Debian Project News - October 28th, 2013

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

Bits from the Release Team

Niels Thykier announced in the bits from the Release Team that Jessie, the current testing version of Debian, will be frozen next year on 5 November 2014, at 23:59 UTC. A draft of the freeze policy, describing the changes that can be considered for inclusion in Jessie after the freeze, is already available. Niels also summarised the results of the porter roll-call of architectures in unstable and testing, and indicated that the architecture qualification page has been updated to include the names of the current porters. To conclude, he itemised the list of release goals that have been proposed and that will be reviewed by the Release Team for possible adoption, and indicated that Britney, the testing migration script, and build services are now able to understand and process pkg:any multiarch dependency relationships.

s390 removed from the archive in favour of s390x

Julien Cristau announced the removal of the s390 architecture from Jessie. s390 was an official architecture for IBM servers since Woody and has been replaced by s390x, its 64-bit counterpart, since the release of Wheezy. The process was completed by the removal of s390 from Sid as reported by Mark Hymers.

manpages.debian.net now an official service

Thanks to Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña and the Debian System Administrators Team, the service providing on-line versions of any manual page available in Debian, previously available from the unofficial debian.net domain, can now be reached at https://manpages.debian.org. The service is especially useful for users who need to read manual pages from packages that are not installed.

Debian increases its popularity on web servers

According to a recent W3Techs survey, Debian continues to be the most popular GNU/Linux distribution on web servers, and has increased its popularity from 29.4% in January 2012 (when it overtook CentOS to take the lead) to 32.7% in October 2013. Debian's derivative Ubuntu is also growing, and the two together have a double lead (58.5% of Linux web servers use Debian/Ubuntu). The survey is based on the analysis of the top million web sites according to Alexa, in order to select a representative sample of established sites, and focused only on the technologies used for web sites (and not individual web pages or desktop installations).

Other news

The eighth update of the oldstable distribution of Debian (codename Squeeze) was released on October 20.

The Debian Outreach Program for Women matching fund 2013 will still be running for a bit over two more weeks. For details, and to give a donation, please see the Donate now page.

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

Two applicants have been accepted and four people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Patty Langasek, Christian Hofstaedtler, Ross Gammon, James Cowgill, Pall Sigurdsson, and Pierre Blanc into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): drupal6, systemd, libapache2-mod-fcgid, libxml2, mysql-5.1, python-crypto, polarssl, librack-ruby, and xorg-server. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: multipath-tools. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 535 packages are orphaned and 160 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 Laura Arjona, Cédric Boutillier, Andrei Popescu, Justin B Rye and Thomas Vincent.