Debian Project News - April 29th, 2013

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

Release date for Wheezy announced

Neil McGovern, on behalf of the Release Team, announced that the next stable version of Debian, Wheezy, will be released during the first weekend of May (4/5 May). Help with the final touches is welcome: release notes, installation guides and documentation in general, especially translations can always do with some work. Please see previous mails on these, and help if you can, explained Neil. And to show Debian your love, you can organise a Release Party in your city.

First Qt 5 packages in experimental

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer announced that the first Qt 5 packages have been accepted in the experimental suite. For now they are available only for the 64-bit PC (amd64) architecture, but soon they will be available in the 32-bit PC flavour as well. As for the ARM based ones, it will take a bit more time. These packages have no GLES2 or Wayland support, but non-official packages with GLES2/Wayland enabled will be provided at some point, for testing purposes.
As for future plans, Lisandro said that other parts of Qt 5 are on the way. And remember, these packages would not have been possible if it weren't for the great Debian's pkg-kde team.

Debian Edu Wheezy alpha release

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, made its first Wheezy based alpha release on 26 April. It aims to provide an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network, featuring:

You can read the full release announcement in the Debian Edu list archive. If you'd like to contribute to the project's development, please access the wiki page for new Debian Edu contributors.

Other news

The 32nd issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:

Niels Thykier sent some bits from the Lintian maintainers presenting some of its new features. Lintian is one of the most important and most used package checkers for Debian packages, primarily checking for Debian Policy violations and violations of various sub-policies.

Andreas Tille sent an update on the status of the Debian Blends project. In the mail, he explained the challenge that the various Debian Blends are currently facing, as well as asking for contributors to improve the general user experience for Wheezy users of Blends packages.

Upcoming events

For a list of Wheezy release parties, follow the constantly expanding wiki page, where all the known release events are listed.

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

3 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Simon Chopin, Markus Wanner and Matteo Cypriani 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 24 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 19 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): curl, xorg-server, xen and tinc. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 523 packages are orphaned and 145 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, Justin B Rye and Victor Nițu.