Debian Project News - January 21st, 2013
Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Bits from Debian Med
- A look into the Linux kernel of Debian
Wheezy
- 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 Debian Med
Andreas Tille sent some bits from the Debian Med team, reporting some recent initiatives of the team, such as the Mentoring of the Month efforts. Andreas also announced that in February there will be a real life meeting of Debian Med developers and users, in Kiel (Germany); all interested people are invited to join.
A look into the Linux kernel of Debian Wheezy
Ben Hutchings, member of the Debian Kernel team and maintainer of the 3.2.y stable series at kernel.org, wrote a series of three blogposts (part 1, part 2, part 3) about the additional features (missing from mainline 3.2) that will be included in the Linux kernel to be shipped with the next Debian stable.
Other news
Petter Reinholdtsen analysed the Debian archive to compile a list of the 20 most supported MIME types in Debian.
Bernhard R. Link took a closer look at cryptographic signatures in an informative article.
Ian Jackson summarised the ongoing discussion on a trademark policy for Debian.
Upcoming events
There is one upcoming Debian-related event:
- February, 2-3, Brussels, Belgium — Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM)
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
One person has started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Alexandre Raymond 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 249 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 84 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): zendframework, emacs23, rails, asterisk, proftpd-dfsg, qemu-kvm, qemu and rails. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: freetype and icinga. 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
35 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- liblingua-en-findnumber-perl — module for locating (written) numbers in English text
- libmath-prime-util-perl — utilities related to prime numbers, including fast sieves and factoring
- libsgml-dtdparse-perl — Perl modules and scripts for manipulating SGML and XML DTDs
- python-secretstorage — Python module for storing secrets - Python 2.x version
Work-needing packages
Currently 521 packages are orphaned and 142 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.
Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
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Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and Justin B Rye.