Debian Project News - September 3rd, 2012

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

Debian's presence at RMLL 2012

The yearly Libre Software Meeting, better known by its French name Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (RMLL), took place in Geneva, Switzerland, from 7 to 12 July; Anne Forker sent a report about the Debian presence there, completing the report by Andreas Tille mentioned in a previous issue. The Debian project was well represented with a booth, four lectures and a workshop. At the booth, T-shirts, umbrellas, Swiss army knives and other goodies could be purchased. The booth was also a meeting point for fans and contributors of Debian, a place to discuss computer issues and for socialisation between conference attendees. Some pictures of the event taken by Marc Duck Dequènes are available on his website.

64-bit PC: primary Debian architecture

According to the Debian Popularity Contest, 64-bit PC is now the primary architecture in terms of number of submissions via the popularity-contest package, which periodically and anonymously sends statistics about the usage of installed packages. With a bit more than 60,000 submissions, 64-bit PC just overtook 32-bit PC. These leading architectures are followed by armel and powerpc, for which the number of submissions is several orders of magnitude behind.

New mirrors closer to Debian users

The Debian mirrors team, together with our sponsors, is happy to announce three new mirrors: in Russia, provided by the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI whose administrators are pleased to provide a full Debian mirror to Russian users; in Vietnam, provided by MAYCHU; and in Malaysia, provided by the Multimedia University of Malaysia. For other countries, the full list of mirrors is available online, as well as the experimental redirector which will automatically take into account these new mirrors. There are still countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror; sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the mirrors team.

Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis

Laura Arjona recently defended her Master's degree thesis entitled Translations in libre software. Many aspects of Debian are included, such as a case study about translation projects and teams in Debian; another one about The Debian Administration Handbook; and an interview with Javier Taravilla, a member of the l10n-spanish (Spanish localisation) team. The more I see of the Debian community, the more I like it and it amazes me, she said when she announced her project to the Debian mailing list. Laura started to contribute to the spam cleaning efforts, and she plans to help in the l10n-spanish team soon. The manuscript of her thesis as well as the slides are available from her blog.

Other news

Andrea Mennucci announced that the new GPG key for the debdelta package is now available.

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

Three applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, and two people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Cleto Martín Angelina, Benjamin Mesing, Andreas Rütten, and Zang MingJie 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 454 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 264 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): libapache2-mod-rpaf, pcp, postgresql-8.4, rtfm, otrs2, and typo3-src. 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

Two packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently: the installation guides for the two new official architectures armhf and s390x.

Work-needing packages

Currently 454 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 Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Simon Paillard, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.