Debian Project News - December 24th, 2012

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

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report of DPL activities for November: among other things, he described recent progress in the work of the debian-cloud initiative, the budget approval process for DebConf13, and IRC meetings of the DPL helpers, a group of people who have offered to share the load of DPL duties.

Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests

Niels Thykier, a member of the release team, blogged about the progress of the release process for Wheezy. Wheezy has now been frozen for almost six months. More than the total number of RC bugs, it is the number of RC bugs fixed in unstable but not in Wheezy that worries Niels. This situation is mainly due to unblock requests that none of the members of the release team has had time to respond to. If you want to help with the release, and don't find any RC bugs to fix, you can review some of the unblock requests, and help to decrease the number that remain unanswered.

Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin

Wouter Verhelst published a report about the BSP he organized in his company's office in Mechlin, Belgium. A couple of RC bugs were fixed and progress was made on a few more. Although Wouter regrets that he was the only Belgian Debian Developer present, he was happy to welcome local newcomers who had never contributed to Debian before. Because of this and the fun they all had, the event can be considered to have been a success.

Other news

Sylvestre Ledru announced the availability of videos and slides for the presentations given during the Mini DebConf held last month in Paris.

Petter Reinholdtsen blogged about Bitcoin support in Debian.

New Debian Contributors

2 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers and 8 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Rahul Amaram, Markus Frosch, Thiago Franco de Moraes, Markus Tornow, Gert Wollny, Denis Laxade, Gary Kramlich, Richard Ulrich, Michael Franzl and Csillag Tamas 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 323 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 133 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): rssh, apache2, libxml2, mysql-5.1, xen, iceweasel, iceape, bogofilter, perl, libcgi-pm-perl, icedove and tiff. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 528 packages are orphaned and 138 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 and Justin B Rye.