Debian Project News - October 15th, 2012

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

Report from the FTP Team meeting

Joerg Jaspert sent a report from the FTP Team meeting held from the 14th to the 20th of September in Fulda. During the meeting, the team implemented a new interface for managing Debian Maintainer permissions which will allow them to deprecate the use of the DMUA flag. A huge improvement was also made in pdiff generation: in the past the Debian archive provided diff files to support incremental updates, but without great results. Thanks to a rewrite of the code, it is now possible to merge older diffs together in order to have a faster and more reliable final result: users now only have to download two diffs instead of up to 56.
The meeting also provided the opportunity to promote Ansgar Burchardt to FTPMaster; congratulations Ansgar!
As usual, the team would like to thank everyone who donated to the Debian Project, as well as Office Factory Fulda for hosting the meeting.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his usual report of DPL activities for September 2012: among others things, Stefano continued his work on the relicensing of the Debian Open Use logo, which is now dual-licensed under LGPL3+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0. In addition, Stefano sent a call for help for the Google Code-In initiative. In order to participate, Debian needs both mentors and admins; if you're interested you can volunteer on the soc-coordination mailing list.

Decrease in bug reporting rate in Debian

Christian Perrier noted that Debian bug #690000 was reported last Monday, three months and eight days after bug #680000. This led to some interesting reflections on the decrease in the bug reporting rate in Debian: according to Christian, this could be related to the freeze of Wheezy but could also be the symptom of a decrease of the overall activity in the project. Don Armstrong sought a confirmation of this theory, analysing the data from the Bug Tracking System and found that while there certainly are specific periods of time with a decline in bug reporting, there's an even more alarming trend of a decrease in bug reporting in Debian which has been happening since 2006.

Other news

Gijs Hillenius reported that the municipality of Vieira do Minho, in the north of Portugal, has been running Debian on its servers for several years. In fact, the administration of the municipality decided to use open source software wherever possible, also switching to it for its desktop computers during March this year. For António Rebelo, head of the IT department, these IT solutions are flexible, easy to study, test and switch […] and, because of the lower costs, [it] results in a more sustainable IT infrastructure.

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

7 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome José Ernesto Dávila Pantoja, Jerome St-Louis, Vivia Nikolaidou, Eugene Seliverstov, James Hunt, Markus Koschany and Louis Bouchard 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 246 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): libxslt, icedove, hostapd, and bacula. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 471 packages are orphaned and 136 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

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