Debian Project News - July 1st, 2019

Welcome to this year's first 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 enjoy this edition of DPN.

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.

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.

Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2019). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list.

The Debian website now also archives the security advisories issued by the Debian Long Term Support team and posted to the debian-lts-announce mailing list.

Internal News

Updated Debian 9: 9.9 released

The Debian project announced the seventh, eighth, and ninth point release updates of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename Stretch). Debian 9.9 was published on 27 April 2019.

News on Debian Buster

Debian Buster started its freeze in January and entered its full freeze on 12 March 2019.

The theme futurePrototype by Alex Makas has been selected as the default theme for Debian 10 Buster among a total of eleven submissions.

The Debian Release team announced the release of Buster planned for 2019-07-06 and provided a summary about the last weeks up to the release. Time to join or announce a Release Party!

The Debian-Installer Buster RC 2 release was published. Tests and reports to find bugs and further improve the installer are welcome. Installer images and everything else are available for download.

New DPL

In April, Sam Hartman was elected as the new Debian Project Leader. Sam has already posted several monthly updates on his work as DPL, for April and May. Sam also guided a discussion and consensus call on whether Debian wants to increase the strength of its recommendation of the dh sequencer from debhelper. Details and conclusions about this can be read in his mail "Requiring Debhelper's dh in Some Circumstances".

Events

MiniDebConf Marseille 2019

A miniDebConf took place in Marseille (France) from 25 to 26 May, with two days of talks, a keysigning party, and more. Thanks to the wonderful video team, all talks are available online. On Friday May 24th, the Debian French translation team held a sprint.

MiniDebConf Hamburg 2019

After a three-day MiniDebCamp, a miniDebConf took place in Hamburg (Germany) from 8 to 9 June. In case you missed it, the mighty video team has you covered and published all the recorded talks. The MiniDebCamp hosted sprints for the DebConf19 team, the Reproducible Builds team, the Debian Perl group, Debian Edu and the Salsa CI team.

Upcoming events

MiniDebConfs

Following the two events already mentioned, there is one additional MiniDebConf scheduled in the coming months, reflecting the vitality of our community. Organized by Debian project members, MiniDebConfs are open to everyone and provide an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person.

MiniDebConf Vaumarcus 2019

From 25 to 27 October, a miniDebConf will take place in Vaumarcus' LeCamp, (Switzerland), the Debconf13' venue. Visit the wiki page of the event where you can get all the details, or follow the organisation of the event on the debian-switzerland@lists.debian.org mailing list, if you want to help.

A glimpse at Curitiba DebConf19's program

Preparations are almost completed for DebConf19 which will be held in Curitiba (Brazil) from July 21st to 28th 2019. It will be preceded by a six days Debcamp from July 14th to 19th. About 50 talks, more than 15 short talks, about 30 BOFs ("Birds of a Feather" discussions), and a Workshop has been approved and scheduled.

As usual, a lot of sponsors have decided to bring their support to the Debian conference. With their help, and the quality of the DebConf Team's investment, all the conditions are gathered to make this event a success. Welcome to Curitiba, every thing is ready, including the official DebConf Cheese and Wine party!

Event reports

Abhijith PA shared his report about DebUstav-Dehli organized on 9th and 10th March 2019. This conference gathered Debian or FOSS-related talks and workshop, including a Bug Squashing Party.

The Debian Web team held a sprint in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019. They discussed the status of the Debian website in general, reviewed several important pages and sections and agreed on how to improve them. They have reported their progress and started to reorganise the homepage and the download section.

Gregory Colpart shared his report about the organization of MiniDebConf Marseille.

Laura Arjona Reina shared her report of her attendance at the MiniDebConf Marseille.

The Debian French translation team recently published the report (in French) of their sprint during MiniDebConf Marseille.

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 Buster cycle.

Help needed

Packages needing help:

Currently 1437 packages are orphaned and 159 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 currently 224 bugs available tagged newcomer.

More than just code

Thomas Goirand details the OpenStack-cluster-installer in Buster. The OCI (OpenStack Cluster Installer) package sets up and provisions an OpenStack cluster using a Debian live system image. The OCI process installs and configures services and components as needed per server roles in the cluster.

Benjamin Mako Hill shared Research on How Anonymity is Perceived in Open Collaboration. The paper written by Benjamin, Nora McDonald, Rachel Greenstadt, and Andrea Forte studies how open collaboration projects can balance the threats of bad behavior with the goal of respecting contributors’ expectations of privacy.

Lucas Nussbaum introduced his work on setting up a framework to graph Debian historical package trends. Lucas delved further into the data with an analysis of package smells (characteristics in source code which indicate deeper issues or weaknesses in design).

Birger Schacht shared the steps used to Install Debian with Encrypted Boot using GRML.

Code, coders, and contributors

New Package Maintainers

Please welcome: Cyrille Bollu, Calum Lind, Esteban Bosse, Shivani Bhardwaj, Jochen Sprickerhof, Mészáros Mihály, Alexandre Marie, Utkarsh Gupta, Robin Krahl, Adam Saponara, Sebastien Chavaux, Guillaume Brochu, Thomas Perret, Sven Geuer, Renzo Davoli, Calogero Lo Leggio, Kees Cook, Torsten Paul, Jozsef Nagy, Dominik Klein, Markus Demleitner, Kun-Hung Tsai (蔡昆宏), Ricardo Ribalda Delgado, Samuel Karp, Louis-Philippe Véronneau, Bastian Germann, Maxime Schmitt, Hanno Stock, Felix Yan, Kristian Nielsen, David Hart, Marc Bigler, Mathieu Mirmont, Andrej Shadura, Emmanuel Arias, José Antonio Jiménez Madrid, Romain Perier, Saira Hussain, Julio Merino, Joyce Zhou, Moshe Piekarski, Gabriele N. Tornetta, Anoop M S, Yashika Dharshini, Dawid Dziurla, Antoni Villalonga, Meenakshi Aiswarya, Olivier Tilloy, Jeremy Oden, Karolis Kalantojus, Shree Dhanya, Aman Verma, Glenn Strauss, Cyril de Bourgues, Jeya Sree, Sweta, Amrithaa.T.J, Alcina Sharon, Sakshi Sangwan, Meenakshi, Valentin Gutierrez, Andreas Misje, Andre Noll, Lluis Campos, Samyak Jain, Shreyas Bapat, Micha David Rosenbaum, Marcos Vinicius Scherer, Nilesh, Jeremy Sowden, Sahid Orentino Ferdjaoui, Nguyen Hoang Tung.

New Debian Maintainers

Please welcome: Nicolas Mora, Wolfgang Silbermayr, Marcos Fouces, kpcyrd, Scott Martin Leggett, Romain Perier, Felix Yan, Christian Ehrhardt, Aniol Marti, Utkarsh Gupta, Nicolas Schier, Stewart Ferguson, Hilmar Preusse, Bobby de Vos, Jongmin Kim, Francesco Poli, Bastian Germann.

New Debian Developers

Please welcome: Abhijith PA, Philippe Thierry, Kai-Chung Yan, Simon Quigley, Daniele Tricoli, Molly de Blanc, Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana, Unit 193, Marcio de Souza Oliveira, Ross Vandegrift, Jean-Baptiste Favre, Andrius Merkys, Norbert Preining, Taowa Munene-Tardif, Jean-Philippe Mengual, Kyle Robbertze, Georg Faerber, Andy Li, Sruthi Chandran, Michal Arbet, Alban Vidal, Jakob Haufe, Denis Briand.

Contributors

1322 people and 9 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2019.

Statistics

Buster

Sid

Release Critical Bug Report for Week 26/2019

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:1418
Affecting Buster:65
Buster only:7
Remaining to be fixed in Buster:58

Of these 58 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Buster:1
Patched in Buster:15
Duplicates in Buster:6
Can be fixed in a security Update:8
Contrib or non-free in Buster:0
Claimed in Buster:0
Delayed in Buster:0
Otherwise fixed in Buster:8

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 35 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 10.0 Buster released.

However, with the view of the Release Managers, 50 need to be dealt with for the release to happen.

Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Once upon a time in Debian:

Outside News

Distribution roundtable discussion with the @Debian, @elementary and @Fedora Project Leaders

Bryan Lunduke of Linux Journal published in a paper intitled The State of Desktop Linux 2019, a roundtable discussion with the @Debian, @elementary and @Fedora Project Leaders after a short comparison of data from about ten Linux distributions. They discuss about their distribution, the model of their project and how they see the future for their distribution and, more generally, for the FOSS.

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 provided unformatted in descending order by date (recent news at the top).

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February

January

December

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Laura Arjona Reina, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Donald Norwood and Thomas Vincent.