Debian Project News - March 5th, 2012
Welcome to this year's fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Rebuild of the Debian archive with clang
- Debian Peru revival
- DebConf11 final report is out
- Debian Utsav
- Other news
- Upcoming events
- New Debian Contributors
- Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
Rebuild of the Debian archive with clang
Sylvestre Ledru performed a study that rebuilt the Debian archive using clang, a new C/C++/Objective-C compiler. The goal was to evaluate the current capabilities of clang for compilation and C/C++/Objective-C support. Results are available on the Debian clang web pages.
Debian Peru revival
Rudy Godoy blogged about a revival of the Debian Peru local group. The Debian Peru users group was founded in 2004 and was quite active in spreading the word about Debian and Free Software, but then slowed down its activity. However, in the two last weeks, the group has become active again and they're planning various events and meetings aimed at helping people to contribute to Debian. You can find more information in the group wiki page or on their mailing list.
DebConf11 final report is out
The DebConf organisation team released the final report of the 2011
Debian Conference, which was held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The report can be downloaded from the
DebConf media
website.
In related news, the DebConf committee decided that DebConf13
will take place in
Switzerland, likely in the middle of August. The Swiss bid narrowly
won over the bid from Riga, Latvia.
Debian Utsav
Shirish Agarwal reported on the
Debian
Utsav which took place in Pune last month. Debian Utsav is
celebration of Debian folks — meet at one place, eat,
drink and work on Debian!
as Praveen — one of the
main organisers — explained in an
announcement
message.
During the meeting there were some interesting talks and workshops, such as
Debian history
, What goes on in making Debian
and
Introducing to packaging
.
Other news
The 29th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:
- New Iceweasel add-on to help looking up developer sites
- Realtime collaborative text editing services for Debian
- DEP9: Availability of reconf-inetd (replacement for update-inetd)
- Security tracker improvements
- Derivatives census improvements
- mentors.d.n software upgrade
- Support for copyright format 1.0 (developed as DEP5)
Sylvestre Ledru wrote a report from the Parisian bug squashing party at IRILL's offices. 104 bugs were fixed. One of the key achievements of this BSP was that Cyril Brulebois fixed the last few packages that had been still using the Yada packaging tool.
Leandro Gómez sent out a call for volunteers for DebConf12 on his blog. Leandro explained how DebConf brings a lot of benefits to the Debian project: during the conference, Debian contributors can share knowledge and have discussions in order to improve various aspects of Debian, including packages, translations, and the infrastructure.
Jan Wagner sent out a call for volunteers to help at the Debian booth during Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. For more information, you can visit the organisation wiki page.
Upcoming events
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
- March 10-11, Perth, Australia — Perth Bug Squashing Party
- March 17-18, Chemnitz, Germany — Debian booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.
Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.
New Debian Contributors
Four applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, four applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and six people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Thorsten Alteholz, Javi Merino, Liang Guo, Oliver Sallou, Timo Aaltonen, Emile Joubert, Brian Thomason, Barry Warsaw, bojo42, Geoff Levand, Jerome Benoit, Cédric Pineau, Jeroen Keiren, and Samuel Bronson 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 7.0 Wheezy
, is currently affected by
575 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved
or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about
385 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.
There are also some hints on how to interpret these numbers.
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): mumble, libvorbis, libarchive, fex, libmodplug, notmuch, libxml2, postgresql-8.4, puppet, openjdk-6, moodle, file and movabletype-opensource. 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, and stable updates list) for announcements.
New and noteworthy packages
105 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- alt-key — tool to help developers improve keyboard accelerators
- bookletimposer — PDF imposition toolkit
- cde — package everything required to execute a Linux command on another computer
- comparepdf — command line tool for comparing two PDF files
- dh-lua — helper tools for maintaining Lua-related packages
- icc-profiles-free — ICC color profiles for use with color profile aware software
- maitreya — software for Vedic and western astrology
- transcode — text console video-stream processing tool
- vavoom — advanced Doom/Heretic/Hexen/Strife engine
Work-needing packages
Currently 144 packages are orphaned and 442 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.
Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
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Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Sylvestre Ledru, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.