Debian Project News - July 22nd, 2013
Welcome to this year's fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Interviews
- Bits from the DPL
- Community distribution
- New Debian Contributors
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
Interviews
Lucas Nussbaum, Debian Project Leader, gave an interview to ITWire highlighting ways to boost innovation within the project.
Bits from the DPL
Lucas Nussbaum also sent his monthly report of DPL activities for June 2013. Among other things, Lucas mentioned the current state of the NEW queue, where nearly 300 packages are waiting. The FTP team welcomed four new members ten days ago to help them process the NEW packages, but they are still looking for help. He also mentioned that Debian is now part of the Network Time Foundation.
Community distribution
Debian topped a poll on the
FOSS
Force blog asking readers to name a legitimate community
distribution
. 255 people took part in the poll, and as multiple
choices were allowed a total of 855 votes were cast. Debian received
173 votes (20%), with Arch Linux (141 votes, 16%) and Linux Mint
(95 votes, 11%) behind it. Interestingly, the results were in line
with the opinions of the blog's editors about what it means to be a
community distribution.
New Debian Contributors
Five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Nicolas Guilbert, William Blough, Ingo Oeser, Louis Bettens, and George Gensure into our project!
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): chromium-browser, tomcat6, php5, and openjdk-7. 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
282 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- apparmor-easyprof — AppArmor easyprof profiling tool
- boinc-app-seti-graphics — SETI@home application for the BOINC client (with graphics)
- fceux — all-in-one NES/Famicom Emulator
- gocode — Go autocompletion daemon
- leocad — virtual brick CAD software
- monkeysign — OpenPGP key signing and exchange for humans
- pairs — memory and pairs game
- print-manager — printer configuration and monitoring tools
- smemcap — data collection tool for memory reporting
- xml-security-c-utils — C++ library for XML Digital Signatures (utilities)
Work-needing packages
Currently 492 packages are orphaned and 150 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 David Prévot, Justin B Rye and Paweł Sadkowski.