Debian Project News - May 28th, 2012

Welcome to this year's eleventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Bits from the Release Team

Cyril Brulebois sent some bits from the Release Team. Cyril announced that, although the exact date has not been determined yet, the freeze of Debian 7.0 Wheezy has been scheduled for the second half of June. Cyril also asked for help in fixing the high number of Release-Critical bugs affecting Wheezy.

Removal of Qt3 from Debian

Ana Beatriz Guerrero López blogged about the removal of Qt3 from Debian: the package was orphaned a year ago and, as nobody has volunteered to maintain it, is now a candidate for removal before the release of Wheezy. A wiki page tracking the status of the removal is available.

Report from Debian Utsavam

Praveen Arimbrathodiyil wrote a report from the Debian Utsavam event that was held at the end of April at MES college of Engineering in Kuttippuram, India. The two-day event was targeted at both new and advanced users, with talks on basic command-line usage as well as workshops on how to create Debian packages.

Interviews

ITWire published an interview with Stefano Zacchiroli, following his re-election as Debian Project Leader.

Other news

Christian Perrier noted that 14 languages are to be deactivated in the Debian Installer and called for volunteers to help to keep them working.

Christopher Huhn noted that the computer infrastructure at GSI uses Debian. GSI is a German non-profit research lab that runs a heavy ion accelerator: they run a Debian-based Linux farm with more than 1000 nodes.

Upcoming events

There are a couple of 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

17 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Jeremy Bicha, Dmitry Nezhevenko, Jerome Villeneuve Larouche, Mehdi Abaakouk, John Millikin, Juhani Numminen, Raoul Snyman, Maarten L. Hekkelman, Jeroen Dekkers, Simrun Basuita, Philip Muškovac, Jean-Louis Dupond, Tom Jampen, Sebastian Lohff, John R. Baskwill, Alexis Bienvenüe and Kevin Smith 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 Wheezy, is currently affected by 857 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 500 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): iceweasel, iceape, ffmpeg, gridengine, openoffice.org, ikiwiki, openssl, pidgin-otr, sympa, sudo, libxml2 and request-tracker3.8. 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

632 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Work-needing packages

Currently 425 packages are orphaned and 163 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.

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 Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and Justin B Rye.