Debian Project News - September 16th, 2013
Welcome to this year's sixteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
- Debian Women IRC meeting
- Bits from the Release Team
- Bits from the DPL
- Videos of DebConf13 available
- Other news
- New Debian Contributors
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
Debian Women IRC meeting
The Debian Women group held an IRC meeting on September 7 on the topic of how to encourage women to get involved in Debian. Projects were discussed for the next Outreach Program for Women, but also smaller tasks and rewards for people that do not know how to contribute. It was also proposed to hold local events, possibly with other groups of women involved in FLOSS, and to restart IRC training sessions. The meeting was well attended and discussions continued after the official end. Margarita Manterola published minutes of the meeting.
Bits from the Release Team
Niels Thykier sent some bits from the Release Team, containing proposals to improve the Jessie development cycle: a change to the testing migration rule, automated removals and automated metrics for architecture qualification for Jessie.
In related news, Jonathan Wiltshire called for release goals for Jessie. To propose a goal, create a wiki page before September 30 with a short description of the goal, details of the advocate(s) and how the goal will be achieved.
Bits from the DPL
Lucas Nussbaum sent his monthly report of DPL activities for August 2013. Among other things, Lucas mentioned the status of MariaDB in Debian and the fact that Debian was invited to participate in the OpenZFS community. He also summarised some actions taken as a consequence of the survey of new contributors, such as the creation of a package how-can-i-help, and moves to encourage the asking of packaging questions on localised mailing lists. He also mentioned that the next Outreach Program for Women will start soon. If you are willing to be a coordinator for the Debian side, please contact the Debian Women mailing list.
Videos of DebConf13 available
Thanks to the amazing work of the DebConf Video Team, there are video recordings available for download of many sessions of DebConf13, which took place in August, in Vaumarcus, Switzerland. Sylvestre Ledru announced on his blog that they can be viewed through a nice HTML5 interface on the IRILL website.
Francesca Ciceri made a start on providing English subtitles for some of these videos and getting them translated into various languages. Some are already available online. If you would like to help with this initiative, have a look at the dedicated page on the DebConf wiki.
If you enjoyed the work of the DebConf Video Team, you can leave a kind message on their wiki page.
Other news
Raphaël Hertzog announced on his blog that the first chapters of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook are now available updated for Debian 7.
Andreas Tille put a spotlight on two Debian infrastructure teams that are in need of contributors: Internationalisation and DebTags. If you want to contribute to Debian's infrastructure and do work directly visible for users, please consider joining these teams.
Martin Zobel-Helas sent his report of the GanetiConf 2013, where he gave a talk about Debian's experience of Ganeti. Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool that has been deployed to all of the new Debian KVM virtualization servers.
New Debian Contributors
8 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 12 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and 33 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Hannes von Haugwitz, Nicolas Dandrimont, Brian Gupta, Richard Michael Hartmann, Agustin Henze, Alberto Garcia, James Downing Page, Michael Beattie, Apollon Oikonomopoulos, Joao Eriberto Mota Filho, Maarten Lankhorst, Martijn van Brummelen, Salvo 'LtWorf' Tomaselli, Uwe Kleine-König, Colin King, Joe Healy, Adrien Grellier, Phillip Susi, Sergey Suslov, Tom Jampen, Adam Stokes, Oliver Sander, Daniel Mizyrycki, Petr Salinger, David Suárez, Stephen Nelson, Pablo Oliveira, Maarten Lankhorst, Laurent Destailleur, Bas Couwenberg, Emanuele Aina, Daniel Pfeiffer, Jack Bates, Dirk Huenniger, Andrea Rota, Guillaume Bouteille, Jose M Calhariz, Olof Johansson, Jackson Doak, Simon Kainz, Micah Gersten, Miles Lubin, Axel Wagner, Anton Balashov, Benjamin Barenblat, Tonnerre Lombard, Federico Brega, David Parsons, Axel Wagner, Léo Cavaillé, Stewart Smith, Maarten L. Hekkelman, and Thomas Bechtold into our project!
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): php-radius, openjdk-6, bind9, openafs, gnupg, libgcrypt11, chromium-browser, otrs2, wireshark, iceweasel, putty, swift, ruby1.9.1, cacti, python-django, chromium-browser, php5, kfreebsd-9, tiff, linux, icedove, cacti, exactimage, asterisk, imagemagick, libmodplug, phpbb3, exactimage, python-django, wireshark, and wordpress. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the packages: tzdata and libdatetime-timezone-perl. 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
1598 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
- apt-listdifferences — source differences notification tool
- ben — toolbox for Debian maintainers
- berusky2 — logic game Bugs Escape 3D
- calypso — CalDAV/CardDAV server with git backend
- codesearch — regular expression search over large bodies of source code
- curseofwar — fast-paced action strategy game for Linux based on ncurses
- cyclograph — route altimetry plotting application
- dateutils — nifty command line date and time utilities
- dgit — git interoperability with the Debian archive
- dianara — client for the pump.io federated social network
- git-remote-gcrypt — encrypted git repositories
- how-can-i-help — opportunities for contributing to Debian
- iwyu — tool to analyze #includes in C and C++ source files
- jitsi — VoIP and Instant Messaging client
- mnemonicode — tool to convert binary data into a sequence of words
- morris — nine men's morris game
- seahorse-adventures — help Barbie the seahorse float on bubbles to the moon
- stegsnow — steganography using ASCII files
Work-needing packages
Currently 535 packages are orphaned and 135 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, Justin B Rye and Thomas Vincent.