Debian Project News - June 24th, 2013
Welcome to this year's thirteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- DebConf13 will have its DebCamp
- Debian Code Search on video
- Bits from the Debian System Administrators
- Interviews
- Other news
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
DebConf13 will have its DebCamp
When the DebConf team announced the official location and dates for DebConf13, there was much uncertainty about whether a DebCamp could be organised, for budget reasons. The DebConf team has now announced that DebConf13 will have its DebCamp, which will last for almost a full week, starting from August 6, at the main conference venue.
If you plan to go to DebConf13, you have until June 30 to reconfirm your attendance and thus validate your registration.
Debian Code Search on video
Debian Code Search is a search engine written by Michael Stapelberg for source code distributed by Debian. It can be used from codesearch.debian.net. Michael Stapelberg wrote on his blog that the video of the talk he gave at GPN13 about Debian Code Search is available. He explains the motivation behind this project and how the code works. The talk is in German, but Michael created English subtitles, so that more people can enjoy the video.
Bits from the Debian System Administrators
Peter Palfrader sent a report on the DSA team sprint, which took place recently in LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. During this meeting, Debian system administrators discussed among other things the progress of the migration of services from physical to virtual machines, the deployment of a Content Delivery Network for static data served by webservers, the possibility of authenticating alioth users via Debian's Single Sign-On server, and longer term goals for configuration management. They listed the points of contact for the DSA team and their current guidelines. The DSA team thanks the LinuxHotel and the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Information Technology departments of the University of British Columbia, who made this meeting possible.
Interviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, there have been two Debian Edu interviews with Jonathan Carter and Victor Nițu, who both describe, among other things, how they got involved in Debian Edu and their views about it.
In an article about LLVM and Clang 3.3, the French website LinuxFR.org interviewed (in French) Sylvestre Ledru about his work on LLVM and Clang in Debian.
Other news
Julien Viard de Galbert wrote a detailed tutorial for building custom Debian installation CDs with simple-cdd.
Ingo Juergensmann announced that as a side effect of the Debian m68k port resurrection, he decided to set up a mirror of debian-ports.org on buildd.net.
Steve Kemp presented a quick hack to manipulate APT's sources.list. Others in the comments proposed alternative solutions. You could use one of them to ensure there are no debian-multimedia.org entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): mesa, pymongo, chromium-browser, dbus, fail2ban, wireshark, xml-security-c, haproxy and otrs2. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package openvpn. Please read it 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
116 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- beignet — Intel OpenCL library
- coquelicot — "one-click" file sharing web application with a focus on users' privacy
- cpp11-migrate-3.3 — tool to convert C++98 and C++03 code to C++11
- dh-acc — debhelper addon to compare ABI compatibility of shared C/C++ library versions
- dh-systemd — debhelper add-on to handle systemd unit files
- git-bzr — fast, scalable, distributed revision control system (bzr interoperability)
- sgabios — BIOS option ROM to provide legacy serial console for x86
- system-storage-manager — system storage management tool
- zathura-cb — comic book archive support for zathura
Work-needing packages
Currently 480 packages are orphaned and 153 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 and Justin B Rye.