Debian Project News - October 29th, 2012

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

Debian Installer 7.0 Beta3 released

Cyril Brulebois announced the third beta release of the Debian Installer 7.0. One of the major improvements in this version of the Debian Installer is EFI support for 64-bit PCs, which allows installation in EFI mode instead of using the legacy BIOS. This is a first step towards full support for UEFI Secure Boot, which is not yet present. Another interesting new feature in the installer is full IPv6 support during the installation process. You can check the errata for details and a full list of known issues.

Reports from the latest BSPs

Jonathan Wiltshire sent a report from the Alcester BSP held between 12 and 14 October. During the party, six Debian Developers and one Debian contributor worked on a total of 51 bugs.
During the same weekend, Dutch Debian developers and enthusiasts gathered in Utrecht for another Bug Squashing Party: they worked on several RC bugs as well as debconf translations.

Other news

Arno Töll, mentors.debian.net maintainer, drafted an initial proposal last month for a simple procedure for salvaging unmaintained packages. After some discussion, Lucas Nussbaum, QA team member, put forward an updated proposal for allowing contributors to orphan an unmaintained package, and make it easy to adopt the package after this first step. While the discussion is still ongoing, Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader, is confident that a consensus will emerge from it.

Raphael Geissert created a nice map of the Debian mirror network.

Martín Ferrari announced the birth of the Ireland Debian User Group (DUG): for more information you can contact the group mailing list.

Andreas Tille sent some bits from Debian Pure Blends, summarising the current situation of the various blends.

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

Five applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Guo Yixuan (郭溢譞), Mike Gabriel, Xiangfu Liu (刘向富), Marcin Juszkiewicz, Lifeng Sun, Xerxes Rånby, Cesare Falco, Carlos Miguel Jenkins Pérez, Gianfranco Costamagna, and Christopher Knadle 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 464 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 235 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. Lucas Nussbaum published some more detailed statistics.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libexif, bind9, tiff, cups-pk-helper, viewvc, tinyproxy, iceweasel, exim4, request-tracker3.8, and rtfm. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the packages tzdata, clamav, and clive. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 474 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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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.