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

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:

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:

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:

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.

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Sylvestre Ledru, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.