Debian Project News - November 13th, 2013

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

Bits from the DPL

Lucas Nussbaum sent his monthly report of DPL activities for October 2013. Among other things, Lucas mentioned important ongoing discussions about the choice of default init system for Debian (which has been brought to the technical committee) and on the possible use of CDNs to deliver content to Debian's users, as well as the participation of Debian in the Outreach Program For Women. In another message, he published the schedule of the DPL helpers meetings for the next few weeks.

A new service to help in making Debian bootstrappable

Johannes Schauer announced the availability of a new service, bootstrap.debian.net, which presents in a human readable way some useful information about source packages that need changes to make Debian bootstrappable. This information is gathered from the output of botch, a tool that can solve cyclic build dependencies using staged build information, and then output an order in which packages must be built to end up with the desired set of packages, thus making Debian bootstrappable in an automatic way.

Mips64el porter box ready for use

YunQiang Su announced that after one year and a half of work, the mips64el port is in quite good shape with more than 7600 packages built. YunQiang Su has received a new board which is running the mips64el port, and is willing to give access to anyone needing to port packages to this architecture.

Last days to donate to Debian Outreach Program for Women

The matching program to help fund Debian participation in OPW will end on November 14. There are just a few days left to make donations and help the program reach its funding target. Brian Gupta wrote an article on Debian's blog describing the rules of the matching program. Please consider donating today!

Other news

Charles Plessy announced that version 3.9.5.0 of Debian Policy has been released.

Hector Oron published minutes of the recent DSA Team meeting.

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

Four people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Gioele Barabucci, Vitor Augusto, Patrick Ruckstuhl, and Lars Dieckow into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): chromium-browser, icu, roundcube, iceweasel, strongswan, nss, tryton-client, and wireshark, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: usemod-wiki (for Wheezy and Squeeze). 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 540 packages are orphaned and 155 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier and Justin B Rye.