Debian Project News - August 21st, 2012

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

Debian celebrates its 19th birthday

On August 16, the Debian Project celebrated its nineteenth birthday since Ian Murdock's original founding announcement.
Debian contributors and users celebrated it all over the globe: appreciation messages and pictures of the parties can be followed on the Thank you Debian website, maintained this year by Lincoln de Sousa and Marcelo Jorge Vieira. You can submit your own message directly on the web platform or using the Identi.ca hashtag #thxdebian.
For this occasion, Leandro Gómez created a nice birthday postcard while some other contributors blogged about their first experiences with Debian.

Help the Debian Installer team: test the new version of the installer

The Debian Installer team announced the first beta release of the installer for Debian 7.0 Wheezy. The team asks Debian users to help in testing and improving this new version of the installer: while there are some known issues with the installer that do not need to be reported, it is very important to try the installer in order to find all possible bugs before the release.
Problems should be reported as an installation report.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities. Stefano reported about the ongoing discussion with the FSF about Debian Freeness, as well as an important discussion about the trademark policy draft and the logo relicensing.

Other news

The 30th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:

Justin B. Rye has started an informational wiki page describing where package names come from, suggestively entitled "Why the name". As the page description says, giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition, and the explanations are often missing from the documentation, either because the developers imagine it's obvious (usually wrongly) or because they think nobody cares (and here they're usually right, or it would turn up as FAQ material).

Upcoming events

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

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

Five applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer, and eighteen people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Alexander Golovko, Elías Alejandro Año Mendoza, Gustavo Panizzo, Ian Campbell, Nicolas Bourdaud, Marc Pegon, Marco Maria Francesco De Santis, Jose G. López, Ariane Boehm, Jocelyn Jaubert, Emmanuel Kasper, Sascha Steinbiss, Eva Reisinger, Julia Ertl, Andrej Belym, Julien Puydt, Markus Frosch, Daniele E. Domenichelli, Emmanuel Promayon, Ralf Jung, Vincent Hobeïka, Cedric Staniewski, and Guy Yachdav 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 487 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 295 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): bind9, krb5, isc-dhcp, openoffice.org, libxml2, fckeditor, globus-gridftp-server, openttd, expat, libotr, php5, icedove, python-django, rssh, and xen. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: clamav. Please read it 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 465 packages are orphaned and 143 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot, Justin B Rye and Victor Nițu.