Debian Project News - April 15th, 2013

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

New DPL elected

Lucas Nussbaum has just been elected with a small majority ahead of his main opponent Moray Allan by the Debian Developers to represent the project. Stefano Zacchiroli, outgoing project leader, welcomes his successor: I've known Lucas Nussbaum and his passionate Debian involvement for many many years now, and I trust the Project is in good hands with him. Good luck, Lucas!

Debian accepted for Google Summer of Code

For the eighth year in a row, Debian has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code (SoC), proposing a number of stipends for students aged 18 or older to write code for selected free and open source software projects. Eligible students for this program may consult the list of projects proposed by Debian and contact mentors in order to prepare their application. More information is available on the dedicated wiki page. If you are interested in applying to this program, send an email to the SoC coordination mailing list, or come and chat in the #debian-soc IRC channel. In order to offer the best mentorship for students, the Debian SoC team is also looking for co-mentors for the proposed projects.

Debian participates in Outreach Program for Women

Mònica Ramírez Arceda announced that Debian will participate in the next round of the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women, started in 2006 by the GNOME Foundation, joined by other FOSS organisations. Debian is proposing an internship from June to September to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing, and web development. All women who are not yet Debian Developers or Debian Maintainers are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don't need to be students. Please consult the dedicated wiki page for details.

Other news

Bruce Byfield, a Canadian journalist, wrote an article trying to debunk some myths about Debian.

The DebConf team announced that DebConf14 will be held in Portland, Oregon, USA in August 2014.

Sylvestre Ledru blogged about the availability of new Twitter and Identi.ca feeds for the latest uploads to the Debian archive, in addition to those already existing for the NEW queue, new bugs and removed packages.

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 39 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 32 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): libapache-mod-security, postgresql-9.1 and postgresql-8.4. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: postgresql-9.0 and postgresql-9.1. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 513 packages are orphaned and 147 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 Cédric Boutillier, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.