for Debian
Squeeze
- Debian Installer string freeze coming up
- Provisional list of talks for DebConf10
- License usage in Debian
- Other news
- New Developers and Maintainers
- Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
Debian Community Poll
After getting the idea during the recent Mini Debian Conference in Berlin, Torsten Werner prepared a poll for users of the Debian Operating System asking different types of questions like the usage of derivatives, about the Debian Free Software Guidelines and firmwares and of course releases.
The Poll is available at http://go.debian.net/3vGnI. Torsten asks to spread the link to as many users as possible.
Automatic installation of hardware-specific packages
Petter Reinholdtsen introduced a new change into the Debian installation system allowing the installation of hardware-specific packages at installation time (or on an already installed system). This is useful for certain RAID controllers, graphic adapters and other hardware, and is done by mapping PCI and USB IDs to the names of Debian packages. Petter welcomes help maintaining this list.
He also pointed out that for hot swappable devices this approach won't work, and wonders whether the existing discover package should be adapted to also support listening to DBus events, or whether PackageKit could be ported to Debian.
Desktop artwork and themes for Debian Squeeze
Valessio Brito started
to collect ideas and proposals for the desktop artwork
used in Debian 6.0 Squeeze
. This artwork would be the base for
common themes throughout the system. Yves-Alexis Perez started to list
possible uses for that artwork ranging from themes for different
desktop environments through boot splash screens to website banners. He also
asked for more comments about the artwork from other users.
Debian Installer string freeze coming up
Christian Perrier proposed
a string freeze
in order to officially notify translators that they should
consider completing their current work. Christian wrote: During the string
freeze, developers would be required to avoid committing changes that involved
modifications to localizable strings. Each of these would require a prior
discussion in debian-boot and a formal ACK to commit.
He proposed
Sunday July 4th as deadline for the string freeze. Time to finish up those translations!
Provisional list of talks for DebConf10
Ana Guerrero announced the publication of a provisional list of talks for DebConf10. She also mentioned the opportunities for ad-hoc events to be scheduled during DebConf, in order to plan a last minute event with others once at DebConf. Details on the scheduling of these events will be available at the conference.
Some of the planned highlights are Bits from the Debian Project
Leader
, Debian in (and on) the cloud
, Debian/kFreeBSD from the
FreeBSD Point of View
, Multimedia Patents vs. Debian
, RC bug
fixing + NMU = Fun
and The Nexenta Project: OpenSolaris + APT +
GNU
.
License usage in Debian
While working on requests to add specific license texts to /usr/share/common-licenses/, Russ Allbery wrote a script to check which licenses are used how often in the Debian archive. He also published his results. Unsurprisingly, the most used licenses are the different forms and versions of the GNU General Public License.
Other news
Ana Guerrero announced that the migration of the Debian-Women wiki into Debian's wiki is now complete. There's still a little work to do: if you want to contribute, take a look at the migration TODO list.
Adrian von Bidder announced that he will now take orders for Debian Umbrellas.
Bill Allombert announced that circular
dependencies in unstable reached an all-time low. Even if fixing some might be too
intrusive for Squeeze
, Petter Reinholdtsen noticed that some
of them may also cause upgrades from
Lenny
to Squeeze
to fail.
Andrew Pollock blogged about his recent progress on the ISC DHCP 4.1 package: packages in experimental appear to work, and upgrade cleanly from the 3.1 packages, so they will soon reach unstable.
The previous issue of the Debian Project News mentioned that the boot loader LILO was about to removed from Debian due to missing upstream development. In the following discussion Joachim Wiedorn volunteered to take over upstream development, while the Debian Maintainer William Pitcock will continue taking care of packaging once upstream development created a release that actually has merit.
Bastian Blank wondered whether Debian 6.0 Squeeze
should be shipped
Xen 3.4 or
4.0 and listed some pros and cons for both versions.
New Developers and Maintainers
Six applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers and two applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Dominique Belhachemi, Sylvain Beucler, Scott Kitterman, Giovanni Mascellani, Alessio Treglia, Ulises Vitulli, Hannes von Haugwitz and Tang Ke into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the unofficial
RC-bugs count, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0
Squeeze
, is currently affected by
424 release critical bugs.
81 of them have already been fixed in Debian's unstable
branch. Of the remaining
343 release critical bugs,
46 already have a patch (which might need testing) and
14 are marked as pending.
Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in contrib or non-free, 211 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): bind9, OpenOffice.org, zonecheck, mysql-dfsg-5.0, glibc, pcsc-lite and cacti. 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 for announcements.
New and noteworthy packages
The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others):
- ants — advanced normalization tools for brain and image analysis
- bucardo — asynchronous replication system for PostgreSQL
- bup — highly efficient file backup system based on git
- cloc — statistics utility to count lines of code
- connectagram — word unscrambling game
- desktopnova — utility that changes the wallpaper automatically
- emdebian-crush — emdebian crossbuilding helpers
- espeakedit — A multi-lingual software speech synthesizer - editor
- eucalyptus-cloud — Elastic Utility Computing Architecture - Cloud controller
- fcgiwrap — simple server to run CGI applications over FastCGI
- fetch-crl — Downloads Certificate Revocation Lists
- freespacenotifier — free space notification module for KDE
- frontaccounting — A web based double-entry accounting and ERP program
- glpeces — Tangram (puzzle) game clone
- grr.app — RSS reader for GNUstep
- gst123 — GStreamer based command line media player
- guayadeque — lightweight music player
- haskell-debian-utils — Various helpers to work with Debian packages
- hpanel — minimalist panel for X
- html2markdown — convert HTML page into ascii markdown format
- jackmeter — a basic command line meter for the JACK audio system
- jkmeter — horizontal or vertical bargraph audio level meter for Jack Audio Connection Kit
- jpegjudge — determine which of two given jpegs (same size) is the original
- kraft — small business-management application
- ltpanel — lightweight tasklist panel for minimalist WMs
- lunch — distributed process launcher
- mango-lassi — Share mouse and pointer with other computers
- nam — the Network Animator
- ns2 — Ns is a discrete event simulator targeted at networking research
- openstv — single transferable vote and instant runoff voting software
- otcl-shells — OTcl shells
- pdebuild-cross — cross-building support for pbuilder
- plymouth-x11 — Graphical Boot Animation and Logger
- quvi — command line tool for parsing video download links
- radicale — simple calendar server - daemon
- radiotray — online radio streaming player
- rawtherapee — A free RAW converter and digital photo processing software
- ruby-tomoe — Handwriting recognition engine (ruby binding)
- rxp — A validating XML parser
- sakura — simple but powerful libvte-based terminal emulator
- sentinella — System monitor that can react to user chosen conditions
- sflphone-gnome — SIP and IAX2 compatible VoIP phone - GNOME client
- silentjack — silence detector for the JACK audio system
- smarty3 — Template engine for PHP
- stterm — an extremely simple terminal for windowed system
- tiled — generic tile map editor
- ttf-denemo — Music Notation Symbol Fonts for denemo
- u-boot — A boot loader for embedded systems
- ufraw-batch — batch importer for raw camera images
- upnp-router-control — simple program that manages UPnP compliant routers
- vainfo — Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- info program
- wiki2beamer — Tool to create LaTeX beamer presentations in wiki syntax
- xen-tools — Tools to manage Xen virtual servers
- yoshimi — A software synthesizer based on ZynAddSubFX
- zynjacku — JACK based host for LV2 synths and LV2 plugins
Work-needing packages
Currently 627 packages are orphaned and 132 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help.
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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Jeremiah Foster, David Prévot and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl.