Debian Project News - May 26th, 2014

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

ARM64 help wanted

Wookey sent a report about the state of the ARM64 port. Currently, the port has 2 buildds running, and over 4200 packages built. The ARM64 porters are asking for help and volunteers to assist with over 300 packages that need small trivial updates. They also need assistance with bug filing, wiki updates, and programming language porting.

edos.debian.net back as qa.debian.org/dose

Ralf Treinen announced that the analysis of packages that could not be installed due to dependency issues, carried out from 2006 onward under the name edos.debian.net, is back on a Debian project machine as qa.debian.org/dose. This comes with some enhancements: the use of dose-debcheck, a multiarch-aware tool; improved explanations of non-installability; and a classification according to the duration of non-installability (going back to April 5, 2014).

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

Michael Banck sent some bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters, retracing the evolution of the GNU/Hurd port during the last two years. Since their last message, they have been working on several fronts: whereas Debian Wheezy does not provide an official Hurd port, last year they released a Wheezy-like version of Debian GNU/Hurd sid, as qemu and Debian Installer images.
On the archive coverage front, more than 80% of the packages available in the archive now build successfully for hurd-i386. The stability and uptime of the Hurd autobuilder has been improved, and the up-to-date package count for wanna-build statistics recently reached 98%.
As a result of last year's GSoC work by Justus Winter, the init system has been switched to SysVinit. This goes together with numerous advances in the upstream GNU/Hurd and GNU/Mach projects.

Other news

Alexander Wirt announced that three new Debian mailing lists have been created for Squeeze LTS: debian-lts, debian-lts-changes, and debian-lts-announce.

Gijs Hillenius reported that the Military Prosecutor's office in the Bulgarian province of Plovdiv uses Debian as its default operating system.

The contest for the DebConf15 logo just closed. Vote for your favorite logo on the dedicated wiki page.

New Debian Contributors

12 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Aaron Zauner, Christian Kellner, Robie Basak, Geoffrey Pouzet, Dylan Aïssi, Sven Bartscher, Corentin Labbé, James McDonald, Razee Marikar, Andrea Claudi, Sergey Shnatsel Davidoff and Bob Ball into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): linux, libxfont, linux-2.6, ruby-actionpack-3.2, chromium-browser, openssl, qemu, qemu-kvm, python-django, libgadu, and torque. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for these packages: tzdata (for Wheezy and Squeeze) 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 585 packages are orphaned and 138 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, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Donald Norwood and Justin B Rye.