Debian Project News - September 17th, 2012
Welcome to this year's eighteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Bits from the FTP Team
- Bits from the DPL
- Technical Committee Nominations
- Interviews
- 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?
Bits from the FTP Team
Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.
Bits from the DPL
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his usual monthly report of DPL activities: during August, Stefano continued his efforts on a new trademark policy and on the DFSG-free logo relicensing (with the help of members of the Software Freedom Law Center).
Technical Committee Nominations
The technical committee has called for nominations to fill Manoj Srivastava's seat. To nominate yourself or someone else, send email to debian-ctte-private@debian.org with the subject "CTTE Nomination of loginname", where loginname is the nominee's Debian account login. Please see the call for nominations for more information.
Interviews
Jennifer Cloer interviewed Ben Hutchings, member of the Linux kernel team in Debian.
Other news
Cyril Brulebois announced the second beta release of the Debian Installer 7.0.
Christian Perrier reported about the state of translations for debconf screens: five languages have reached 100% (German, Russian, Swedish, French, Portuguese). Many thanks to all the translators!
Mattias Wadenstein published some statistics on the number of accesses to the server hosting DebConf12 video recordings: during July and August, 3653.8 GiB of data have been downloaded by 7162 unique IP addresses.
Upcoming events
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
- September, 24, Guaíba, RS, Brazil — talk and debate: What is the Debian Project
- September, 29-30, online on debian-fr@chat.jabberfr.org Jabber chat room — JabberFR Bug Squashing Party
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 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Ben Howard, Marcin Juszkiewicz, Alexander Golovko and Ehud Meiri 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 443 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 243 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): moin, zabbix, mahara, beaker, qemu-kvm, xen-qemu-dm-4.0, xen, qemu, freeradius, bind9, tor, request-tracker3.8 (updated announcement), and devscripts. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package libreoffice. 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
47 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- alot — text mode MUA using notmuch mail
- dmtx-utils — utilities for reading and writing Data Matrix 2D barcodes
- gammaray — tool for examining the internals of Qt applications
- pxz — parallel LZMA compressor
- pynag — command line interface to Nagios configuration
- python3-debian — Python 3 modules to work with Debian-related data formats
- tribler — Python based BitTorrent/Internet TV application
Work-needing packages
Currently 457 packages are orphaned and 141 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 Don Armstrong, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and Justin B Rye.