Debian Project News - August 14th, 2017

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

Welcome to the Debian Project News!

We hope that you are enjoying this edition of DPN.

This issue is brought to you from DebConf17 in Montreal by the now extended group of Debian Project News editors. So we expect DPN will see more frequent releases in the future.

For other news, please read the official Debian blog Bits from Debian, and follow https://micronews.debian.org which feeds (via-RSS) the @debian profile on several social networks.

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2017). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list.

At the end of this Project News we've added a Quick Links section which links to a selection of the posts made through our other media streams during the last months.

Internal News/Happenings

New DPL

In April, Chris Lamb was elected as the new Debian Project Leader. Chris has already posted several monthly updates on his work as DPL, for April, May, June and July.

Stretch released

In June, we welcomed the release of Debian 9 (codename stretch). If you haven't upgraded your systems yet, you might like to do so soon to enjoy the improvements in the new release. Security support for the old Debian 8 release is expected to be available until around June 2018.

A group of CD set images have been dropped in this release, in favor of the DVD sets and netinst ISOs. With Stretch, several images for usage in different cloud providers are available too.

DebConf17 in Montreal, videos online

DebConf17, the annual Debian conference, has just been held in Montreal. We have been enjoying many interesting talks and productive discussions. Videos of many talks are already available by visiting the talks' individual pages linked from the schedule. Read the article in the Debian blog about DebConf17 for more details (including the group photo!).

DebCamp

Before the main conference started, some Debian teams gathered for the DebCamp week of work sessions and discussions. The Debian Perl Group held a Rolling Sprint at DebCamp, and the teams for OpenStack, pkg-emacsen and Debian Policy also held meetings and sprints. DebCamp17 may have been the biggest DebCamp ever, with 117 attendees.

Chinese translation of the Debian website

The Chinese language team has been relaunched with new contributors, and the Debian Installer, many pages in the Debian website, and other documents are being updated and translated into Chinese. If you want to join this effort, ask in the Chinese language team mailing list for details.

New and noteworthy packages

1042 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive in this quarter. Among many others there are:

Events: Upcoming and Reports

Upcoming events

Debian Day 2017

Debian Day is almost here!

Debian is turning 24 this year and several local groups have already added to the schedule their own events to celebrate, on or around Wednesday August 16.

Add your own event to the Debian Day 2017 wiki page and join our groups in Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Sweden and Venezuela on this special occasion.

Alioth replacement sprint

Debian's development platform alioth is due for a major restructuring since the underlying software will no longer be supported in the future. A sprint to replace alioth will take place in Hamburg, Germany, from 18 to 20 August 2017.

Event Reports

The Debian Groupware team recently sent a report about their meeting held in April 2017. The Debian Policy team also reported about their work in the last months. You can also read the recently sent Status update from the Reproducible Builds project.

Some Debian contributors have written about their attendance to DebCamp and DebConf17: Michal Čihař about Weblate and Mike Gabriel about Ayatana indicators, Debian Edu, and a global summary of his work at DebConf, about Flatpak. (More reports will probably be published in the following weeks in the Debian Planet.)

Once upon a time in Debian:

Help needed

Teams needing help

Packages needing help:

Currently 1106 packages are orphaned and 167 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Newcomer bugs

Debian has a newcomer bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. There are 204 bugs available tagged newcomer.

More than just code

Contributors

1635 people and 20 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2017.

Discussions

In July 2017, Debian user Rainer Dorsch asked, what is going on here, when he was trying to perform comparisons (less than/greater than) in the shell. Darac Marjal explained what was going on, and Tomás elaborated on that.

Tips and Tricks

Jose M. Calhariz has published a series of blogposts about crossgrading, starting with small tasks and evolving to a real-life example: Crossgrading the kernel in Debian 9, Crossgrading a minimal install of Debian 9, Crossgrading a more typical server in Debian 9, Crossgrading a complex Desktop and Debian Developer Machine running Debian 9, and Crossgrading a complex Desktop and Debian Developer Machine running Debian 9, for real.

Outside News

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab, one of the Debian partners providing hosting and administration services to the Debian project, launched a student sponsorship crowdfunding campaign with the OSU Foundation, towards funding students working at the lab along with sending them to open source conferences in the coming year. The campaign will be active during August 2017.

Reports

LTS Freexian Monthly Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Reproducible Builds status update

Follow the reproducible builds blog to get the weekly reports on their work in the Stretch cycle.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the micronews.debian.org feed, in which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue. You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social, Mastodon or Twitter). The items are given unformatted and in descending order by date (recent news at the top).

We have removed from this list the Debian 9 release and the DebConf17 microblogging release coverages. If you are interested on those, you can browse them in the micronews.debian.org site.

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Shirish Agarwal, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Justin B Rye, Joost van Baal-Ilić and Fabián Rodríguez and Moray Allan.