Debian Project News - March 4th, 2013
Welcome to this year's fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Update for Debian 6.0: 6.0.7 released
- Call for projects and mentors for Debian GSoC 2013
- Wheezy release progress
- Debian at Open Source Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring
- arm64 image available
- 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?
Update for Debian 6.0: 6.0.7 released
The seventh update for Debian 6.0
(codenamed Squeeze
) has been released. This update mainly adds
corrections of security problems to the stable release, along with some
adjustments for serious problems.
Call for projects and mentors for Debian GSoC 2013
Paul Tagliamonte, newly appointed administrator
for Debian participation in the Google Summer of Code
program 2013, asked all Debian contributors for projects
and mentors to help Debian participate in the initiative this year.
Everyone (member of the Debian project or not, student or
not) is welcome to submit
their ideas, and to try and find people willing to mentor the
projects
, explained Paul in his mail. Information on how to
submit proposals is available in the
relevant wiki page.
You can also contact Paul and the other GSoC administrators for Debian on their
mailing
list or on their IRC channel, #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.
Wheezy release progress
Niels Thykier, release team member, noticed that the current pace of RC bug fixes is slowing down, with only 1.1 RC bugs fixed a day since his last report. About 200 RC bugs are left to be fixed, and if the pace of RC bug fixes does not pick up, the release team may need to remove packages along with their reverse dependencies.
Debian at Open Source Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring
Hideki Yamane reported about Debian
participation at Open Source Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring at Meisei
University, in Tokyo, Japan. Debian was present with a booth where Hideki
and other contributors talked with users and enthusiasts. Takahide Nojima
delivered a talk titled Debian Update
focused on the latest Debian
achievements.
arm64 image available
Wookey announced the
availability
of the arm64 image. This is the culmination of a
three year long effort to make Debian bootstrappable, which has been
used for the first time on the port to the 64-bit ARMv8
architecture. Whilst it should be considered alpha-grade for now, it
represents a great achievement: all these packages were cross-built on
raring, untangling cyclic dependencies with build profiles making this the first
(non x86) self-bootstrapped Debian port ever
, explained Wookey.
Getting this port working has been
, he added.
The current
status of the bootstrap is online,
whilst more information on the port (and how to build
images) is available on the
wiki page of the project.
interesting
because it's
attempting four new things all at once: multiarch (file layouts and dependencies),
crossbuilding (tools and packaging support in a distro that historically
was always natively built), arm64 (aarch64) support in
packages that need it, and build-profiles to linearise the
build-order
Other news
Paul Wise blogged about a QA tool for finding packages' inadequacies (broken symlinks, missing copyright files, obsolete conffiles, etc.) called adequate and developed by Jakub Wilk. People interested in software quality are invited to participate in Debian's QA initiatives.
Kurt Roeckx, Debian Project Secretary, announced the timetable for the DPL election.
Hideki Yamane blogged about
the
series of articles about Debian he is writing for the Japanese
magazine Software Design
.
Olivier Sallou sent a report from the Debian Med sprint held during the last weekend of February in Schönberg, Germany. The team worked mainly on packaging new software as well as updating existing packages.
Upcoming events
There is one upcoming Debian-related event:
- March, 16-17, Chemnitz, Germany — Debian booth at the 15th Chemnitzer Linux-Tage
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
Three people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Alexandre Dreyer, Sebastiaan Mathot and Erik Sjolund 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 174 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 69 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): nss-pam-ldapd, openjpeg, postgresql-8.4, squid3, linux-2.6, fusionforge, python-django, cfingerd and xen. 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
102 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- epubcheck — ePub book format validator
- firewalld — dynamically managed firewall with support for network zones
- kbtin — tintin++ style text-based MUD client
- miceamaze — video game with mice in a maze
- opensesame — graphical experiment builder for the social sciences
- powerdebug — tool to display regulator, sensor and clock information
- python-gsw — Python implementation of the Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater
Work-needing packages
Currently 495 packages are orphaned and 143 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 Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.