Debian Project News - October 14th, 2013

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

Debian Outreach Program for Women matching fund 2013

In an effort to get more women involved in FOSS, the Debian Project will be participating in the GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women (OPW), which is an internship program similar to Google's Summer of Code. Unlike the Google program, OPW does not require participants to be students, and as well as coding projects it can also cover non-coding tasks such as translation, graphic design, documentation, bug triage and marketing. In order to aid this effort, one of Debian's generous sponsors has offered to start a matching fund in USD to fund Debian's participation in OPW. For details, and to give a donation, please see our Donate now page. Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make OPW an even more useful program for Debian in the future. If you wish to apply as an intern participant, please review the available coding and non-coding internships and follow the instructions for application.

Bits from the DPL

Lucas Nussbaum sent his monthly report of DPL activities for September 2013. Among other topics, Lucas called for more developers for dak (Debian Archive Kit), the software suite behind the Debian archive, and debbugs, the software behind the Debian bug tracking system. If you want to contribute to one of these two critical pieces of software from Debian's infrastructure, you can contact their respective teams directly via their mailing lists. He also announced a process to streamline small expenses by Debian System Administrators.

Debian behind the biggest website in Sweden

Royal Pingdom published an article about the technology behind Aftonbladet.se, the main online component of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. With its 3 million unique visitors and 15 TB of traffic each day, Aftonbladet is the biggest website in Sweden. For its infrastructure, Aftonbladet uses Debian on its servers, with MySQL and Tomcat.

Automatic removal of packages from testing

Niels Thykier, on behalf of the Release Team, announced that autoremoval of packages with release-critical bugs has been activated in the testing suite: if a non-key package suffers from a bug considered as critical for the release in testing and unstable suites, and this bug hasn't seen any activity for 14 days, it will be automatically marked for removal from the testing suite.

Interviews

Lucas Nussbaum, Debian Project Leader, has been interviewed by Jonathan Nadeau for the Frostcast podcast.

Other news

The second update of the stable distribution of Debian (codename Wheezy) was released on October 12.

Raphael Geissert continues his blogpost series Bashism of the Week, with this week an article about maths in POSIX Shell.

Paul Sarbinowski published on Google Play Store and F-Droid the Android application he has been developing during the Google Summer of Code: DebianDroid. With this application, you can track packages and bugs, or look at some Ultimate Debian Database queries.

Steve McIntyre announced a few details about the organisation of the Mini DebConf to be held in Cambridge, UK on November 14-17. For further information and to sign up to attend, please visit the dedicated page on the Debian wiki.

Upcoming events

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian wiki, 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

Eight applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and three people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Alberto Luaces Fernández, Markus Koschany, Eugenio Cano-Manuel Mendoza, James Hunt, Eugene Zhukov, Michele Cane, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe, IOhannes m zmölnig, maxigas, Daniel Lintott, and acrefoot into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): linux-2.6, proftpd-dfsg, icedtea-web, kfreebsd-9, torque, nas, typo3-src, gnupg, gnupg2, and ejabberd. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 532 packages are orphaned and 151 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, Brian Gupta and Justin B Rye.